Don’t you feel stressed, when your tourism business is left with no leads after spending a huge amount on marketing and advertising? There is a single common question around all travel agency owner’s minds: how to get clients for travel agency after the Corona pandemic. No one is booking a trip through your agency, right?
COVID-19 quarantine across the world impact as a curse for the tourism sector, more than 60 percent of travel agencies turn dead during the pandemic according to a survey report of KPMG.
But the good news is that everything seems to be returning to the normal state slowly, People started making domestic and international trips.
Well, guys, even after everything returns to normalcy, Covid lockdown had left a great impact on the world’s psychology of lifestyle due to which industry like tourism has to face a huge change in their marketing strategy.
People have become habituated with digital technologies and the internet during quarantine, today consumers trust only those businesses that have an online presence. Thus to survive after the COVID situation, the tourism industry has to adopt a new evolution of marketing which is Digital Marketing.
If you are wondering how I market my travel agency business online, then don’t worry you will get complete guidance on digital marketing for travel and tourism with a brief discussion on the importance of digital marketing in the tourism industry in this article. So sit back, relax and continue reading…
The importance of Digital Marketing in the Tourism Industry
I think it would be stupidity to ask how important marketing is for a business. Digital marketing is the same process as old traditional marketing but on a new platform, the Internet.
Digital marketing could prove to be a success key in the tourism industry if it is implemented in the right way. Digital marketing is important for any business as it allows the business to track real-time consumer behavior data, every digitally launched campaign can be measured in terms of reach, engagement, and conversion. This evolution of online marketing increases the capability to stand out in the competitive market by improving the quality of the service or products according to consumer needs. Thus to reach the business and marketing goals you need to include digital marketing in your marketing strategy.
These are the 7 strategies to market your travel business online.
Build a Perfect Website
In today’s market, your brand’s website is like the offline storefront of your business. Do you know that nowadays people judge the quality of your service by the look and feel of your website? Your agency’s website needs to be professional with a proper travel theme, it should be easily navigable, user-friendly, and mobile-friendly as most of your clients will search for you on mobile.
And friends, the best part is the website not only allows your business to reach global traffic but also allows your audience to reach your business 24/7.
If your travel agency is not having a business website till now hurry up, hire a web designing agency to build it up for you, or in case if you don’t have the required budget you can build it up on your own by the website builders software like WordPress available in the market, fortunately.
Create a Buyers Persona
Before planning a marketing strategy you need to create your buyer’s persona. Creating a buyer’s persona makes it much easier to plan a marketing strategy as it allows to create a campaign that focuses on a specific group of audiences at a time.
A good buyer persona includes exact challenges faced by your customers, the interest of your buyers, their lifestyle, hobby, income, goals and etc. I mean your buyer’s persona should represent all your customers on a single view.
The best way to build a buyer’s persona is to observe the analytical data of existing consumers’ behavior and noting down the demographics, interests and etc which are required to create it.
Create a Marketing Funnel
Many travel agency owners ask how to get corporate clients for travel agency. Let me inform you that whether it’s a corporate client or a normal client to acquire both of them a strong marketing funnel plan is a must. A marketing funnel consists of awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty. Your customers will ask a different set of questions with a different mindset in each part of the marketing funnel.
Marketing Funnel is a vast topic in itself but you must know that the main aim of the marketing funnel is to push the traffic down the funnel by satisfying and educating the audiences in each part of the funnel and converting them into your customers.
Content Marketing
Content acts as fuel to the marketing funnel. We, marketers, make the audiences engage through the funnel with the help of content.
In the world of digital marketing, content is known as the King as it is the most important element for a successful digital marketing campaign.
Let me help you understand content marketing in an easy way with a help of an example in your travel niche.
In the awareness phase, your customers will type “best places to visit in Rajasthan” in google’s search box, your job is to provide them with the best places of Rajasthan to visit, I mean to provide your audience with the answers to those questions asked by them in forms of Text, Video, Audio, and Images.
After being satisfied with the answers in the awareness phase consumers ask questions of different intent like “How to book a travel agency” this is a consideration phase question and if you manage to provide a satisfying answer again, the audience will be pushed a step down in the marketing funnel which is the conversion phase.
In the conversion phase, audiences are in the intent of making a purchase, here they will text “Travel agency near me” if your brand’s website is the first result on the search result page you will crack the deal then and there.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Digital marketers say “The best place to hide a dead body is the second page of Google”. This is a true phrase as no one visits the second page of Google to find information. No matters how great your content is if it is not ranking on the first page of Google it’s worthless. Content marketing is incomplete without Search engine optimization.
SEO is a huge and lengthy process but I will try to make you understand SEO for travel agency websites in an easy and short way.
Basically, SEO is an organic way of generating leads, here we research the keywords or phrases used by the audience to search the business and utilize those keywords throughout the content along with the site-title and meta-description of our website, these two terms might be sounding technical for you, don’t worry these are simply the clickable blue link and the grey color description appears on the result page after a search on google’s search engine. This whole process falls under on-page SEO
There is one more part of SEO which is known as of-page SEO, where we create backlinks for our webpage in order to get indexed on Google quickly.
SEO can prove to be a stressful task for you if you are not skilled enough, you can hire an SEO agency or appoint a freelancer to do the job done for your travel business.
Social Media Marketing
Today we all know the power of social media, about 88 percent of your clients are spending their most of time on social platforms and you can grab their attention easily with a solid social media marketing strategy for travel agency.
Today there are countless social media platforms in the market but you have to figure out which social media platform will be the best fit for your travel business. To find out the one you need to discover the social app which your customers use the most to find business like you.
I believe the travel industry is Photogenic because most of its clients like to consume travel-related content from photo-based social sites like Instagram and Pinterest.
As a social media marketing strategy, travel businesses like you create and post quality content on social media platforms according to the requirements of the marketing funnel and buyer’s persona, which makes the audience engage on social platforms with your business causing an increase in the rate of leads and conversion. Always remember that Consistency is the key of sucess in any social media marketing strategy.
Video Marketing
Guys, Google claims through a report that 70 percent of content consumed in 2021 and beyond by the worldwide audience will be video content.
Think how better your audience can engage with your travel agency if they can consume for example “10 best places to visit in Delhi” visually in a video format.
Youtube is one of the biggest video consumption platforms across the world. My advice is if your travel agency is missing out on youtube then hurry up without any late go for a creator account on youtube before the competition goes out of control.
I can make the process much easier for you so you can implement it as soon as possible. No need to research and create a different set of content, just convert the blogs which you create in the early stages from text format to video format and post it to Youtube.
Run Online Ads
From the start of marketing, Advertising used to be believed to be an essential part of the whole marketing process whether it is digital or traditional.
Internet and Digital platforms made it possible to target a large potential audience throughout the globe at a cheap cost compared to the traditional means of advertisement.
The two most popular and effective online advertising platforms are Facebook ads and Google ads. Fortunately, on both ad platforms, we get the option to target the audience by interest, demographics, and location through content in the forms of display banners, video, images, text, and audio.
My tip to you is it’s better to hire an online advertising agency or freelancer as online advertising is a mixture of the mathematical and technical process and a lot of risk in money loss is also involved, you can lose money while operating an online ads platform if you are not skilled enough.
Conclusion
A solid digital marketing strategy for your travel agency can save you from the stress of leads and sales. In this article, I have mentioned a few most important strategies out of the whole digital marketing for the travel industry. Implementing all the tricks and strategies I have mentioned above can result in a huge
growth in your agency’s leads and sales graph.
See guys, Digital marketing is a huge and dynamic process, it is changing every day with the arrival of new technologies in the market, thus it will be impossible for anyone to explain the whole digital marketing in a single blog. To apply a full-fledged digital marketing plan to your business either you have to hire a digital marketing agency or you have to master the skill of digital marketing to implement on your own.
“Want an end-to-end Digital Marketing strategy for your travel agency. Feel free to call us at 7479257033 or E-Mail at supportsaibalsarkar@gmail.com”
Author Bio-
Saibal Sarkar is a digital marketer and a passionate blogger. He helps business owners to get more sales and leads through his online marketing strategies. He is also one of the alumnus of AADME.
