A significant percentage of people are no longer bothered with survival only. They explore new places, new cuisines, new cultures, etc. This is why the tour and travel business has become a huge thing. Though the demand side (tourists) is pretty big, the supply side (travel agencies) is intensely competitive with many potential customers opting for big and established travel agencies.
The competition level is so intense that even big companies will start declining in absence of a strategic and consistent marketing strategy. This necessitates the need for a well-laid-out travel agency marketing plan. If you own a travel agency, these travel agency marketing ideas given below will give you the best insights that you can use for getting and serving more tour and travel-seeking people.
1) Increase Your Site Ability to Convert More
To begin online advertising of your travel agency business, what you must have as the most basic component is a website. Though a website is a basic requirement, it is not sufficient to generate customers for your travel agency. You can make the changes mentioned below to get a greater percentage of visitors to convert into clients.
A) Make the contact details of your travel agency thoroughly visible on the homepage with a call to action button.
B) Give options like free consultation and free quotes to get more visitors enticed to call your travel agency.
C) Allow online booking options for common destinations to increase bookings.
D) Make the website superfast to load as websites that take time to load do lose visitors.
E) Make your website resolution dynamic so that it loads smoothly on mobile devices, tablets, desktops, etc.
F) Bring out your best features like recognition, news coverage, achievements, etc to showcase the trustworthiness of your business.
G) For achieving better engagement, use a good quality and professionally shot video on the homepage. Having such a video also adds to better communication of the key qualities of your business to the visitor.
2) Right SEO Equals More Bookings
A great way to get targeted traffic (along with more bookings) is to work on the search engine optimization (SEO) of your travel agency website. Having the right SEO strategy can help to position your website in the top positions of Google (and other search engines) which is the most crucial factor in bringing organic traffic and bookings passively. The process of implementing SEO is not that hard as there is plenty of free material available online related to tips and techniques of SEO. However, if time is a constraint or if you do not want to go through all the stuff related to SEO, a business can easily outsource the SEO to any capable agency with a good background in ranking its clients.
3) Take Direct and Indirect Benefits of Press Release
There are many reasons why press releases are considered an effective marketing strategy and why your business too must adopt them. The most powerful reason is that the content that you publish in your press release will be seen by hundreds or even thousands of people within a matter of a few days because your press release will be visible on all PR-syndicated sites. The links emerging from these syndicated sites will help in getting a better positioning (of your website) in search engines which is the second good reason for the significance of press release marketing. Since some of these syndicated sites will be popular news sites and associated domains, the brand image and trust factor of your business will enhance and it is yet another reason for signifying the role of press release marketing. All these and other indirect benefits are available for a reasonable cost through marketing through press releases.
4) Witness the Benefits of Google Business Profile
Businesses that understand the potential of “Google Business Profile” (previously known as Google My Business) along with the right ways of optimizing it can very easily be able to get more leads and customers through this channel. If you fill up your Google Business Profile page and then focus on obtaining more positive reviews and business citations, your travel agency business can very easily dominate the Google Local Listings shown on the front page of Google which will further open the opportunity to get more customers consistently. If optimizing “Google Business Profile” seems like a tough task to you, you can easily outsource the task to any competent marketing agency.
5) Keep Compounding Your Site Traffic with New Content
If you are looking for a marketing approach that is easily executable individually, then content marketing is the right choice as you can easily create content on topics related to your business (like the best places to travel in a city). The more content you start posting on your website, search engines like Google will get more chances to show your website for a variety of keywords which will invariably cause traffic and customer growth. You can decide which type of content you would like to post on your website. You can select either articles, FAQs, infographics, videos, etc, or a combination of all these. If you have the budget, you can outsource the content creation and posting to a third party too.
6) Run Travel Agency Ad Campaigns on Google
To greatly speed up the process of promoting your travel agency, no marketing strategy comes close to paid advertising on Google specifically advertising on Google search results rather than on the display network of Google. While getting your site to organically appear on Google’s first page for relevant queries takes much time and effort, you can easily bypass this limitation with paid ads and can show up on the front page just by increasing your bids and optimizing ads for better relevancy. There is plenty of information freely available online regarding setting up and optimizing paid ads on Google that you can make use of to market your travel agency.
7) Get More Conversion and Loyalty with Email Marketing
If you would like to adopt a marketing strategy where your one click can deliver your marketing offer to thousands of prospects, then email marketing is the right way out. With an average return of $36 for every $1 spent on email marketing, you can’t get a better deal. The only constraint is that you will need to devote some time and effort to building a targeted list first. People connected with email marketing are much more likely to be loyal to a business due to the existence of a continuous communication link. To start with this process, set up an opt-in form on your travel website combined with a powerful reason (incentive) for the visitor to leave his/her email address. This will also help you to gain an extra chance to convert your website visitors.
8) Start Building Social Media Visibility
Marketing a travel agency on social media requires creativity and patience. If you want to see quick results from the vast user base available on social media, then running paid ads on such platforms is the only option. However, if you want to organically grow your travel agency brand on social media, you must first identify the key behavioral and demographic aspects of your potential customers followed by interacting with them through group pages, the right usage of hashtags, running viral contests/quizzes, coming up with incentivized sharing contests, making landing pages and capturing leads through social media, etc.
9) Experience the Power of Video Marketing
Wouldn’t it be great if you get a new digital asset to market your travel agency? Videos are one of the powerful and passive means to drive traffic to your business site. YouTube being one of the few top-visited sites on the planet, it explains the power of video marketing. By doing minimal optimization for title, description, keywords, etc, videos have the potential to bring traffic to your business for a wide variety of long tail and less competitive search terms. They (Videos) also serve as good content for getting more engagement on social media too. So businesses must make the routine of creating and posting new videos regularly to see additional growth in traffic and customers.
10) Get Known Locally with Influencers
With billions of people on social media, there are also such social media profiles of individuals that have followers in thousands to millions. These profiles are labeled as influencers. If you start promoting your travel agency through social media influencers from your region, you are more likely to reach a good segment of the local population. Such types of promotions carry more weight as they are coming from a person whom their followers trust. This element of trust from influencer marketing of your travel agency can provide you with more customers.
11) Make More Appearance Online with Directories
Put search queries on Google like “travel agencies near me”, “travel agency in [your town/city name]”, etc. You will find a few directory-type sites on the first few pages of Google that permit any business to list their details. As such sites have high authority, listing your travel agency business on them will render powerful backlinks to your site along with providing a few extra customers every month. So make use of such sites for direct (in form of customers) and indirect (in form of backlinks) benefits.
12) Make Others Refer You
Request your customers to refer your travel agency to their respective circles. Also, announce a discount to new customers coming through referral of old customers along with creating some incentive to the referring person. With good back-and-forth incentives, the motivation to refer your business to your previous customers will increase which will also increase the bookings from new referred customers.
13) Get Clients Through Print Publications
A soft, subtle yet powerful way of advertising your travel agency is by writing articles for print publications including local newspapers and magazines. Though some initial effort has to be put in to get the authorization for contributing articles in local newspapers and magazines, every article contributed by you will help in indirectly growing your travel agency brand.
14) Collaborate with Linked Businesses and Services
All such businesses and services that come in contact with tourists or people looking for travel can be the most significant partners for your business. A few such businesses and services include hotels, tour guides, etc. You can make a list of more such businesses and services in order to grow the network of potential referring sources for your travel agency.
15) Do Marketing Through Destination Guides
Start creating destination guides in form of content posted on your website as well as in ebook form. These destination guides when posted on your travel agency website will attract those visitors looking to travel to the respective places and hence your posts will start driving you more customers. Similarly, the destination guide ebooks created by you can be distributed all over the web in PDF directories, in forums, etc. So these ebooks too can drive customers to your travel agency.
16) Let a Network of Podcasts Bring You More Sales
Begin making podcasts on different popular regions and the key places to visit and things to do in such locations. Start sharing these podcasts on top podcast directories and sites with relevant titles, descriptions, etc, to make them easy to find. As the numerical value of these podcasts will start increasing, you will find more people arriving at your travel agency website to get their tour planned.
17) Use Image Marketing to Bring and Convert Prospects
To all the customers for whom you plan their travel, ask them, or reward them in some form, to share some of their pics at their travel location. These pics can be used in various ways to market your travel agency. You can create a portfolio of these pics on your website in form of success stories, you can get them shared on your social media accounts, you can get a hard copy of these pics printed out and used in your physical location, etc. These pics will give more trust in your travel planning abilities and will help to convince more potential customers to take your services.
18) Give Good Budget Deals
For customers, price is one of the most influencing factors in a travel agency business (holds true for most other businesses too). Keep an active watch on what price your competitor travel agencies are charging for the same location and similar set of activities and accordingly get your prices fine-tuned. If adjusting the price makes your margin very low, then focus on adding extra activities that would bring up your profit gains.
19) Thrive Your Business on User Generated Content
Your personal effort in growing the amount of content will take time to yield results. However, if you allow and incentivize your customers to create content related to travel on your website, the content on your site will start growing at a much faster pace and this will increase the amount of traffic you are getting presently to your travel agency website. So make use of user-generated content to make your traffic and sales bigger.
20) For Long Term Benefits, Use SMS Marketing
People read SMS much more than emails. If you start giving the option to your site visitors to ask questions using SMS, you will soon collect many phone numbers in your database to whom you can promote new packages year after year and can gain long-term value from such clients. You can also announce highly discounted trips for people who participate in contests using SMS and can this collects phone numbers faster for marketing to them through SMS.
21) Use Chatbot Marketing
The chances to convert a site visitor to a customer increase many folds if you spark a conversation right when they are on your website. For this, using chatbots supplemented with an active live chat agent can do wonders to engage and convert your site visitors.
22) Grow With Supplier Side Deals
If you can chalk out good deals with businesses and services in your network that are involved in serving tourists sent by you, you can provide more economical packages that will increase the number of people taking the services of your travel agency.
23) Add-Ons Can Bring More Revenue
Add more sources of bringing revenue to your travel agency like selling travel-related accessories on your website, partnering with car rentals for pickup and drop facility, partnering with tour guides, etc.
24) Get Customers with Ads on Booking Sites
By putting ads on booking sites like TripAdvisor, Trivago, Kayak, etc, you can get a target demographic to know about your travel agency. This will help your travel agency to get many more customers by utilizing the large traffic of these sites.
25) Social Contests Can Promote Your Travel Agency
Depending on whether you want your travel agency to get local customers or global customers, you can accordingly hold social media contests to make your travel agency business name reach more profiles on social media. With many applications nowadays that allow creating and managing social media contests, the process of holding such contests has become very simple.
26) Don’t Miss Promotion on Events and Charity
Events, charity, trade fairs, etc attract crowds and any crowd is good for local publicity of your travel agency. To make a bigger impact and use of such occasions, you can sponsor/co-sponsor them to get more promotional benefits.
27) Be Different with Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality (AR) can give a good glimpse and feel of tour locations to your potential customers while also separating your travel agency from your competitors. These visual tours can give a big jump to conversion chances. So integrate it for the growth of your travel agency.
28) Start Being Judged Positive for More Bookings
People are more inclined to judge products and services by going through the ratings and reviews left by others online. This means if you have actively worked towards getting more positive reviews for your travel agency, people going through online reviews are much more likely to trust you and do their travel bookings through your service. So request every customer to give their ratings and ratings for your travel agency online.
29) Use Offline Strategies for Supplementing the Online
As an advertiser, the best marketing strategy is to include both offline and online marketing methods so that your business can be seen across both physical and digital mediums. If your business is on a limited budget and resources, then the best choice is to opt for online marketing so as to get low-cost marketing along with greater precision in targeting people. If you can be flexible with your advertising budget, then opting for the old and tested offline advertising methods like distributing flyers, advertising in local newspapers, billboard ads, etc can prove to be new mediums for generating new clients for your travel agency.
With this comprehensive list of travel agency marketing ideas, there is nothing that will stop you from growing your business. If you are still stuck at some point, ask it using the comments below. If everything is well and fine, do show some appreciation by sharing this article on social media.
