Tour company marketing has become increasingly digital, with more than 60 percent of marketing budgets now spent on the internet. Expanding your business here can indeed be lucrative, but it’s also easy to make mistakes that could cost you money and even hurt your reputation. Take a look at some of these common errors that your tour business could be making right now.
5 Tour Company Marketing Mistakes To Avoid
1. Aiming at the wrong target audience
Your target audience is a specific group of people who will show the most interest in your services. Marketing campaigns can quickly fail by having too broad a reach or targeting the wrong audience—a travel ad for families might flop because the offering is better-suited to seniors. When you know who your audience is, you’ll be able to fit your content to their tastes and convince more to book with you.
Finding the right target audience starts by reviewing what your business sells. You can then research the demographics that make up your market or observe your current customers. Let’s say that you’re offering outdoor adventure packages. Couples and families make up most of the adventure tourism market, so your content can be about family-friendly activities or photos of couples enjoying the trip. If your customers belong to other demographics, then you can adjust your content to suit them too.
You can also check out other established tour companies. In most cases, they’ve already done the market research and developed strategies for catering to their target audiences. Pay attention to their marketing tactics and borrow from them to improve your campaign.
2. Neglecting social media
Social media is one of the most potent tools for tour company marketing teams. It lets you access a vast audience and gives people another communication channel. You can share photos, videos, and promote upcoming tours. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram also have advertising and analytics tools for reaching specific niches and understanding audiences better.
Some companies don’t make the most of social media because they don’t have the time and experience to manage pages properly. However, people aren’t likely to follow you when you’re rarely active online. How responsive you are on social media can also be the deciding factor on whether someone books with you or not.
In this case, you can assign social media marketing and management to staff members or hire a digital marketing professional for some of the following tasks:
- Creating and scheduling posts
- Making promo ads
- Analyzing insights
- Study competitors’ pages
- Participate in travel niche groups
You and your team can use social media management tools like Hootsuite and Buffer to post across multiple platforms more efficiently.
Having a social media manager also means that you’ll have faster response times to messages and more consistent interactions with followers. They’ll also lessen the risk of PR problems since they know how to handle delicate inquiries properly.
3. Ignoring analytics
One mistake that can lose you a lot of potential bookings is ignoring website or social media analytics and insights. You won’t be able to develop a strategy that effectively since you don’t know exactly how people are interacting with your site and if your content works. You also might not discover any possible issues with your website or social media until it’s too late.
Fortunately, getting started with web analytics is simple and won’t cost you. Free software like Google Analytics let you study data such as:
- Most popular content
- Popular search terms
- How visitors move in your site
- Recent active user count
- Your website’s speed
- Number of sales and conversions
There are also social media tools like Facebook Insights for finding information on:
- Follower age, gender, and location
- Post performance
- When followers are online
- Top pages similar to yours
- Actions by users
- Response time to messages
The data provided helps tour company marketing staff know what adjustments to make to your promotion strategy, be it improving your content, changing posting schedules, or tweaking your site’s design.
4. Leaving customers out
Some travel companies think of customers as one-time deals and promptly forget about them once the tour’s over. They might not even bother to respond to feedback.
But customers appreciate it when you acknowledge and thank them. By doing so, others will notice your rapport with customers and grow curious about what makes your tours unique. You’ll exert less effort on promoting to new customers since your followers can do some of it by word-of-mouth.
You can foster good relationships with customers by:
- Checking up on them after booking and before the tour date itself
- Mentioning and featuring their posts about your tours on social media
- Reaching out and asking them about their tour experience
- Offer special travel promo packages if they want to book again
5. Content is focused on services
Being overly direct with your promotions is more likely to turn people away than attract them. This is because most travelers today aren’t concerned with destinations, but what they can do once they’re there.
So rather than just advertising your packages, you can talk about experiences during your tours instead. If you offer wine tours in Italy, for instance, you can write about picking grapes or joining grape-treading contests. It doesn’t always have to be about activities done during trips. You can get creative and engage your followers by discussing different wine pairings or make a poll on the top wine brands. It will help you stay fresh and memorable with your current followers, as well as make you more attractive to others within your travel niche.
If you want to make sure that your travel business isn’t making these mistakes, just reach out to SRJ Digital, your trusted tourism marketing expert. We provide digital marketing services in social media management, SEO, lead generation, and web design and development. Our team also specializes in B2B industries including healthcare, real estate, and finance. Get started with your tour company marketing campaign today with a free SEO audit and strategy session, or call us at (202) 738-1207 for other inquiries.