5 tips to grow your travel business with online marketing

The internet over the past few years has become an important marketing channel that funnels most of the bookings and sales in this industry. It affects how travel agencies reach their customers, how they promote their tours, and even how they do their bookings.

With that stated – online marketing can be a single marketing tool for tour providers and travel agencies to get started or grow their business.

But in order to grow a successful business, they will need to understand how online marketing works, where can they find their customers and how to optimise to get the most out of it.

Here are several tips you can take into consideration if you plan to promote your travel business using online marketing tools:

Tell a story (Blog)

When you want to promote a travel destination you must be good at digital storytelling. Telling a story in your social media campaigns with quality content is inevitable. To do that use pictures, videos and real-life stories in the description of your travel destination to catch reader’s attention. Know your audience and be creative. Share them on social networks.

Engage Customers through Social Media

Social media is the part of the online marketing that can bring the most value for tour operators and travel agencies. Tough it’s important to know how to use each network and on which of them you can find your targeted audience.

Also, you need to share and post daily, become likable, but don’t go all promotional all the time. Instead, have fun. Publish beautiful pictures, create conversations, answer questions. Join the industry groups on LinkedIn and Facebook to find partnerships and share experiences.

Integrate Direct Booking on your Website

Direct booking from your website can shorten your customers time and increase your conversion rate. Having a multi-function Book Now button on your website allows more control over your small tour business. Once you start driving traffic to one place you can easily have control on the booking process and have a view on the customer experiences in one place.

Use the information from Popular Travel Marketplaces

Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, or Touristlink, promote tours through customer reviews. That is the best option for free promotion with organic traffic. Those reviews are seen from people all over the world. And people trust them. So use this channel to increase the traffic to your website and along with that your bookings.

Be Mobile

Did you know that 87% of internet users have a smartphone? Is your website mobile friendly? A lot of customers today read posts, emails, and website content through their mobile devices. So when you start publishing your content online –   check how it appears on your smartphone or tablet screen. You also need to know if your page has fast load time, big pictures, easy navigation, search and selection, and clear call to actions. There are a lot of tools you can use to make your website more friendly – from Mobile Friendly test to free WordPress plugins perfect for mobile optimization.

marketing, online marketing, travel, travel agency