If you run a tour or activity company in 2019, you cannot succeed without a high‐performing website. More tourists than ever before plan their entire trips themselves, all through online channels. Beyond UX and encouraging visitors to your site to actually buy your products, you need to encourage people to visit your website in the first place.
It is this need to attract potential customers that is at the core of online marketing, and it involves a sometimes‐confusing combination of SEO (search engine optimization), social media and content marketing.
Put as succinctly as possible, however, in order to bring people to your website, you need to give them something they need - and this is why you should turn your website into a helpful travel resource.
What kind of travel resource?
The answer to this question completely depends on the kind of tour or activity business you run. However, there is one principle that applies across the entire industry: Offer useful, helpful information and make it easy for your potential customers to find.
Whether you provide walking tours in Rome or cooking classes in Bangkok, it is vital that you create content for your website that is useful for people who fit your target demographic. If you help answer a customers’ question about the city you operate in – even if it’s about a topic mostly unrelated to your products – you will give them a positive experience with your brand, and this is someone clearly thinking about visiting your city. The more familiar someone is with your brand, the more likely they are to pay for your services in the future!
When planning a holiday, many people spend a lot of time in the research phase before they lock any plans in and begin to book flights, accommodation, tours, etc. The goal of becoming an online travel resource is to make contact with customers at this stage in the buyer funnel. They are considering a trip to Lisbon and want to know about the weather there in July; your article all about the weather in Lisbon throughout the year is exactly what they’re looking for!
Not only that, but by writing it you have consolidated your brand as an authority on all‐things‐Lisbon. So, when they want to book a walking tour of Lisbon, who are they going to turn to first? Offering useful travel information is about adding value to your customer’s experience of your website, and thus creating a connection. This isn’t high‐pressure sales; it is nuanced online marketing.
SEO: Speaking Google’s language
While it’s important to provide potential customers with plenty of travel information, this is only part of the picture as you need to ensure that customers can find your website in the first place. This is where SEO comes in as you need to make sure that the content you are creating can be found on Google (which has an overwhelmingly large share of global search traffic).
The online travel resources you create – whether in blog, infographic or video form – need to be optimized for search. This way, when someone Googles something about a place they’re thinking about visiting, your content will rise to the top of the Google rankings.
If you write great content, Google will reward you.
Chris Torres
The good news is that Google’s algorithm is more nuanced than ever, and while you still need to speak Google’s language by including keywords in the title tag, H1, H2s, etc., gone are the days of keyword stuffing.
Instead, Google will reward the most informed, best‐written content on the topic. If you write well and you’re an expert on your city or tourist destination, then you can use this to your advantage.
And if you want one particularly practical piece advice, I’d recommend using question phrases as the headings and subheadings for any blogs you write and that you write up transcripts of the videos you produce and publish them too. Google can only see you and reward your work if it can read your content; SEO, in a way, is trying to make it as easy as possible for Google‐bots to read your website and categorize it appropriately.
What other kinds of content can you create?
Making content takes time and money, but it’s the only way to make yourself visible online, and to — ultimately — make yourself more visible than your competitors. Let’s look at just some kinds of content you can include as part of your marketing strategy:
- Written blogs and travel guides
- Video blogs and travel guides
- Tour write‐ups
- Social media posts (both text, images and video)
- Facebook and Google Ads
- Email list‐building campaigns
- Quizzes
- Questionnaires
- Infographics
- Q&As
- And so much more
Maintaining focus when creating content
As you can see, so much of digital marketing is involved with the creation of content. And this makes sense when you consider that that’s all the internet is: an interconnected collection of information/content.
Subscribe to our newsletter below
However, with so many different content creation avenues to consider, things can become overwhelming. While it is great to have so many available touch points and platforms to engage with your customers, it is also easy to lose focus and for your marketing strategy to become disjointed. Usually this is down to two things:
- No proper marketing strategy, informed by data, with clear KPIs.
- Being too quick to change your strategy.
It’s extremely hard work to run your own T&A company, and business owners usually want to see instant results with any online strategy – especially anyone who runs small, family‐owned businesses (which makes up so many tour companies around the world).
I totally understand the impatience: Cash flow is king and the money you put into marketing needs to provide clear advantages, and the quicker you can begin making money from your content strategy the better. However, I think that perfectly worthwhile strategies are often scrapped because they don’t work straight away. Be patient and remember that you are playing the long game with any content strategy.
Takeaways
If you run a tour company, I advise you to use your own expertise or that of your tour guides to help produce high-quality, informative content. Your staff members are the most valuable resources you have, and their knowledge is key to any content strategy.
And don’t be too intimidated by SEO: While there are plenty of technical aspects to learn, if you write great content, Google will reward you – even if the optimization elements aren’t perfect.
Get out there and start writing articles and making videos. Talk about yourself, and about your industry. Use your knowledge to offer content that potential customers find useful and makes them want to spend time on your website.
The best part of content creation is also that it’s never boring! Get stuck in and believe in what you’re doing.