Travel agencies are in high demand these days. As the demand increases, this type of business multiplies and agencies must get their act together to capture and consolidate customers. And this is where what is known as Tourism Marketing comes into play.
We can define this marketing as a succession of strategies, applied to the tourism field, which helps to extend the image of the brand, to attract new customers and to consolidate the existing ones.
With the unstoppable advance of technology, the way to shape the marketing strategy has changed. Without further ado, we will analyze the main strategies followed by marketing agencies today.
Web positioning
The objective of web positioning is to try to get a web page to appear in the first positions of the search engines (normally in Google), under a certain keyword (keywords).
For example, if a customer wants to travel to Italy, he may use the keyword Travel to Italy in search engines and click on the first results.
The travel agency must find a way to appear in this ranking to achieve the best results.
Mobile Marketing
More and more users are doing all their online business through their mobile phone, without having to sit face-to-face on their desktop PC.
Agencies are taking advantage of these devices to become travel companions through them. For example, they can give customers what they need through geolocation systems.
According to studies, almost 1 in 2 people reach travel web platforms through mobile terminals, so it is worth working on strategies related to these devices.
Social Media Marketing
The customer consults Facebook to find out if a travel agency is reliable or not, to check if the opinions of its services are good, to check if there are any offers, or to contact the user and ask for information.
There are many social networks, although the most important ones nowadays are Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
Each one of them has its specific characteristics that must be evaluated in order to get the most out of them.
You have to be very careful with creating more profiles in social networks than you can handle. Because if we don’t control each profile, the strategy will be useless.
E-mail marketing
E-mail marketing is considered to be the most effective strategy to reach the customer at the moment.
The reason for this is that the client has given us his email; that is, he has given us his permission to receive information, so he will be more intrigued to open the email we have sent him.
But this does not mean that we will be successful if or if: the travel agency will have only a few seconds before they draw attention to themselves. If not, the user will soon delete the email.
SMS marketing
It complements the previous strategy perfectly. It is much more complicated to create a database with customer phone numbers, and more expensive, but if we succeed it can be very profitable.
Almost nobody sends text messages anymore, so if we receive one we don’t take long to open it just out of curiosity.
In addition, modern terminals allow you to handle emoticons, styles and even include links in the links.
All this means that an SMS marketing strategy can catapult an entity towards success.
Content Marketing
Content marketing specializes in the creation of relevant content that attracts, that draws the attention of a certain target audience, either to attract them as new customers, or to consolidate those we already have.
It is applied to practically any type of support, although it is more common to apply it to platforms such as blogs or similar.
The texts must have a certain structure, be correctly formatted, present headings, properly integrated keywords, multimedia content, links, etc.
Online Reputation Control
It is very important to control everything that is said about the agency on the net; a bad valuation (of for example, a star in pages like Google Business), can end up ruining you.
We will have to manage those possible negative opinions, trying to turn them into positive ones, or not to generate a controversy that could spoil things even more.
Some companies, to avoid these opinions, decide not to include their business in a website where they can receive them. However, sooner or later some user will have an opinion, so you should be prepared.
Video marketing
It usually includes videos on YouTube or social networks such as Facebook and Instagram. It’s a good way to communicate.
According to studies, about 60% of tourists already use videos to make a decision about their next holiday destination.
We can always hire influencers to advertise our video. There are platforms specifically designed for this.