If you decide to start your own travel business, you have to remember that everything, literally everything, peaks and troughs.
If there is one industry that took rather a beating over the last couple of years is the travel industry. It's recovering very well since the pandemic, but the pandemic did put a stop on so many different methods of travel and prevented lots of people from moving from one country to the next for a long time. If you decide to start your own travel business, you have to remember that everything, literally everything, peaks and troughs.
The travel industry is no different, and competition in the travel industry has become fiercer than ever before. You want to get an edge over your competitors, and you want to step up your marketing efforts. Whether you are considering your social media accounts or your promotions, there is a lot out there that you have to market to your clients. You need to know how to market your travel business properly if you want to ensure that you are going to be doing everything right. In this particular article, we're going to take you through everything that you need to know to make your travel business stand out from the crowd. In a post pandemic market that's not always going to be easy, but hopefully these tips will help.
- Get to know your target audience. This is the first thing that you have to do when you start any business, but in the travel industry you have to consider where you are segmenting yourself. Are you hoping to run a business that's with package holidays so that you can aim towards families? Are you hoping to look at 18 to 30 holidays where it will be focused on parties and fun? Perhaps you're going to be looking at booking cruises for the elderly in their retirement years. Regardless of what kind of business you are hoping to run in the travel industry you need to know who your target audience is so that you know how to market to them properly. Demographic data can help you to figure this out, and before you spend any money on any ads or establish that marketing strategy, understanding your customers will help you to ensure you're not going to waste your money. When you understand what goes through their minds when you research travel, you can put things in place to ensure that your efforts will not go unnoticed. Once you have determined your target market you can create the correct adverts from the buyer perspective. This results in adverts that are emotional and the target market will find them completely relatable. This will encourage more clicks and more conversions.
- Consider your communication. How do you want your customers to contact you? As a customer there is nothing more frustrating than not being able to get hold of people to discuss your holiday plans. Not everybody wants to book online, so while you can learn more about live chat integration website options, you do need to consider whether you are going to have dedicated customer call services. You want people to feel comfortable calling your business, which means that you need to ensure that there is a way for them to do that. Providing customer service is among the most important applications of artificial intelligence in the travel industry. Chatbots can be a great backup option, but this is not something to rely on entirely for good customer service. Live chat with real humans at different times of the day and night could help people to feel connected to your business and as if they are going to get the instant answers that they need.
- Look to influence the customer journey. Customers go through many stages when they are booking travel, from dreaming about where they like to go to organizing their own holiday and then booking and experiencing everything. These stages need to be supported by experts, and as you I'm planning to be one of those travel experts you need to consider your research and the activities that people can participate in. If people have an idea of where to go and what to do, they are going to look for the right companies to book with. Knowing that you are by their side as they go through this customer journey is imperative if you want people to feel like they can connect to your business. As a travel business you want to understand what the customer mindset is so that you can make the correct marketing moves to influence them. For example, if your website has a package builder where they can look at the overall cost of their package and all of the inclusions people are going to flock to your website because sometimes you just want to figure these things out without talking to somebody. Either way, if you can figure out how to make sure that your marketing influences the customer journey you are going to be far more ahead of yourself than you think.
- Diversify all of your social media posts. It's a no-brainer to have a social media presence for any business, and if you have built a sizable following for your social media accounts you are going to get far more out of it by diversifying all of your content. You want to make sure that you are posting about travel deals and travel news, any promotions and tips, pandemic updates and destination highlights. You could even ask influences to write about their experiences at certain luxury travel destinations and have a whole segment of your website dedicated to luxury travel. By diversifying you are going to create conversation and creating conversation helps people to move forward and become a complete customer by booking with you. Everything that you do should also be image based because much of travel is about the daydreaming that's involved with thinking about destinations.
- Image source: Pexels
- Send off monthly newsletters. If you've managed to convince people to sign up with their email addresses to learn more about what you can do, crafting a monthly newsletter to give them information about what your business does is a smart move. One of the easiest ways to maintain contact with your customers is by sending a monthly newsletter. Just make sure that your newsletter is packed with good content. And don't forget, email newsletters are only effective when they are done correctly. Many people use email generators to create dummy emails which redirect unwanted commercial emails away from their real accounts. You don't want to have that happen because then your newsletters that have been carefully crafted are going to the wrong place. Keep your EDM's short, and make sure that you are making sure that your customers are happy.
- Optimize your website with the right keywords. The website of your business is the foundation of every marketing effort you are making. You want this website to be the very best that it can be because it's going to represent your brand and have a huge impact on the customers first impressions. If you keep your website updated and optimized for different platforms, people will be interested in what you have to say and they will be targeted. If you keep your site free from any fluff, people will be happy with that because nobody wants to open a website only to be overwhelmed by content that doesn't matter. Everything should be clear, concise and targeted exactly where your customers want to look.
- Outsource to a good graphic designer. While we are discussing marketing your travel business, outsourcing to a good marketing team or graphic designer to work on your website with you is a good idea. Not only will they be able to help you with your imagery, they can make sure that your website design is free flowing and abundant with content. It's vital that you thoroughly discuss your brand with your designer and your target market so that they can get the best design together that represents it.
- Pay attention to your online reputation. You need to ensure that people are looking at you online and feeling confident about shopping with you. If you are helping people to travel, they need to make sure that you are not going to flake out on them and cancel their flights at the last second. Negative reviews can hurt your business but it's better than having no reviews at all, so make sure that you are giving an experience enough to have good reviews across the board and this won't be a problem any longer.
- Showcase what you could do. When you launch your business, offer a great promotion or a dollar amount that will go towards spending money on a vacation that's been booked between a certain number of dates. Everybody loves a freebie, and discounts or promotions are great ways to ensure that people want to flock to your business. You need to make this exciting for customers, because they are going to find themselves looking for a vacation next year and you should be the first company they think of.
