With the increased internet penetration and exponential growth of businesses in India, innumerable digital marketing organisations have come into existence in the past few years. Instead, as per the article, the digital marketing industry is booming high with 40% growth rate. Consequently, the number of online marketers for destinations has increased too.
Formulating a good marketing strategy for tourism is vital for online travel marketers. It plays an important role in coordinating business activities, eliminating interferences and maximising profits. We have listed few key points below that might be highly useful for digital travel marketers.
Tapping into the needs and emotions of customers
Online travel marketers must keep in mind that creating an immediate need for destinations is a crucial element. There are different methods of carrying out this process. Online marketers can post attractive photos of cuisines, off-beat spots, flora and fauna related to the place. Interesting facts can be revealed too. This will grab the attention of trippers within seconds and bring higher engagement in the online medium. Beyond this, the format of the content should be gauged. For example, online videos might not be the best option in India as internet speed is drastically slow here. More innovative forms of content like gif animations and cinema graphs can be considered. Another aspect that is deemed necessary is bringing a sense of emotional connection between the people and the products/services. If a photo of a destination reminds the trippers of a particular travel experience, the travel brand can perform exceptionally well in the market space.
Focusing on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter
Social Media platforms can be extremely useful for online travel marketers. Beyond attracting tourists, it assists the trippers in shaping their travel plans and decisions. Timely and positive feedbacks on people’s reviews can encourage travellers to re-visit the destinations. Online reviews, Facebook comments and Twitter posts can impact a destination’s attendance. One exemplary social media campaign has been #MeetSouthAfrica. It had produced 9,000+ tweets, 77.8 million tweet impressions and 1,059 photos on Instagram. Needless to say, it had grabbed the attention of many people worldwide and promoted South Africa in a major way.
Relevance of SEO
Travel SEO is visibly different from the regular SEO. People while making travel plans usually do lot of research online. As per the reports, they search queries usually consist of long tail keywords. For example, instead of just typing ‘holiday’, they might look for ‘safest family beach holiday’ or ‘best places to visit in South Africa’. For good SEO, content should be developed in a similar manner. Also, linking few parts of it from reliable and popular websites can put the content in a more noticeable position in the search engines. Such tricks should be considered while designing the marketing strategy.
Listing in popular websites
Online travel marketers can enlist their products or services in sites like TripAdvisor, Hipmunk, Flightfox and BookingBuddy. Similarly, they can associate with travel bloggers to increase the visibility. Getting their content across through blogs can be a good marketing technique. Hence, the brands can easily expand their businesses, achieve maximum exposure and obtain monetary benefits later.
Travel PPC should not be set and forget
Travel industry is third largest in paid searches. Some easy tricks can help your Adwords campaign outperform and get worthy return. AdWords should never be set it and forget it, but with travel, pausing seasonably irrelevant campaigns, making adjustments to ad text, and monitoring locations, time and hour of the day are even more critical to avoid wasting large sums of marketing spend. Not only searches but in order to promote your destination, marketers must put their sweat and tears into display advertising. Use of captivating visuals with some compelling strategies like re marketing can do wonders in small budgets.
These tips should help all the Destination Marketers frame their digital strategy. If you have any additional points to add on, do let us know!
