Best Ways to Reach Out to Travel Consumers

The travel and tour sector has become a competitive landscape in the last couple of years. With the arrival of many small, independent travel operators on the scene, it is now a challenge for any individual travel business to stand out and do better than the rest. In this context of cut-throat competition, it has now become essential for travel and tour businesses to be proactive in their promotions. Those days are long gone when a travel company could maintain and improve its bottom line with passive and minimal marketing.

One of the basic components of hands-on and proactive marketing is to reach out to consumers instead of waiting for them to reach out to your front desk. However, a travel business also has to maintain a balance while going to consumers. If this proactive approach translates into cold calling (unsolicited one-way communication), it is less likely to work. It can backfire and turn the entire marketing campaign on its head.

In short, you need to think up some creative ways to effectively reach out to consumers with your travelling services. In this post, we will discuss with you how four ways through which you can reach and persuade potential customers for using your travelling services.

1. Start a Travel Blog

One of the essential rules of reaching out to your travel consumers for any meaningful results is to offer them first something of value and without conditions. This unconditional value entails serving consumers without charging them anything. Many businesses offer this unconditional value by dolling out their merch among the target audience.

As online travel and tour agency, you can offer that unconditional value through a travel blog. This blog will provide valuable content to your target audience without asking for anything in return. From the latest travel rules to tour guides and reviews of tourist attractions and destinations, this blog will cover various areas of travel consumers’ interest.

A good travel blog that shows consistency with its posting and content manages to garner hundreds and thousands of followers. The majority of those followers remain avid readers and only a fraction of them converts into consumers. But even that fractional conversion is more than enough to justify the existence of a travel blog.

Also, starting a travel blog requires least to no investment. You enjoy tremendously high ROIs on your blog once it starts getting a required response.

2. Leverage Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms have transformed into one of the biggest consumer breeding grounds for any business. For travel and tour operators, social media hold a lot of potential in terms of customer outreach and conversions. However, creating social media accounts and profiles and funnelling money in their paid promotion is not enough to use this medium to reach out to consumers. You have to focus on many other aspects as well.

Here we will list down all the things you should consider for leveraging social media platform for reaching out to travel consumers.

• Keep your social media pages and accounts active. You can’t expect customer engagement on social media if you scarcely post from your accounts. Make sure that there is at least one daily post on your Facebook and Instagram pages. These posts should be posted in the time slot when most customers are online. Different surveys for different platforms suggest different “peak times”. So, factor in that research. In general, you should do posting post afternoon and before midnight.
• Avoid putting generic, uninspiring content on your social media. As users, all of us know how we quickly scroll past those “boring” posts. Use loads of visual elements in your posts because they grab attention more quickly than anything text-based. Also, devise interactive content for SM posts that promotes audience participation. Sharing the latest travel news and asking for user feedback on travel-related developments are some of the ways to get good traction on your social media posts.
• If you invest money in paid social media promotions, make sure your page is promoted among the target audience closest to the sketch of your ideal consumer profile.

3. Run an Intuitive Email Campaign

You can leverage the travel marketing automation platforms if you can get legitimate mailing lists of travel consumers. Customers who are willing to subscribe to newsletters usually pay attention to what promotional stuff they get in their inbox. Therefore, when you start your email campaign among that audience, make sure it works along the stages of the sales funnel (awareness, lead generation, prospects, and conversions).

Also, those emails should not have over-the-top promotional stuff. Keep it short and reach out to the customer with offers and values without using any fluff. You will get a better response on those short, direct, and honest correspondences than emails saturated with marketing elements.

4. Have Influencers and Vloggers on Board

If you have a good marketing budget to utilise, you can use social media influencers and vloggers to reach out to your target market. First, assess the influencers and vloggers that are more suitable for your travel business niches than others. Then, select the ones that can extend their services within your marketing budget. From getting shoutouts in regular videos and posts to sponsoring a tour for them or getting a vlog made just around your travel services, there are various ways (depending on your budget and strategy) to leverage their social media following for attracting potential customers.  

Focus on Streamlining Your Operations While Reaching Out to Consumers

Good word of mouth plays a very important role in the promotion of a travel business. Sometimes a travel business gets most of its new clients through referrals rather than any marketing campaign. You can only harness good word of mouth about your travel business by improving your service delivery to your existing customers. This is possible by adapting your operations in line with the latest travel technology.

TravnetTech can help you on that front. From a travel management system to a travel back office and marketing automation, the firm can help you with all the digital resources and infrastructure your travel operations need.