Digital marketing is a critical piece of reaching a global audience for tourism businesses. To influence travelers’ decision-making processes, create a winning digital marketing strategy in the tourism business with a strategic and comprehensive approach to your online presence, targeting, media mix and analysis. Keep reading to see the steps in creating a winning digital marketing strategy.
- Building a Strong Online Presence
Everything about your strategy should be user-friendly and mobile-first, especially your website. Your website should load fast while incorporating high-quality visuals and content to compel travelers to visit your destination. When choosing landing pages for your campaign, ensure they are the most relevant to the messaging in your ads and lead travelers to the content they are looking for. Do not make your landing pages overly complicated and try to have the least number of barriers as possible between the user and the conversion your ad is driving.
Your website content should focus on what drives travelers to visit your destination and you should also incorporate smart SEO (search engine marketing) strategies into your website’s content. This will help ensure you are showing up in organic search results when users are searching for your destination or certain attributes related to your destination. A good SEO strategy includes keyword research into relevant keywords for your destination and continually updating content to be relevant as search engine algorithms update.
- Know Your Audience
There are many types of travelers out there and your destination may cater to several or all depending on what your destination offers to travelers. It is important to know the audience that is attracted to your destination and craft messages specific to them, along with other audiences you want to attract. The message and imagery you advertise to an outdoor enthusiast should be different from one for an urban explorer. The platform or tactic you use to deliver your message may also be different based on audiences so it is important to know your audience(s) and how to most effectively reach them.
A benefit of digital marketing in the tourism business is the ability to target broadly or granularly a wide range of travel-related interest-based or activity-based audiences. You can also use any first-party data you own within your digital campaign targeting as well as lookalike audiences to further expand your targeting options on digital platforms.
- Choose the Right Media Mix
Once you know who you want to target, you then need to choose where you are going to deliver your message to reach your audience. You need a good media mix to reach your audience across multiple platforms and several creative types. Each channel should serve a purpose and fall into a specific place in your overall marketing funnel from building awareness to driving conversions and gaining advocates for your destination.
When choosing your platforms, most will allow you to deliver ads based on several types of goals and objectives. You can run social media marketing campaigns focused on awareness alongside campaigns focused on driving traffic or conversions. You can use an interest-based audience to drive awareness and then retarget a conversion-driven campaign to users after they visit your website. Layering several platforms and objectives into your campaign in a strategic way will increase your ability to reach the right audience at the right time with the right message, and lead to more travelers picking your destination for their trip.
- Analyze and Optimize
You never want to “set it and forget it” for any digital marketing campaign. You should always be analyzing and optimizing your campaigns to improve them and exceed your KPIs. A very important factor in analyzing your digital marketing campaigns for travel destinations is the partners you choose to be able to track actual visitations and purchases to your destination. Partners like ADARA and Datafy can help you track revenue from your digital marketing campaigns through flights purchased or hotels booked to your travel destination after interacting with one of your ads. This can tell you which of your marketing campaigns is driving actual tourism to your destination and which ones are best for you to continue investing your marketing dollars into.
A digital marketing campaign cannot be proven effective unless you can track and report on results, the most important result being increased travel to your destination. Many things go into building a successful digital marketing campaign for the travel and tourism business, but the ones above are some of the most important. If you are ready to partner with an expert in building successful campaigns to drive travel to your destination, contact us to get started!
