Tourism is one of the most competitive industries worldwide. And when it comes to marketing in the tourism niche, it is essential to be resourceful in order to find new strategies to get ahead of your competitors.
The problem is that the pandemic created new challenges, and now tourism marketing requires new tactics to optimize results and achieve business objectives.
This article will explore specific tourism marketing tips to help you grow in this unstable environment and keep up with the new developments moving forward.
Tourism Marketing Tips Have Been Reshaped by COVID
The outbreak of COVID has reshaped significantly many strategies from the past. Hotels, airlines, restaurants, tour companies, and other businesses in the travel sector have to adapt to the new trends and guidelines that the pandemic has created.
Prioritize Hygiene and Safety
Customer safety has always been a crucial concern for the tourism industry, but COVID changed almost everything regarding these customer needs.
Hygiene(opens in a new tab) is more significant than ever before, and as a result, this has to be reflected within your marketing efforts.
Customers must be sure that they will be safe, so you have to emphasize these hygiene and safety concepts on your website, on your social media, through customer communication and any other marketing content.
Focus on Local
Travel restrictions have made it almost impossible to broaden your target demographics. As a result, an excellent tip is to focus solely on your local customers(opens in a new tab), a safer group of people, ready to engage with your brand.
Although they may be interested in “playing tourist for the day” as they are from the area the emphasis should not be on highlighting the local attractions and excellent weather for local customers. Instead, try to emphasize what differentiates you from your competition.
For instance, focus on what your particular tours offer, you and your guides’ expertise, or quality of service to improve your target groups’ customer experience.
Leverage Virtual Reality
The pandemic created new dynamics and has forced businesses to shift more to the use of tourism technology. Virtual reality is one of those promising fields to explore when it comes to new kinds of experiences.
With the power of technology, potential customers can experience a local attraction, restaurant, from the comfort of their home, and risk-free.
Virtual tours(opens in a new tab) can be handy as a tourism marketing component to supplement your existing tour offerings or an alternate when in-person tours are not possible because they allow potential customers to experience the place or the adventure before they arrive, or without travelling at all.
Keep in mind that you may end up having a happy customer even before arriving in your country or city positively contributing to your brand awareness.
Reconstruct Your Content Marketing Strategy
Content(opens in a new tab) is one of the best tourism marketing strategies for many reasons. By providing valuable content, you can have more traffic and drive more attention to your business. It can improve the chances of positioning your brand as an established industry expert.
Blog posts(opens in a new tab) about destinations, infographics(opens in a new tab), and videos(opens in a new tab) are all part of the process. An effective content marketing strategy contains all of these elements to help you boost your overall visibility with both diverse material and types of content.
With all this extra time at home, people are spending even more time online searching for high-quality and genuinely useful content as they think about both their future travels and what to do now. To take advantage of this, think about what you have to share and keep your potential customers up-to-date for industry news in order to keep your company’s name on the mind of travellers.
Take Advantage of Email Marketing
Email marketing(opens in a new tab) is one of the most effective ways to increase revenue and have a significant investment return. Email allows you to gather information, sell products, upsell, and add reviews to your website.
During COVID, email marketing has remained a dominant tool that can help you achieve your business goals and objectives. There are many free email automation services(opens in a new tab) out there with different features to help streamline your process and convert users into customers.
Take advantage of the free templates(opens in a new tab) and landing pages that most of these platforms offer and implement them in your marketing strategy to improve your customer experience. Add value with your emails, and make sure you don’t try to sell with every email.
Invest in Remarketing Ads
Remarketing(opens in a new tab) doesn’t only apply to tourism. However, it should be an essential part of every tourism marketing campaign.
But what is remarketing anyways?
Remarketing (also sometimes refered to as retargeting) is the way to get back in front of the people who have interacted with your brand in the past. Browsing your website, reading your articles, liking photos, or videos on your social media channels are all types of engagement that can then lead to remarketing.
The most popular way to retarget your audience is through Google and social media platforms like Facebook. Some booking platforms even have built-in email remarketing capabilities.
The benefit of this kind of targeting, especially during the pandemic, is that it can be extremely cost-effective. Because these people have shown at least some interest in your brand so then it’s a matter of capitalizing on this existing interest again and reminding them to continue their customer experience(opens in a new tab) with the brand rather than starting from nothing.
Enhance User Experience Through Chatbots
Chatbots have evolved and become an increasingly useful tool for the communication process. When it comes to customer service purposes, they are an extremely valuable solution because of their ability to generate quick replies to questions, even outside of company business hours. Depending on where you are located, this could be particularly valuable when it comes to connecting with international customers.
Chatbots are a great tool(opens in a new tab) for gathering marketing information and data to then target customers later on. It can also be a great way to accumulate feedback and reviews on your product or service.
This technology can also be set up to attempt up-selling and cross-selling of your partners’ products or services, features that can potentially help you boost your revenue.
The Takeaway
The pandemic has changed the tourism industry dynamics, and because of that, when it comes to marketing, companies need to figure out ways to perform better and increase their revenue streams in this hostile environment.
New technologies are coming every day to facilitate part of the process and create a more broad and in-depth kind of experience. Virtual reality is one of these breakthroughs that has evolved during COVID, and those in the tourism industry should consider it as a way of expanding their offerings in order to meet changes in demand.
During these trying times brands should focus more on the people aspect. Going local should be the number one priority in combination with prioritizing hygiene and safety. It’s both crucial in complying with regulations but also reassuring both your guides and guests that you care about their wellbeing. Offering the best experience possible(opens in a new tab) remains crucial even if the circumstances have changed
Take your time and explore all of the tips in this article, and understand the motive behind each one as you adapt to both the circumstances and customer needs. The pandemic has created the ideal environment for experimentation simply because old strategies don’t work anymore. So, what will your next campaign look like?
Find this article useful? Enter your details below to receive your FREE copy of 95 Epic Places To List Your Tours and receive regular updates from Tourism Tiger and leading industry experts.
By submitting this form, you agree to Tourism Tiger contacting you via email.