Did you know internet marketing for tour operators can be easier than for any other business? Why, I hear you ask? Because adventure activities bring people to life, they provide the moments people talk about as years go by, and a photo helps them never forget.
For us at Fotaflo, adventure marketing is about taking an experience, capturing it in photos, and letting your guests do the rest. The power of photos alongside our simple digital marketing strategy for tours helps you increase brand awareness, interact with your target audience, and boost sales. All tour guides need to do is share photos with guests of their active adventures following the event.
Want to know more about internet marketing for tour operators? Here’s our recipe for success.
1. Know your audience
Who’s your customer? Where do they live? What might they enjoy about your adventure activities? The best way to know more about your biggest fans is to ask them questions—but don’t forget to make notes. That’s why we recommend asking customers to give you a review at the end of their tour, so they can tell you in their own words what they loved the most (and what they didn't). This will let you make sure your guests get more of the good stuff.
Furthermore, giving customers space to voice negative comments directly might help avoid them going online and writing a bad review publicly instead.
Once you analyze your customer feedback and figure out the keywords that your audience is using to search for their next adventure, you can start driving traffic to your website with search engine optimization (SEO). This helps you reach the top of Google search engines when guests type things like 'ziplining near me' or ‘best 4x4 tours’ in a specific area. To help with SEO, you might want to try a keyword tool to help with analyzing feedback.
2. Develop a content strategy
The goal of a digital marketing strategy for tours is to give customers a reason to choose your product over competitors. While search engines look for keywords to put you at the top of search results, your target audience wants to visualize it, so show them why you’re great.
Hearts race, eyes light-up, and grins beam once guests fly through the sky on your zipline, splash in the mud at your assault course, or bounce over sand dunes in your 4x4. These are the moments your guides want to capture forever—and they can, with photos.
At Fotoflo, we help tour guides collect that magic content in their stride. Our automated photo-delivery platform integrates directly with your booking software, so when guests arrive, your staff app knows. It pre-builds an album for each customer so guides can enter with one click, take photos from their smartphones, and save them directly in customers’ albums. After tours are complete, guides close the albums, and we automatically send them to customers right away.
Photo albums are the perfect customer engagement tools for reconnecting with existing customers and encouraging a positive review, word of mouth advertising, or a repeat booking.
3. Leverage social media and email marketing
A grand 89% of US vacationers (Passport Photo Online) checked social media during their most recent leisure trip, with 46% of Americans wanting to show off their travel experience. So give them something to flaunt.
With their digital photo albums arriving directly in their hands—or smartphone email inbox—minutes after the event, emotions are high, and guests are ready to share. It’s too easy when the album is pre-designed with a call to action to ‘share on social media’ right at their fingertips. This is because customers don’t have to save and upload photos or even exit the page.
The good news doesn’t stop there: 40% of millennials pick travel and adventure activities based on how Instagrammable the pics will be. While Schofields conducted this research in the UK, we already know that already almost a third of the entire planet is on the platform.
So, we’ve got Instagram-worthy photos, guests sharing them organically, and new visitors searching for them. All you need now is to keep in touch with your existing customers via email. Whether that's during school breaks, to wish them a great summer, or a celebratory happy anniversary for being one of last's years' best guests. You can invite them back, give them a chance to share their photos again, or hey, why not ask for another review?
Customer engagement is about the ongoing interaction guests have with your brand. By keeping up with their evolving needs, maintaining and building your brand integrity through shared photos, and using customer review data to find out what they like, you can help them have the best experience.
Ready to maximize customer engagement with internet marketing for tour operators? Get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.
