Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies

Transcription

1 FREE EBOOK 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Helping travel companies generate quality leads online.

2 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page 2 About Dot Tourism Dot Tourism helps travel companies generate quality leads online. Our set of integrated services is designed to help you be found online and win more customers. Request a free assessment with Dot Tourism below and find out how we can transform your marketing. Strategic Planning Create brand personas and develop your content plan on how best to reach them. Campaign Development Powerful website and content creation for every stage of your customers travel buying cycle. Drive Traffic Promote your content via search engines and social networks to prove your expertise. Convert Leads Engage your visitors, build trust with your brand and capture more quality leads. Grow Sales Managing your leads with nurturing and scoring shortens your sales cycle. Marketing Analysis Immediately and accurately measure the ROI for all your marketing activity. Get Started Visit: /getstarted/

3 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page 3 Contents Introduction How to use this e-book... 4 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Strategy... 5 Campaign Development... 9 Driving Traffic Converting Leads Marketing Metrics Conclusion Conclusion and Summary... 21

4 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page 4 Chapter 1 Introduction How to Use These Digital Marketing Tips? There are plenty of in-depth digital marketing strategy guides out there (and don t forget to check out our resource page for some travel industry specific ones) but sometimes you need a quick refresher or some bite size reading to fill a spare five minutes. That s where this e-book comes in. It is not exhaustive, nor does it offer detailed strategy. Instead it offers quick advice and reminders to help you keep your digital strategy up-to-date and to offer inspiration. As always you ll find some advice specifically tailored to the travel industry, look out for the highlighted tips for some great sector specific insights and advice. We ve broken down the tips into five broad aspects of a good inbound marketing campaign, namely strategy, campaign development, driving traffic, converting leads and monitoring the right metrics. Right, let s get started!

5 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page 5 Chapter 2 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Strategy It s vital to get your digital marketing strategy right, otherwise the traffic, leads and conversions won t happen. Use the following tips as a checklist. How many can you tick off right away? Know your audience. You can t engage and appeal to your audience unless you have a clear idea of who they are. Create detailed buyer personas for each of your target audience groups. Have your social network ready to start communicating through. Have you claimed your company name on ALL the social channels? Tick off Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and Flickr at the least. Take a critical look at your website. Does it do the job you need it to do? Can you add content easily? Are you able to set up landing pages? If not, you might need to consider a redesign. Align your search, social and content campaigns. Start thinking of them as a whole and not in terms of individual channels. What resources do you already have that you aren t utilising? For example, make a list of all your offline content you might be able to reuse, such as brochure copy. What are your teams capabilities? Do a company audit of your strengths and weaknesses in terms of expertise. Think about how you can create content and who is best poised to help.

6 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page Clearly define your goals. What are you hoping to achieve? Set targets that are realistic but push you that extra step. Be informed. Read up as much as you can on digital marketing trends. Read case studies and see if you can apply the success of others to your own business. Take a long hard look at your competitors. What are they doing well? Seek to emulate it. What are they doing badly? Don t make the same mistakes. Make a list of the main challenges you face in achieving your business goals. Assess each one and think about how you can overcome them. Do you need to outsource something? Can you streamline certain processes? Content should be at the heart of your strategy. Great content will bring your customers to you. Make sure you can check off these content strategy tips Make sure you regularly publish new content. Publishing new content to your website or blog shouldn t be something you do when things get quiet and you have a few spare moments. Content isn t just about writing an article. Mix it up. Include infographics, photo essays and podcasts. Don t forget video. Research shows that 60% online traffic comes from video. Plan to include it on your website, blog and social media. Make your content aspirational or useful. Your audience are more likely to share it. A two day suggested itinerary for example, packed with the main sights and supplemented with other quirky ideas. 15 Provide answers to common problems. Think about the sort of things your customers ask you, can you create a blog post about it? For example, what to pack.

7 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page 7 16 Preempt questions too. Think about your customers concerns and provide reassurance. For example, security and safe travel to the destination. 17 Think about what is unique about your destination. Plan content that covers the local cuisine or wildlife that people can experience in the region. 18 Follow travel trends. Responsible travel and community support are popular topics. Create content that ties this in with your area, such as a feature on your food suppliers. 19 Make use of positive reviews. If you get great feedback through sites such as TripAdvisor, then make a feature of them on your blog. 20 Consider creating a big piece of content about your local area or a region you cover. Turn it into an ebook such as 50 top sightseeing tips in XXXX but make sure it is unique. Get local people and staff to contribute Research travel literature that applies to your destination or location you are promoting. Provide reading lists and reviews to inspire your guests.... What events or celebrations are unique or celebrated in your destinations? Create an event calendar and let people know about the history and best ways to take part. After the event, crowdsource for photos and do a photo essay. 23 Ask guests to share recent travel experiences in a blog post.

8 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page 8 24 Get staff and partners involved sharing their own insights into the company. For example, get a tour driver to list their five favourite views on one of your tours, or somebody who works in your hotel bar to write about the top poolside cocktails. 25 Don t just aim your content at potential visitors. Encourage guests to reminisce about their holiday. They will become powerful advocates and might book another stay.

9 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page 9 Chapter 2 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Campaign Development You ve got your strategy prepared and you have some great content ideas. Now you need to turn it all into a campaign that pushes visitors towards your company goals. Pour all your content ideas into a spreadsheet. Use keyword research to determine what keywords you should use for each article. Choose keywords that offer a balance between not being too competitive to rank for, yet receive a good volume of searches. Use keywords in your blog article but don t repeat them too frequently. Aim to use them in your first paragraph and then where it sounds natural to do so in the rest of the article. Include a column in your spreadsheet for the blog post title. This is important for SEO and for capturing the attention of your visitors. Make sure it includes your keywords. Link your blog posts to other relevant content on your site to help visitors find other information of interest to them. Don t forget to include a call to action (CTA) within your blog posts. For example, encourage them to sign up for updates. Get somebody to proof your posts for grammar and spelling. Make sure your blog posts are a sensible length. They need to be long enough to offer substantive content but not be an essay nobody will read ,000 words is about the right mix.

10 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page Make sure you have social sharing options embedded on your blog posts. Add customised share options within the content where it is less likely to be overlooked. tweet here] When writing your tweet remember that you need to keep it within the 140 character limit set by Twitter. You will also need to remember that you can t use spaces in this area of HTML but you can get spaces in your tweet text by typing %20 instead. Don t to forget to include your own Twitter username so you can see your link has been shared and reply when appropriate. Instead you will need to use %40 in your code though. So an example link you might write yourself as a share link would be: sharing%20%40dottourism URL fere] So an example link for Facebook sharing might be: Facebook will use the meta description of your page as the default text for your post so make sure it is relevant, makes sense and is well optimised. &url=[insert URL] An example LinkedIn link for sharing would be: Like Facebook, LinkedIn will use the meta description as the default text for the sharing post Make sure your blog posts are in line with your brand identity. Use the same style of language and consistent design elements so people associate all the great content they are reading with your company. Make sure you have at least one great image for your blog post. Travel is very visual and the right image to illustrate your content will not only be pleasing to the reader, but will be shown when a preview of the page is shared via social media.

11 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page 11 With all these great things going on you need to make sure your website is in the right shape to support your campaigns Does your website reflect your current branding? Does it look fresh and modern? If your website is old it might be time for a refresh. Is your website responsive? Does it adapt according to how a visitor is viewing it? Mobile web browsing continues to grow, make sure your website is easy to use for visitors on small screens using their fingers to navigate. Are you using Flash? It might be time to get rid of it. Do you have music that autoplays when visitors reach your site? Please remove it if you do, it is one of the things that visitors hate most (and will lead to a high bounce rate). When visitors land on your homepage is it obvious what you do? Make sure they can understand what your are offering in a glance and give them a clear step to take. Load your website now and look at it really critically with this question in mind. Is your site easy to navigate. Make sure your content is easily reached. Do you have landing pages with a strong CTA and no other distracting links? You need to be able to create these easily. Do you have a custom 404/error page? If not, you should get one set up. How quickly does your site load? If it takes time, it will frustrate visitors and you will lose them before they even get to your content. Do you have clear CTAs for visitors to take? Make sure there is an action you are pushing them towards on each page. For example signing up to receive offers, downloading a brochure or guide, entering a competition etc.

12 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page Really focus on what you do best and make a list. Look critically at your copy and photo assets and ask if they represent that. Run a usability test on your website. Ask somebody who isn t familiar with it to take an action (for example make a booking). How long did it take them? How easy did they find it? Use this information to improve the process. Images are very important for travel. Do they represent your products? Are they of good quality and inspirational? Avoid generic stock photography and use meaningful images. Use customer testimonials, people like to see that others have had good experiences. Maximise their impact by using photos and names of people to add authenticity. Take a look at forms on your website. Only collect information you need, if the forms are too long, people won t fill them out.

13 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page 13 Chapter 2 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Drive Traffic You ve got your website sorted and you re ready to drive visitors to it. Make sure your website is well optimised for search engines. First, check that search engines can find your content. Take a look at your page using Google s text cache. This shows you how the search engines see it without all your lovely styling and widgets. Is all your information accessible in this way? Poor link structures lead to search engines failing to reach all of a website s content. Can you manually navigate to all your content pages within a few clicks of your homepage? Create a list of your important content pages and then analyse how long it takes you to reach them. Be careful about hiding content behind online forms. Search spiders generally will not attempt to submit forms so the search engines won t find this content. Review your thank you pages to make sure they don t contain content you think should be indexed. Review how much rich media such as Flash or Java Script you use on your site and make sure that any you are using isn t hiding links from search engines. Check that text you want indexed isn t embedded into an image. For example if you want your company name to be indexed make sure it is on your website as text and not just as part of a graphical logo. Video & audio content should have an accompanying transcript if the words and phrases used are meant to be indexed by the engines. Create these if your website is missing these transcripts.

14 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page If you want your website to stand a chance of ranking for the phrase tours to India then you need to make sure you are using those words by implementing a keyword strategy. Plan time for working on your keyword strategy. It s not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors. Ask yourself, will a user searching with the keywords you are targeting, find what they are looking for on your site? If not, you are wasting their time and they are generating meaningless traffic that will never convert. Avoid highly competitive two-word keyphrases. Look for low competition opportunities or focus on longer keyphrases. Think commercially when choosing keywords. You want your product pages to attract people looking to spend money rather than those just looking for information. If you are a luxury hotel in Goa, you don t want to target keyphrases that include cheap even if they are high traffic. With a keyword strategy in place, make sure you are using them in all the right places, which includes more than just within the text copy of an article Your title tag is an important SEO element. It appears in three key places: browsers, search engine results pages, and external websites. Make sure it is unique, descriptive and contains your page keywords. Review the title tags on your most important pages. Use your keywords to optimise image and video tags and titles. Make sure you have all the other SEO basics covered. Are your pages optimised for users and not search engines? If you are worrying too much about the latter, you may be reducing the usefulness of the page for the users and they should always be the focus of your optimisation work. Do a quick review to check your pages and content are human friendly.

15 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page Dedicate time to creating a clear link building strategy and make sure it is ethical. Avoid chasing quick, low quality and irrelevant links or risk facing the penalties. If your budget allows it, consider having a professional do a full SEO audit of your website. They will be able to spot any problems and make useful recommendations that you would otherwise miss. When used well, social media can help you build an online community around your brand, and really help drive traffic to your website Create a conversation. You aren t pushing a message out to your audience, you are chatting to them about it. Ask a question. Request an action. Give your audience and excuse to interact with you. For example, post a picture of a beach / mountain / city and ask them where they would rather be today. Plan when you are going to post things. For example, for travel, Facebook messages between 11am and noon are more successful than those posted first thing in the morning or late evening. Use pictures. Photo posts on Facebook receive a lot more likes and shares than plain text posts. Choose holiday images with plenty of blue sky or bright colours for the most eye catching effect Think about the length of your messages. Twitter limits you to 140 characters, but just because Facebook doesn t, you don t have to write reams. Remember, your audience has a relatively short attention span, keep your messages brief. Use hashtags to make it easier for people to find your content. Using original hashtags for a specific campaign can help spread the word and make it easier for you to monitor. Twitter, Google+, Instagram and even Facebook all allow you to use hashtags.

16 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page If you are sharing videos, then make sure embedding is enabled to allow other users to share them on their websites. Check the settings on your YouTube page. Make sure your profile is complete and professional looking for all your social networks. Do the images you use represent your brand? Is it obvious at a glance what you do? Make sure you link back to your blog and website. While social is all about sharing and spreading good content, it is easy to forget your own sometimes and forget to link back to your products. Mix up your media. Create a visual variety by posting and sharing different things. Did you know you can pin videos on Pinterest? Investigate all the avenues for driving traffic. It is not just about building visits from social and search, referral traffic is important too. Approach partners and suppliers for links. For example, if you are a tour agency and you use a network of independent guesthouses for accommodation, ask them to link to your tours from their websites. If you are a small hotel and you make a point of serving and sourcing local food in your restaurant, ask the organic farm you work with to give you a link. Make sure you are listed on relevant directories. There are plenty of regional guides or tourist information sites that might be happy to include you. Avoid any directories that aren t strictly relevant though, the link will definitely not be worth it. Find relevant blogs that might be happy to publish an article from you and create some guest posts. Plenty of websites offer you the opportunity to create links through forum signatures, blog comments or user profiles. These are often low value links but as long as the pages are relevant then they have an aggregate value. Get friendly with travel bloggers and ask them to give you a mention but be prepared to offer something back.

17 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page 17 Chapter 2 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Converting Leads You ve got the traffic and your website is getting plenty of visits. Now you need to convert those visits into leads and sales and to do this you need to nurture your leads. Don t wait for people to convert, give them a gentle push. Segment your data so that you know what your leads interests are. If 81 somebody downloads your family trips brochure, they probably are interested in family trips. If somebody downloads a romantic holidays brochure they are probably travelling as a couple Timing is almost everything. You need to respond quickly as the response rates of leads decreases over time. Review your company processes and make a note of how quickly you are responding when somebody submits data to your website. Relevancy is everything else. Use each subsequent to further hone the relationship between you and the lead by offering content on topics in which they ve expressed an interest and use calls-to-action to prompt them to respond again. As an example, if a visitor converted on your offer for an ebook for How to spend 24 hours in Barcelona send them an offer that might be something like, Great European Weekend Breaks Reduce unsubscribes on your s. The top two reasons people unsubscribe is due to receiving too many s (69%) and receiving content that is no longer relevant (56%). Both of these mistakes can be avoided. Make sure your s are being received. Approximately 17% of all s don t arrive due to factors such as spam traps. Check your company are keeping your lists clean, the IP address your s are coming from has a good sender score and that you are following best practices.

18 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page Use split A/B testing to ensure that you are refining your marketing efforts. Test aspects such as broadcast timing, subject line and creative. Personalise your marketing. Look at what differentiates your subscribers or leads and see how you can address those needs or interests. For example, include segmenting by geographical location (promote that weekend break to people who live about 3 to 4 hours away) or type of traveller (different messages for business travellers, honeymooners and families) How does your look? Is the design in line with your website? Make sure that it carries over consistent design elements, avoids being too wordy and looks like something people will want to read. How does your work on different devices? Make sure it is mobile friendly. People accessing it on a mobile device won t read it again later on their computer, it needs to work for them on all formats. Include a CTA so that people know what you want them to do. Hold their hand through the sales process, but don t expect them to run straight there, warm them up first.

19 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page 19 Chapter 2 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Marketing Analysis Make sure you have the right data being collected and are using it meaningfully. Looking at the right data will enable you to measure your return on investment and close the loop on your analytics, tracking your customers right through their buying life cycle Use closed-loop analytics tools that allow you to fully measure, analyse, and act on the performance of all the elements of an inbound marketing campaign. This includes your blog, social media, landing pages to leads, calls-to-action, marketing and more. Are you monitoring the right landing page metrics? Monitor the CTA click through rate (percentage of visitors who visit your landing page by responding to your call-to-action), visitor to lead conversion rate (percentage of website visitors who become leads), lead to customer conversion rate (percentage of leads who become customers) and visitor to customer conversion rate (percentage of visitors who become customers). Use this data to find poorly performing landing pages. Find your landing page with the lowest click through rate and critically examine it to find out why. Make sure the page content is properly aligned with the content in the preceding CTA. Are people s expectations being met? Collect CTA insights. Find out how many people are seeing your CTAs and then how many are taking action. If it is low, you need to review your CTAs. Using your CTA views-to-submission rate, look at the worst performing CTAs to assess how they can be improved. Remove navigation and other distractions so that visitors can focus on the action you want them to take.

20 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page Make sure you are using the right SEO metrics. The ones you ll want to measure and analyse include: organic search traffic, branded vs. non-branded search traffic, unique search terms, inbound links and conversion rates from organic search. Make sure you are using the right metrics for your blog. These include: individual post views, blog traffic and referral sources, CTA performance, blog leads, visitor to lead conversion rate Make sure you are using the right social media metrics. Broadly, this includes the engagement or number of interactions generated in social media channels, traffic and conversion rate from social media. Make sure you are using the right marketing metrics. These are: bounce rate, delivery rate, list growth rate, click-through rate, conversion rate and revenue generated by (if appropriate). Pull all your analytics together and do a critical analysis of which marketing channels are succeeding and which are in need of help. Look at the areas where you are losing potential customers by not converting them and use this data to finely tune your inbound marketing campaign.

21 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page 21 Chapter 3 Conclusion Optimising your Digital Marketing The 100 digital marketing tips in this ebook have hopefully given you some great ideas for improving your digital strategy. However, it s important to stay up to date with different tactics and strategies to ensure you continue to get the best return from your marketing efforts. Make sure you make time in your schedule to read industry blogs and join in with commentary and discussion on platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn. By improving your own knowledge and reaching out to experts, you will be building an excellent foundation for making the most of your digital marketing.

22 100 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Companies Page 22 Thank You Thank you for reading this e-book. We hope you found it useful. We have plenty of other great resources and a growing library of e-books especially written for travel marketing professionals. Keep in touch Please connect with us on Social Media Download Resources Visit: Read Our Blog Visit: Next Steps: Request your free assessment Visit: /getstarted/ A free inbound marketing assessment from one of our experts will look at your current marketing and provide actionable advice on how you can reach your goals. Get Started