Travel and Tourism Marketing

Social Media can be like Word Of Mouth Advertising

It is now an established fact that social media plays a vital role in marketing for almost any business. For the travel and hospitality industry, it is critical due to the fact that it is almost the same a word-of-mouth advertising — and we all know that word-of-mouth advertising is the best kind of advertising there is.

But many travel-related companies have yet to take the plunge, which I believe is mainly due to fear of the unknown. You know you should be doing it…but how? What if it blows up in your face? What if it wastes tons of money and time? If you’re still dithering about this, read on for some practical tips that will help you get started and be successful.

First, you absolutely must have a plan. What do you want to accomplish with social media? What is your goal? How will you measure success? If your goal is to get more guests in your hotel, and you will measure success by having 50% of your new business tell you they heard about you on Facebook, then you’ve got the inklings of a plan started.  If you want to provide customer service in real time over the web, and you’ll measure success by your TripAdvisor rating, that’s another good start to a plan.

Next, find out what various social media platforms do and how they work. You can only do this by spending time on them. Get a personal Twitter account and a personal Facebook account. Get a book for beginners, or search Google for tutorials. Always bear in mind that social networks are social in nature, not business. You must interact with the network on a social level in order to promote your business. It’s very different from previous marketing methods.

Social Media for Various Marketing Objectives

Now that you’ve figured out what your goal is, how you’ll measure success, and what social media tool is the best fit, you should have some idea of what resources you need to allocate to this project. Many people think social media marketing is virtually free, and the online community happily promotes your organization for you without any effort on your part.

Not so.

You must make a commitment to this project and back up that commitment with enough resources to get it done right. Social media marketing requires regular time spent every day (especially on Twitter), and regular resources assigned to it. If you won’t have the time to do this yourself, you will have to hire someone. Conducting a social media marketing campaign can be a full-time job, depending on what your goals are.

A well-planned and properly executed social media marketing campaign will net your travel or tourism business short-term buzz and build long-term reputation and trust. By using social media consistently and correctly, you will find that your customers are finding you easier without having to look too hard, and that they feel they know you better and therefore trust you more. Eventually, those two benefits will translate into a third benefit where they promote you without you have to pay them. But you must first give to the community before it will give back.

Always provide a toll-free number.

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed how your website needs to be clear, and what information to keep above the fold. In Part 2, we covered testimonials, copywriting and using your website to sell, not entertain. Now we will wrap up the series with a few more tips that will get you more bookings more often.

Simplify booking as much as possible

This is another area where money spent is not wasted. Get a really good booking engine that works for your type of destination. Your online booking center is open 24 hours a day, so anyone in the world can check prices, availability and more importantly, book a vacation at the very moment they are ready to book. Don’t miss out on those sales by having a booking engine that is so complicated no one can figure it out, or so slow that they lose interest and leave.

If at all possible, have a toll-free number available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the people who don’t like to book online, as there are still plenty of those.

Strive to get people engaged in your site

This does not refer to games and other gizmos like Disney has, since we’re committed to selling our destination instead of entertaining people. This refers to contests, a forum, guest book, blogs and other social media. Any and all of these things are geared toward selling your destination and have many added benefits. They get people engaged in your brand and create more market awareness. The viral sharing aspects of social media can be a huge boost to your mailing list. Guest books and forums gain the all-important user generated content (UGC) and long tail keywords, as well as providing you with a source of testimonials you didn’t even have to ask for.

Miscellaneous Details

Make sure your pages load quickly. Optimize your images, be sure you don’t have too many stylesheets or scripts loading, and if it still loads slowly, move it to a different host.

Try to offer something free to people, such as brochures, calendars, desktop wallpaper, etc.

Always have a call to action clearly visible in multiple places. “Book now!” “Call now!” You might think this is elementary, but you’d be surprised at the number of websites that don’t do it.

In conclusion, none of these principles are hard to implement, and most of them are not costly either. It’s entirely possible for virtually any travel or tourism organization to create a website that effectively sells their destination. All that’s required is a little time, a little money, and a great deal of attention to detail. If you have to choose something to start with, start with testimonials. After that, get your booking engine up to par, then start working on copy and photographs. Build your FAQ page, organize your navigation and redesign the layout after that.

Now that’s an action plan for travel and tourism marketing success!

Show happy people to build trust

In the first part of this series, we discussed how your website needs to be clear, and what information to keep above the fold. In this part, we will continue to discuss key marketing concepts as applied to travel and tourism industry websites.

The more you tell, the more you sell.

This catch phrase is as old as capitalism, but it’s very true. Long copy sells more than short copy. The best thing you can do for your website is to invest in your copy. Hire a professional to write copy that sells. Every word must have impact and be designed to get the reader excited about coming to your destination.

“But wait,” you say. “You said to put all the important information above the fold. I can’t do that with long copy. I have to use bullets.”

You don’t necessarily need to use bullets, but you’re right. You do need to use short, extremely well-crafted paragraphs that maximize the use of every short, descriptive word. Then include links at the end of each teaser paragraph so people can get to your long copy…only one click away.

Use your website to sell, not entertain.

Unless you’re Disney, your website needs to be a lean, mean, selling machine, not a flashy animated supersite full of gizmos, bells and whistles. Save your money and website space and put some killer copy and awesome photographs above the fold. Be sure to use photographs of happy people: photos of people build trust. Photos of happy people build even more trust and desire to book. Do make sure they are photos of real people. If you get celebrities, definitely show them. But make sure the people in your photos are not all glamorous and perfect. Keep it real….professional quality…but real.

You can never have too many testimonials.

More than anything else, testimonials are key to convincing people to book, especially in travel and tourism marketing. The whole point of your website is to get people to come to a new place. They can’t exactly come check it out ahead of time, before the make a purchase decision the way they can in retail marketing. They need some way to evaluate whether they will be happy with their decision to come to your destination. Testimonials are your best way to address that concern.

Furthermore, testimonials are extremely cheap and easy to get. Grab people that are already on-site and offer them something nice in exchange for a testimonial. Most people are thrilled to get something free, right? They’ll be happy to tout their good experience. Snap a photo of them (don’t forget to get a photography release signed!) and have them write a short testimonial before they run off to their “free” activity, ice cream, or whatever.

Video and audio testimonials are also becoming increasingly popular. If you can, try to get some of those too for your website. You can run a whole column of testimonials along the right-hand side of your site, starting above the fold and continuing for the whole length of the page. Your bookings will increase, guaranteed.

In summary, testimonials and great copywriting are essential to selling your destination. Don’t waste space on bells and whistles that you could be occupying with copy and photographs that sell. In Part 3, we will wrap up the series with some more tips that should be elementary, but are often overlooked. Click here to continue reading this series of articles on making your website SELL your destination.