Travel Agency Marketing Plan
Guide to Travel Agency Marketing
As a travel agency owner or agent, you have to rev up your game as the competitors are intense, and the potential traveler has a host of reasons to choose from thousands of rivaling agencies over you. Promoting your travel agency to the targeted audience is an integral part of being in this industry. Managing your website, social media accounts, blogs, and email marketing, plus staying on top of new travel deals and booking your clients – are the cores of your campaign. When crafting your advertising plan for the next year, there’re many useful travel agency marketing ideas that you should consider including in your stratagem.1. Content Marketing
The reality is that if your website isn't loaded with valuable and relevant content, then it's not going to spark off the traffic required to make your travel agency successful. Not only does content have to be interesting, authentic, creative, informative, and engaging, but it also must be well-written. If you're not comfortable in your writing skills, think about hiring a copywriter to create high-quality content for your website, or take some time to beef up your writing crafts.2. Local SEO
Local SEO is a means to optimize your website, so your business will come up when folks search for your location or when searching via mobile when located in an area close to your physical agency address. Google, Bing, and Yahoo have the highest market share among search engines. Try out all the search engines. For example, if you type "San Diego travel agencies." What shows up? For the 3 different search engines, you'll have 3 different results. But all of them—on the #1 page—hadn’t only their own local listings, but also linked to listing to Yellow Pages, Angie's List, and Yelp (in a different order according to the search engine.) What does this mean? It means you not only need to list locally on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, but you also want to ensure you're listed on local business directories.3. Google My Business
Every day, Google processes over 3.5 billion search queries. This means about 40,000 queries are processed per second. So, to help local businesses struggling for visibility in the web jungle, Google has developed Google My Business for an optimized online presence. GMB is a free tool that allows you to control your appearance on different Google products such as Google Search, Google Maps, and Google+. With this weapon in your pocket, you can create and update your business listings to make them interesting for clients. Using Google My Business, people can easily find where your travel agency is. It allows you to maintain your local results, which crop up on multiple Google platforms. These results are modified according to geographies to improve the online searching experience.
4. Reviews
Rely on good reviews - Google My Business and Yelp, are excellent for building your reputation online. As you start out, make an effort to reply to both negative and positive reviews – demonstrating your clients that you’re willing to listen and care about what they’re saying. It can greatly improve your customer relationships and may be crucial in growing your customer base.5. Website Appearance
Yes, content is king, but a website is your brand ambassador. An excellent site will be easy on the eyes, easy to navigate, provide a unique and interesting design, and will load text/images/videos rapidly. Good website design with adequate formatting will also ensure that your business information is listed on each and every page. At the bottom of each site page, contact information with a phone number, email address, and physical address – should be listed.6. Mobile-Friendly Website
With more people using smartphones and tablets rather than desktops or laptops to access sites, having a mobile-friendly website is uber important. Your travel agency has two choices for going mobile. First, you can design a mobile-optimized site, which means that when the site is loaded on a tablet or a smartphone, a smaller, simpler version of your regular site will appear. Or you can create an app for your travel agency. An application usually provides a more personalized UX and can be beneficial for that purpose. Still, creating an app takes a lot of time, and is more expensive than designing a mobile-optimized version of your website.
7. Blogging
Since you’re a travel agency, it means that people want to hear about your experiential travel, planning trips, the pros and cons and finding the best deals, and so on. As such, your field of business has an obligation to the client to share knowledge and insights. The perfect way to do it is blogging. With blogging, you can underline personal experiences, talk about different client interactions, tell stories, make lists of unique places, write tips for traveling in comfort, etc. A blog post serves as a fruitful way to hook in your audience, plus advertise your personal skills and travel know-how.8. Use Photos and Videos
While you may be able to tell a fantastic story about your trip to Hikkim, the location of the world's highest post office, with a tremendous 14,400 ft sight from the Himalayas, but nothing describes content quite like a photo or a video. Travelers love to see images and often skip the text in a blog to concentrate on photos alone. Therefore, be sure you don't deny your audience the value of the photo, and always pick great videos or photography within your blogs and other pieces of content.RANK IN GOOGLE TOP 10 FOR $500 MONTHLY
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9. Travel Agency Email Marketing
Most of the visitors who come to you for the first time won’t make an instant reservation. But you can get the person to subscribe to your email list, so that you get the ability to show your authority and credibility by providing valuable content to them through email, encouraging them to buy your travel arrangements. As for your previous customers, they also will be inspired to become your regular clients by the daily and weekly time-sensitive updates on your service information. For example, you may get them informed when you’re offering an attractive offer.
10. Google Analytics
Set up Google Analytics, since analytics and reports will give you a big picture look at your user engagement. For instance, how many users are arriving at your website from, whether they're on mobile or desktop, how much time users spend on your different web pages? Plus, it's free and user-friendly. Even if you're a beginner and don't know how you'll want to use it, install it because all that data will be there for you when you decide you need it.11. Social Platforms
It would be best if you built a presence on every available forum relevant to your business, which includes joining social networks. Almost every phone or email contact you have is present on social platforms. Social media used most commonly by travel enthusiasts, and travelers are Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. You have to bear in mind that every social media platform is specific, so your digital marketing campaign should be optimized to cater to each social media.12. Paid Search
With thousands of search queries on Google every second, paid search has incredible potential to get your travel agency known to the world. Paid media marketing makes your ad get to the top of Google's first page within a couple of hours. Anyway, organic traffic is better for the long-term growth of your business.13. Referral Marketing for Travel Agents
Word of mouth marketing is highly effective, requires minimum effort, and is free! Increase your sales by asking your clients to refer to a friend or family to your travel agency or to keep you in mind when someone mentions a vacation. To add extra incentive, you could make a referral program. Offer your customers money off their next vacation or a gift card when they refer new clients that book an arrangement.14. Speak at Trade Events
Trade events are a proven place to network with travel companies, travel customers, and other travel agents. It gives you a chance to share your travel services, and boost your business awareness. Events have a higher impact when you speak at them. Try to find a local event related to the travel sector, come up with an interesting topic you can speak about, and you’ll benefit a lot from the role of a speaker, which leads to branding/establishing yourself as an authority.15. Rebranding
Most folks consider rebranding as an extra move to promote their business since it has proved to be an efficient travel agent marketing strategy. It can be simple as changing your slogan, redesigning your logo, or even just promoting your business website. The slight difference from your status quo will induce clients’ interest and make them want to learn more about your travel agency.16. Snap Mail
Every day your prospects come to the home to a mailbox loaded with bills, flyers, and newspapers. Therefore, bring a little variety and a personal touch to your customer communications by sending them something from their favorite travel agency! For special occasions such as holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, consider hand-writing a letter or card, and it will boost your brand awareness immediately.
