Whether you own a travel booking portal, travel blog or guide, you need to follow specific promotional strategies that not only attract the visitors but also build their trust for your brand in the industry.
Traditional marketing practices don’t value much in the online industry. Moreover, the marketing methods evolve different within each niche of the online industry and hence, it requires some unique and effective strategies to build a positive and lucrative brand across your travel website in order to attract readers, sales or revenue.
Understanding your target audience is the key to set these promotional strategies. Although, the tactics don’t differ much between the different types of travel websites across the web, the target audience does change. A travel booking portal would try to lure in people planning to book holidays or office trips whereas a travel blog would try to add subscribers on the list. On the other hand, a travel guide may be attracting the audience who would either download the Travel Guide in the eBook format (free or paid) or subscribe to the Travel Video channel on YouTube.
Once you have identified the target audience, you can use the following marketing tips, tailored for travel bloggers or entrepreneurs, to generate traffic and conversions.
Key Marketing Strategies for Travel Bloggers or Entrepreneurs:
Keep the website clean and user-friendly:
I have seen a lot of travel websites with simple corporate-themed design, look and feel. This is one of the silliest mistakes made by new travel website owners who simply follow the website developer’s guidelines or suggestions without realizing the fact that a web developer can’t be a great judge of what the users will like about the site.
Considering the fact that the target audience is travel enthusiasts, you must follow a design that is clean and user-friendly. In addition, you must also make sure that your travel website is slightly on an adventurous theme or at least have background images that relate to the travelling theme with some beautiful landscapes or something like that. Such a design would not only attract the readers but also would make them fall in love with your website.
Engage your audience through the blog and social media channels:
As a travel website owner, your main goal is to attract the traffic that would convert into sales or any other pre-determined goals. However, a website couldn’t attract the traffic on its own. You must take some effective measures in order to engage the audience and lure them on to your website. In the digital marketing world, this strategy is known as creating “doorways” to your website.
The best way to create such doorways is to know where your target audience hangs out the most online. You can always use the popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram and many more in order to attract traffic from these media channels. Setting up a blog with interesting content that could trigger eagerness among the people could bring in a lot of traffic to your website via your blog. Remember, the more you keep your visitors engaged with the website, the more they are likely to return again.
Start a YouTube video channel:
With the rising popularity of videos against textual content, it is the need of the hour to start a YouTube channel for every brand. It’s a fact that our brain could process videos faster than textual content. Also, with the evolution of the internet across the globe, it is now easier to watch videos online than before.
Also, a YouTube channel can help you build subscribers for your brand opening another doorway to your travel website. If you can deliver some interactive, adventurous and unique videos around the travel niche, people would like to know about the brand behind these videos and thereby about the services your website offers in the industry.
Use quality images for the destinations:
Adding quality images to your travel website helps a lot to keep your traffic engaged with the website. Try adding galleries for destinations that users can view one by one and experience these places right from their desktop or mobile devices. Such a delightful experience can also encourage these users to visit these destinations in real life and they may use your website services for booking hotels, travel packages, flights etc. If you own a travel blog or web guide, then you can easily convert these users into subscribers who love reading about destinations before visiting them.
Remember, sharing knowledge or information on a website for free builds trust among the readers and they feel confident in hiring your services. The best way to share information on travel websites is by posting images as people would be more interested in a virtual tour of the destinations rather than reading about it.
Offer free tips about food, destinations and travel safety:
As informed earlier, sharing free tips and guide would help build trust for the brand. Travel website owners can easily offer tips about food, destinations and travel safety with the help of travel guides as well as food & destination guides. Hire a team of writers who could publish such articles on a regular basis either in the guide or blog section of your website.
Such informative articles also attract search engine traffic for the website and helps in building authority for your domain in the industry. The basic questions that people have while travelling are eating options, sightseeing and safety measures. If your website could solve these queries free of cost, then chances are that people would consider your website as the ultimate choice for all their travelling needs.
Share real-life experiences of others via blog:
People love stories and travel enthusiasts would adore travel stories shared by others on your website. You could invite your users to share their special experiences on your travel website that can inspire and help other travel enthusiasts while travelling the same destinations.
The way people love reading such stories, in the same way, they like sharing similar stories as well. If you keep the channels open, people would come and share their stories for free with your website readers.
Let the visitors inquire, contact or share feedback easily:
Lastly, you should let your readers inquire or share feedback about your services or the website easily. Have a 24/7 chat support enabled on your website that would answer all the queries of the readers inquiring about destinations, bookings, etc.
