5 Ways to Optimise Your Tourism Marketing Efforts

5 Ways to Optimise Your Tourism Marketing Efforts

As a tourism business, in order to stand out from the crowd, it’s key to explore a variety of tourism marketing tactics. With the holiday season and 2021 on the horizon, in our latest blog post, we shared five ways you can start optimising your tourism marketing efforts to grow your business.

1. Set clear goals

Before you begin implementing and trialling new marketing tactics, it’s important to first get clear on your goals. Think about your overall goals and values as a business, and then create SMART goals to translate into your tourism marketing that align with these. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Be practical when setting your goals and be sure to set a time frame to evaluate and improve the success of your tourism marketing tactics.

2. Get to know your target audience

Define and get to know your target audience. Before you can sell your offering to your audience, you need to get to know who you’re talking to! This will determine the types of promotions which will suit your audience best, their decision-making process, what’s important to them, their pain points and the type of language to use in your marketing. 

Tourism Research Australia has released 22 domestic visitor profiles to help tourism operators target their offerings to their domestic target audience, especially during the current travel restrictions. From solo travellers to family groups, visit TRA’s website to read through these profiles and get to know your target audience.

3. Collaborate with local tourism businesses

There are many benefits of collaborating with other local tourism operators with a similar target audience but different service offering for a mutually beneficial purpose. It can be a cost-effective way to attract more visitors to your destination, encourage low commission rate bookings, elevate each other’s offerings, create tailored holiday promotions and packages, and boost your business’ brand reputation through co-marketing and association.

Once you’ve identified your business and tourism marketing goals, do your research and due-diligence on potential collaboration opportunities and businesses to build a relationship with. We recommend considering the following:

  • Is your target audience the same?
  • Do you share the same core values?
  • Are they a direct competitor?
  • Do they have a similar niche to your business that could pair well together?
  • Do they have positive reviews and social proof?
  • Are they active on social media and online?
  • Do they produce quality content?

Collaboration is a two-way street, once you’ve built a relationship and opened up the discussion, consider ways that both of your businesses can be mutually beneficial for each other’s tourism marketing.

4. Share valuable content on your social media and website

Social media channels are a great tactic to boost your online presence, help your customers find you, tell your business story, and connect with potential customers. Aligned with your tourism marketing goals and strategy, consider the following content pillars and how they could apply to the social media content you could create and share with your audience.

  • Educational
  • Promotional
  • Testimonials and Reviews
  • Cross-Promotional (e.g. supporting other local businesses)
  • Behind The Scenes Updates
  • Customer Stories and Experiences
  • User-generated content
  • Blog posts and media mentions

5. Storytell and showcase the highlights of your region

As quoted by Simon Sinek, “People don’t buy what you sell, they buy why you sell it.” This rings true when it comes to creating the marketing messages behind the content you share and promote for your tourism business. For example, as a canoe hire shop, people don’t just want to hire canoes, they want the memories of a fun holiday kayaking experience and adventure. Capture the attention of your target audience by connecting with them through storytelling and sharing why your service is made for them. 

As well as this, share highlights of your region as a whole to sell the destination and your business as the holiday of a lifetime! This is also a great way to support your other local tourism businesses and create cross-promotional content.

 

Interested in finding more ways to increase your tourism marketing efforts? Create a free tourism operator listing for your business on www.atdw.com.au 

 

Related Articles