3 steps to marketing your travel business
Written by Karen BryanEveryone wants to know how to effectively market their travel business. It’s a competitive environment out there in the world of online travel and you need these travellers to find and purchase your travel product or service rather than your competitors As the owner of a web based travel business Europe a la Carte I wanted to check out my marketing strategy so I looked at the definition of marketing in Wikipedia.
1 Discern consumer desires
2 Design product or service to fulfil these desires
3 Direct consumers to purchasing your product or service.
It’s all very well reading three apparently simple marketing steps but the trick is how you translate these into actions that will be effective for your travel business.
I’ve some issues with point 1. I’m not sure many travel consumers have a distinct desire. Many are influenced by price alone. There are some predictions that travellers will start to place less emphasis on bargain hunting when purchasing travel as they seek a more personalised travel experience. Therefore travel brands which fulfil this desire will attract and retain a more loyal following.
Many UK residents view travel primarily as an escape to sunnier climes from the unpredictable UK weather, so are not too concerned about their destination, as long as it’s hot and sunny. Consumers may see a location in a TV programme or film and decide they’d like to visit that location. They may read about a destination in a magazine or on a social network site. I’ve had clients approach me with very specific requirements e.g they want to rent a villa in the Italian lake district. I found a villa which fulfilled their criteria and when I phoned them they told me that they’d decided to go to a kibbutz in Israel. The problem is if you can’t correctly identify customers desires how can you then fulfil these desires?
I’m sticking to the belief that there is a niche for Europe a la Carte in providing information to travellers who want to experience authentic travel in Europe on a modest budget. I see the rise in the value of the euro against the dollar and sterling as an opportunity for me to attract travellers who want to squeeze more of off their holiday euro but still travel in relative comfort. Also more UK residents are considering taking holidays on home shores and my site has a lot of content about Scotland.
Therefore in order to follow step 2 of fulfilling the desire of travellers to visit authentic Europe on a modest budget I write destination guides to less well known cities and regions where travellers can experience more of the real Europe away from the tourist crowds and inflated prices. I write blog posts giving tips and advice about destinations, travel deals, accommodation and links to useful resources.
With regard to step 3 that should follow logically on from the content of the site and blog if my content can be found through the search terms used by potential site visitors. With around 60% of my traffic coming from search engines keyword identification and search engine optimisation are crucial. However I find that visitors referred to my site stay longer and look at more pages highlighted the importance of having links on other sites and blogs.
However merely driving traffic to the site is not my aim, I need a percentage of visitors to go on to purchase accommodation, car hire or insurance through the affiliate links and/or click on ads on the site in order to generate revenue. I find that it’s contextual text links that bring the most revenue. You can’t just stick a few banners on your site and expect that to be effective.
I hope that by reading this post you’ll evaluate your marketing strategy to ensure that travel purchasers find and buy on your site. I’d welcome any feedback and/or suggestions about marketing your travel business.
This post was featured in the 12th edition of the Internet Business Blog Canival and the Marketer Review Sunday Carnival on 4 May 2008.
According to internet marketers a new way to get to the top of google’s search pages is to create links to your website. This can be done either through writing articles or press releases about your company/service you provide and then posting them on certain sites or by writing blogs or posting comments on other people’s blogs just like I am doing below.
Dennis Czigler
http://www.europetraveltours.net/
Thanks for your comment Dennis. Now I’m not great on SEO etc but I’m not sure that links left in a blog post help with SEO but readers may click on the link and visit your site. Whereas if you write articles with your links published on other sites this does help increase your ranking.
I’ve found that submitting articles to a service such as Ezine Articles useful.
Dennis is sort of right but a little off the track :)
Links are important to get your blog or website listed on the 1st page but don’t waste your time submitting press releases and articles as these links will be low quality in my opinion.
I spend zero time on link building and just write content that people want to read – this content gets linked to from other blogs and websites and in return traffic flows in nicely from Google and other search engines.
Leaving links in comments is a no-no in my opinion. Most blog applications have the “no-follow” tag embedded which means your link will not be followed by the search engines anyway, so despite the myth that blog comments are a great way to improve your rankings, your’ simply wasting your time.
Thanks for the information Darren. So you are intent on writing content that people want to read and ignoring link building and you get good traffic?
Exactly Karen.
I don’t want to give my secrets away – not in public anyway ;) but write interesting useful content and people will link to it. They are other skills to get the blog posts ranking well, but people spend too much time on watching their Google Page Rank and building links.
That’s my opinion anyway! :)
No Darren we can’t expect you to give away all your secrets but as top UK travel blogger you must be doing something right!
I was typing the secrets bit tongue in cheek, because alot of the techniques I use to promote and write my blog posts are easily found online on sites like Darren Prowse and Problogger.net
I have looked at trends on my blog, i.e. if I write more than 1 post a day, the comments drastically reduce, if I stick to one post a day, the enquiries trickle in nicely.
Saturday is the worst day of the week for traffic, so I am looking at how I can improve that. A post last week was Stumbled and brought over 400 visitors yesterday, so that was nice.
The aim is to see which works best for your blog.
I’m rambling on here :)
There is lots of information about marketing your blog available on the web. It sometimes a s matter of not having time and/or knowledge to implement the knowledge.
Yes Darren I’ve noticed that Saturday is the day with the lowest traffic but Sunday’s not far behind.
[...] Bryan presents 3 steps to marketing your travel business posted at Europe A La Carte Blog, saying, “Some basic steps for marketing your business which [...]
Hey Darren, how can you find out if the blog applications has a “no-follow” tag embedded before you post your comment?
I have difficulties with building links from my comments on blogger.com. I do not get “clickable” links. What is your opinion?
Our webiste has nice content on our website but our ranking is going down.
Dennis Czigler
http://www.spaintours.biz
[...] Bryan presents 3 steps to marketing your travel business posted at Europe A La Carte Blog, saying, “Some basic steps for marketing your business which [...]