3 steps to marketing your travel business
Friday, April 25th, 2008Welcome to my blog, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Everyone 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.













