And now that local and foreign online travel booking portals are becoming very active in the market, things get even harder. So if you don’t improve your marketing strategies, your personal and financial growth ambitions will remain unfulfilled for a long time to come.
However, that your desire for improvement is what this post aims to help with.
At the end, if you put what you learn to work, day by day, you’ll start to see some measurable improvements in the performance numbers that matter most to you.
When it comes to online marketing strategies for a travel agency, there are literally hundreds of things that can be done to move your business forward.
But if you commit to doing everything at the same time on your own and probably with limited expertise, the effectiveness won’t be desirable at all. To make it all digestible, we’ll break the few selected online lead generation strategies into free and paid options.
Free Online Lead Generation Strategies
Because of financial limitations, it is obvious that everyone won’t have the money to upgrade their marketing performance as much as possible. So we’ll be pointing out the exact free online lead generation strategies you can leverage for better outcomes.
Here we are referring to specific things you can do on your own without paying money to any company or expert to help in advertising and execution.
Search Engine Optimization
This is a process of making the contents of your website eligible for higher ranking in search engine result pages. Active search engine optimization is about attracting people who are searching for specific key phrases like ‘corporate travel agent lagos’.
The other important angle relates to using location specific search terms to attract only qualified travel prospects within a certain target location.
Example: ‘travel agency in Ikeja Lagos’.
Now compare that with the push marketing strategy of going on radio, newspapers, printing flyers and posters as well as sponsoring an event. In all these cases, you’ll only be reaching people who are demographically qualified but not interested in your travel agency services.
Practically, if your website is not optimized, it will not show up to attract people searching for relevant keywords within your target market.
Here are some specific actions you can take to grow the volume of search engine traffic and quality leads flowing through your website.
Do some keyword research – research and select the keywords that your prospects are actively searching for. And then use them to create contents for your website.
Start a business blog – stop guessing, it’s one of the reasons why I wrote this post. Consistent blog post publishing will help you experience month to month growth in targeted SEO traffic. Use the selected keyword to write lead generation blog posts.
Promote your blog posts – without promotion, both your blog and website will be like an empty warehouse. Use relevant social media groups, email and other medium.
Build high quality backlinks – these are links connecting your website with other sites. The more of it you have, the better your ranking for relevant search terms. When built in a high traffic site, it also brings visitors too.
All these things are meant to grow your organic search engine traffic and generate consistent quality of travel agency leads from there.
Wondering if these strategies work or not, here is an SEO case study that will enlighten you more – SEO strategy resulting in 502% growth in organic search engine traffic (https://www.gotchseo.com/seo-strategy/). Unlike traditional marketing medium in which people pay for visibility only, the results you get here are measurable, repeatable and scalable.
Social Media Marketing For Travel Agencies
Probably you found this post via social media. My word for you: thanks a lot for checking in. However, social media marketing for travel agencies isn’t much different from the way other types of businesses are leveraging it to generate more leads online consistently.
Because it offers a lot of free promotional options, it seems almost everyone is using social media, both the big brands and starters alike.
Interestingly, the way you approach it could guarantee higher level of effectiveness or flat zero ROI.
Below are the practical actions you can take to get more out of your time spent on social media marketing. Note that it goes beyond growing brand awareness and vanity metrics that most people get out of their invested time and energy.
Create relevant contents – one interesting thing here is that the contents you create can be used across different social media channels – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instrgram, etc. Create text, image and video contents. For example you can create videos around travel expert interviews, customer testimonials and travel affordability Q/A or checklist.
Discover social media groups – especially on LinkedIn and Facebook, you can find lots of interest, career and business focused groups full of working adults. Be sure to find relevant groups within your target location. Don’t join groups full of other travel agency owners.
Sweepstakes and surveys – with this option you can only be limited by your imagination. Use this option to build brand awareness, get targeted website traffic, quality travel leads and paying clients. Try to make it relevant to your target audience.
Leverage social media automation tools – to get real results from your social media marketing strategy, there is always the need for matured level of consistency. Platforms like Buffer and Hootsuite have free starter plans to help you leverage on automated social media marketing.
From the above points, you should understand that social media marketing is beyond engagement with your existing brand fans. However, I am sure you want results more than useless social engagement metrics – likes, shares, replies, comments etc.
Use social media analytics or Google analytics to measure the volume of targeted traffic you get from it.
Email Marketing Strategy (to be continued)
