What to do when the base melts.
Travel agencies often operate on their own customer base, new customers come only on recommendation. At some point, the database slowly begins to melt: someone changed their place of residence, someone left for another company, someone stopped applying for other reasons. “Sarafanka” does not provide a constant flow of customers: it is thick, then empty and you have to sit for days without customers. At this point, as a rule, there comes an understanding that it is necessary to use other ways to attract tourists, including the Internet. But which ones?
A lot of travel companies, getting to this point, first of all go to social networks. It looks logical — if not all, then the vast majority are currently sitting on social networks, and literally any company has accounts — from tire repair to a beauty salon. But is it so easy to promote on social networks? With travel marketer Elena Belousova, the author of the Telegram channel on promotion for travel companies, we will analyze where a travel agency can attract new customers, except for social networks.
What’s wrong with social media?
On social networks, the simplicity of getting started is captivating. The “entrance” to the world of social networks is free, it’s enough to spend 5-10 minutes registering a profile and a couple more hours for initial registration. By adding an avatar, description, contacts, several posts and a pin, you have a ready—made link that you can send, for example, to potential customers.
However, then the most interesting thing begins. A page that is so easy to create and design needs to be maintained. And systematically, regularly, without breaks and vacations. Whatever the workload is for the main job, but 3-5 posts per week need to be posted. And in some social networks, you also need to mount stories, shoot reels, and preferably every day.
In addition, social networks need to be promoted: spend money on targeted advertising, on bloggers and crops (placing ads in other people’s accounts, for example on VKontakte). If not for a fee, then at least engage in mutual promotion, comment on other people’s posts, create lead magnets and chatbots, answer questions and personal messages.
As a result, after 2-3 months and a lot of resources spent, single requests will begin to arrive, which after a few more months of intensive work will turn into a thin trickle of customers.
It’s long, expensive, and time-consuming. In the long term, this method will certainly bring new customers, but there are other tools.
Mailing lists in messengers
If it is expensive and laborious to collect subscribers on social networks, and you have to wait a long time for the results of promotion, then this process can be simplified and accelerated in messengers.
When I talk about messengers, I primarily mean the organization of mailings through personal messages in VKontakte communities and through a Telegram bot. We are not talking about spam, when the mailing is carried out by users who did not give permission for this, but the official mailing list on the database, which is collected in “white” ways.
You can attract subscribers to the newsletter, first of all, with the help of so-called lead magnets. These are useful files or videos that a person can receive by subscribing to the newsletter. For example, a checklist “What to take with you on a winter trip to Lake Baikal”, a guide to “non-tourist restaurants in Istanbul where locals prefer to dine” or a webinar on “ways to fly economically to the Maldives”.
It is important that the lead magnet is really useful, informative and interesting for the user, has an attractive name that makes you want to download it.
If you have no idea what can be used as a lead magnet, I suggest downloading 30+ examples from the tourism theme. Follow the link and at the same time see how those chatbots work.
The mechanics of obtaining a lead magnet through the VKontakte or Telegram chatbot are very simple – the user just needs to click on the link and click the “Start” button. This starts a chain of messages that you can register in advance through specialized services.
The most popular designers for creating and managing newsletters messengers include Bothelp, Bothunter, Textback, etc. By the way, many services work not only with VK and Telegram, but also allow you to connect mailing lists in Odnoklassniki, Whatsapp, Viber and others, however, most of the messengers have limitations. It’s easier to start with VK and Telegram.
The mechanics of collecting a database are similar to email marketing, when a person, for example, leaves his e-mail in a form on the site, then clicks the consent button in the letter to receive mailings from you. In messengers, everything is much simpler — as soon as the subscriber clicks on the “Start” button, he gives you permission to send messages to him.
As in an email newsletter, you can think through a series of emails in advance. For example, 3-5 messages after subscription that introduce a new user to your company, services, or country, region, or city. However, in messengers, unlike emails, you can also add interactivity — for example, set up buttons under messages, menu buttons, by clicking on which a person will receive the content that they are interested in.
You can send mailings using the collected subscriber base. For example, you have collected subscribers using the lead magnet “5 best hotels in Egypt for winter holidays”, you can send them a selection of tours to Egypt for the coming months once a week. However, you should not abuse your trust and send messages too often. Since such mailings come directly to the personal account, they can annoy users and lead to unsubscription or blocking.
An unobvious advantage of working with newsletters is that your competitors will never know how many subscribers you have in the database and will not be able to set up ads for them.
Mapping services
If a travel agency has its own office, then the first thing I recommend is to register on the maps and post your data there. Yandex.Maps and 2GIS — services where Russian users most often search for services near their home or place of work.
It is important not only to register a profile on maps, but also to design it correctly: add photos, what the office looks like, the entrance group, how to get to it, specify opening hours and weekends, add contact details, links to the website and social networks (if any), place several goods and services, for example, tours to countries which you suggest.
In the interface on Yandex.You will see hints on what else needs to be filled in so that your profile is as complete as possible. Your task is to ensure that the profile has a “blue check mark”. It means that your card will be as effective as possible on the cards.
After the profile is filled out, it is important to take care of the reviews. Ask your regular customers to leave a rating and write a few words about you on the cards. After posting at least three reviews, the rating will begin to form.
It is important to organize the work so that each client receives feedback. And if he was satisfied with the services of the travel agency, ask for a review. This is a simple and completely free way to get to the top of the maps. Rarely does a company have more than 100 reviews. If you can achieve more, it will definitely set you apart from other colleagues.
By the way, do not forget to respond to reviews. Connect notifications of new reviews to the work email that you read regularly, so you won’t miss the alerts. It is especially important to respond to negative reviews, even if you disagree with them or there is a suspicion that they were written by malicious competitors. Unanswered reviews lower your rating.
When you start receiving requests and calls from Yandex.Maps and realize that the profile is working, pay attention to the advertising subscription. It helps to stand out on the maps and be shown above other companies. In addition, you can add a promotion, it can attract additional attention.
But I must warn you that you should not activate a subscription if your company has a rating below 4 points and less than 10 reviews. You will spend the money, but you will not get a profit. It is better to engage in free methods of promotion on maps. For example, in the “Promotional Materials” section, download business cards, pyramids for placement in the office, print a QR code.
Do not forget to periodically visit your profile on maps, check the relevance of information, change your work schedule before the holidays, add new photos and even write posts. Yes, you can post messages on maps, for example, with promotions. Yandex will see that your company is constantly monitoring the posted information, updating it, and will show it higher in the search.
Promotion works in a similar way on 2GIS, on Google maps, and in any other cartographic service. This is not only a source of free referrals, but also a place where potential customers can see reviews about you and decide whether to contact you.
Landing pages and advertising in Yandex.Yandex. Direct”
It will take time to promote profiles on maps. If you need requests “yesterday”, one of the most effective ways to start receiving applications as soon as possible is to create landing pages and set up contextual advertising on them. Let’s look at the terms.
Landing page— this is the landing page of the site, specially tailored for advertising. Its difference from “regular” pages is that all the content leads to the client leaving their contacts for the selection of a tour or getting advice. I did not go to the site to search for a tour on my own using specialized widgets, I did not just read the content, but sent a request.
It is the quality of the landing page, its conversion rate, that is, the percentage of users who perform targeted actions on it — fill out a form, call or write to a messenger, and the effectiveness of advertising will depend. It is very important to invest resources in the development of landing pages and achieve a conversion rate of at least 2.5–3%. Otherwise, advertising will pay off with difficulty.
It is most effective to direct contextual advertising to the landing page — this is an advertisement in search engines that is shown by certain keywords or by user behavior. For example, a person could search the search engine for “tours to the Maldives” or visit pages related to holidays in the Maldives. It is based on the search context that such ads are displayed. Its effectiveness is often higher than targeted (advertising on social networks), where the user does not specifically search for tours, but sees ads while scrolling the news feed.
Currently in The largest search engine available in Russia for contextual advertising is Yandex. Setting up advertising in it is carried out using the Yandex service.Direct.” For non-professional marketers, you can use the “Campaign Wizard” tool, it allows you to launch ads even for those who have never done this before. It is enough to write 5 headlines, come up with 3 text options, upload 5 photos, optionally add 2 videos and up to 8 sitelinks. You don’t even have to select keywords or user interests, the system will find an audience for your ads on its own.
If you have tested such advertising and received a positive result, you can scale this customer acquisition channel, create advertising campaigns separately on search, separately in the so-called Yandex networks (abbreviated as YAN). This will allow you to more precisely target advertising to those potential tourists whom you want to attract. It is better to add the setting of such advertising to professionals, there are many subtleties here.
One of the non—obvious advantages is that once you create a high-quality landing page and assemble an advertising campaign for it, you can receive a stream of customers without much effort. The main thing is to replenish the budget on time and monitor the indicators, and this can be delegated.
Articles for the blog
On social networks, content lives for a couple of weeks, and sometimes even less. The posts that you wrote on the VKontakte page last month are unlikely to be read by anyone in this one. A blog is good because the content in it lives forever, especially if it is content by country, region, city, or place of interest — it can only be updated periodically, but globally it remains evergreen.
You can start a blog on your website or on an alternative site, for example, in Zen. You can also use two options together, duplicating content to multiple sites or alternating placement channels. Both methods will be effective if you know a little about SEO, know how to select headings, subheadings and prescribe texts that search engines “love”.
Topics for articles can be drawn from the Yandex Wordstat service. It shows how many times users have searched for a particular phrase in the search engine. You can substitute question words or particles to your subject to find suitable queries. For example, “!li” + “Anapa” + “September”. Pay attention to the question mark of the particle “li”, it fixes the word form so that Yandex does not miss it. So you can get 5-7 ideas for articles that you can write on the topic of travel in Anapa in September.
A good blog article should be quite succinct, informative and structured. It is important to provide several subtopics, each of which may also contain a keyword found in the above-mentioned way. Subsections can be accompanied by pictures, to which alt and description can be added, this also helps in promoting the article on SEO.
Don’t be afraid to learn the basics of SEO. There are many terms in this topic that are incomprehensible to a beginner, but it will be useful to master the basics for anyone who is engaged in promoting themselves or their project on the Internet.
Before publishing an article, you need to think about what you want from the user who will finish reading it. This may be a transition to the Telegram channel, where more detailed information on the topic is available, to the lead magnet, which can be obtained for free via a link in VK, or to your website, where you can get acquainted with your services in more detail.
The better you think through the client’s path, which he should go from reading the article “Is it cold in Anapa in September” to booking a tour, the higher the chances of effectively using the blog to promote and attract new customers.
One of the non—obvious advantages is that after reading meaningful blog articles, users are much more warmed up and ready to buy than from other marketing channels.
Life hack: if you don’t have time to write long articles, divide it into several parts, write posts of 1-2 thousand characters, then this content can be combined and published as a full-fledged blog article.
Travel agency promotion strategy for 2024
If you are interested in current ways to promote a travel company in 2024 and you want to understand this topic in more detail, I suggest you familiarize yourself with the recording of the free broadcast: “How to promote a travel company in 2024? 5 main strategies”.
You can find more information about promotion for travel companies on the Internet in the Telegram channel of travel marketer Elena Belousova.
Author: Elena Belousova
Photo: pixabay
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