Why Target Marketing Is Ideal For Travel Agencies and Tour Operators

Target marketing is a strategy businesses use to reach specific groups of consumers with similar characteristics. For example, travel agencies have a lot of offerings, including travel, accommodation, and packages for all walks of life! Travel agencies have been around for centuries. They were initially used to help travelers find accommodation on foot or horseback. Today, they provide services ranging from arranging flights and hotels to organizing tours and car hire.

Today, the internet has made it easier for consumers to research and compare prices and services before purchasing. This has led to a shift in how travel agents operate. Instead of focusing their marketing directly on selling trips, they now have a more holistic approach, first concentrating on providing information about destinations and activities so travelers can make informed decisions.

With target marketing, travel agencies can be more selective with their content to identify who from their vast audience will be interested.

Sales and ROI

When a travel agency uses expansive, far-reaching marketing tactics for offerings that interest a niche audience, it’s more expensive, and there’s a risk the intended audience doesn’t engage with the content. There might be some sales, but the marketing and advertising investment ROI wouldn’t be as high as it could be when the marketing is targeted to the right audiences.

Targeted marketing is ideal for every business in all industries. It does take more know-how and time to identify ideal audiences for specific marketing campaigns. However, the results are worth it. Businesses in high-volume sectors like hospitality and travel need their marketing dollar to go further, which can help with a more targeted approach.

How To Use Target Marketing

You must first identify the ideal audience for a specific offering to use in target marketing. To create a niche audience, you will need to do research and analysis.

Identify the audience

Identifying the audience is where target marketing begins, which requires researching demographics, which is the study of populations, including information such as age, sex, and income. Plus, your marketer needs to delve deeper into customer discovery by analyzing their psychographics which includes:

• interests
• values
• needs
• goals
• motivations
• lifestyle choices

Therefore instead of delivering marketing and advertising campaigns that are a catch-all, travel agencies want to attract a small number of customers who are best suited for a product or service based on detailed research and market analysis. Consider a 10-day cruise around the Mediterranean with bar service and live music on top of yoga and art workshops during the day would be ideal for people without children. On the other hand, a 3-day cruise with free childcare would be a hit amongst working families.

Example

Let’s look at tour operators; they have excursions to suit everyone’s needs but not all their tours are ideal for everyone. Some tours have been created for really active and fit people. At the same time, other trips are best suited for people who prefer a more sedimentary lifestyle, have physical disabilities, or maybe travel with young children.

To be more specific in our example industry, for a tour operator in Iceland, what we know about this country is – it offers a lot of outdoor adventure. Visitors don’t just arrive in Iceland without knowing how they will spend their time before arrival. The internet can serve up all a visitor needs on Iceland including a guide to Iceland and the most popular things to do, see and experience. A visitor can find information on self-driving tours of the Northern Lights or a guided tour of the Snaefellsnes peninsula.

Create Your Marketing Campaigns

Now you know who will receive your marketing campaigns, it’s time to create focused content. Use content that resonates with your niche audiences. For example, younger audiences love video so use video and images for engagement. Older audiences love words, so use targeted word content in your marketing messages.

Content and Social Media

You may need to back up a step and create a pre-target marketing campaign to pull customers to your site and online assets like your email marketing list and social media pages. This is where you use your unique, informative content.

A tour company to get found in a keyword search for a specific tour relies on site rank and SEO. Targeted content is essential for improving site and page rank to pull visitors to a tour operator’s site and view their tour packages and excursions. All tour operators need a business blog where they can regularly provide high-quality, relevant content on their tours for their targeted audience.

Plus, use Google Analytics to capture data, including demographics on visitors to specific pages. Use all the information you can get your hands on to make your target marketing campaigns more successful.

Sticking with the tour operators’ example, they can also get the word to their customers through social media marketing, and this is where their blog is valuable. Sharing blog posts to social media platforms, including short clip videos will win over audiences and improve the tour operator’s site ranking.

Final Words

Today the scattergun approach to marketing is gone. It goes without saying that when it comes to business, being able to relate to and attract customers will bring about sales and success. This is especially true in the digital age, before the rise of social media and Web 2.0, where every answer was just a mouse tap away.

Maybe you’re interested in other types of marketing – if so, keep scrolling to our you may like section.