How Should the Travel Agency Leverage Digital Marketing to Get Leads?

How do I plan a strategy to get the leads for a travel agency through digital marketing? Originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Listed below are the methods to promote travel business and get leads for travel agency through digital marketing.

1. Website Creation: 

We all are very much aware of websites now. Nowadays, we can see even a small business operator can build his business website easily with the help of digital marketing. This is the most important parameter to get your business identified. As travel field is very demanding and interesting field, tour operators can take advantage of it. With digital marketing tour operators can create very unique website with high quality images of your travel destinations, showing information about upcoming trips with dates and prices, multiple available packages information, creating a video of your own travel story and putting it on a website, providing travelers best experience with you and so on. So website is a one stop place with overall availability of entire information that a traveler or customer may need from a travel company and of course the entire credit goes to digital marketing.

2. Social Media Presence: 

Now only creating your travel business website is not enough to promote your business. As long as your audience is not aware of its existence, it’s not going to work. So social media does that part for you. It is a great platform to interact with thousands of audiences. Your presence on social media is as important as your actual presence. Travel companies can create their social accounts on multiple social media’s like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest etc by providing complete information about their business. As now everyone is on social media, there are huge chances of your business getting familiar with audience. Instagram is a great platform to post your past travel pictures with customers. As visuals are left in our mind forever than words.

3. Posting on Social Media: 

Once you are done with creating business account on social media, keeping them alive is the next job. As we see that many business accounts are just present on social media but they are inactive…means they are not making the most of digital marketing. Actively posting about your travel business will keep them alive. Now posting includes regular posting about what your business is all about, new offers going on, upcoming trips, your travel business story and many more to keep your audience engaged with you.

4. Increasing Connections/Friends on Social Media: 

After you have started posting about your travel business, if nobody is there to view them then all your efforts will go in vain. Many social platforms allow you to increase your fan following by sending them request to like your company page and after they accepts your request, they can see all of your post. Isn’t that great? By keeping these practices going on, tour operators can end up converting their start up travel business into a unique brand only by increasing their active presence on social media.

5. Running Ads: 

As we already discussed that digital marketing is very vast topic to discuss. It has solutions available to all your travel business marketing related problems. It does not stops on creating website and social media accounts but it has to give some more. We all have heard of advertisements. We see them on daily basis. Digital marketing provides a very fast and effective mean of business promotion that is advertisements. As compared to social media, advertisements or campaign give fast results. If posting on social media is good for branding or creating awareness about your brand, then advertisements are good for converting your audience into leads. Digital marketing provides you multiple platforms like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter to run campaigns. Platform can be selected on the basis of campaign objective like Brand Awareness, Website Traffic, and Lead Generation etc. These campaigns allow targeting more specific traffic to your website.

6. Email Marketing:

Email Marketing is also one of the effective ways of promoting your travel business. Travel companies can send emails to their target audience in specific format. This is a very powerful way to attract customers by creating attractive subject lines and email body. In market, multiple options are available to select email templates that fit your objective. Tour operators can promote special offers, new announcements and many more through email marketing. You can also ask your customers to sign up for email newsletters to get attracting offers.

7. What’s App Promotion: 

What’s app promotion serves the same purpose as email marketing. Tour operators can promote their business through what’s app by sending bulk messages to the customers. What’s app message format can be created that describes complete information about your business and the services you provide as a tour operator. Different software’s and tools like WhatsApp Bulk Sender, Bulk WhatsApp Marketing, WhatsApp Dominator, Blaster Bulk Sender are available in the market for promotion. The more attractive and appealing your message body is, more likely you will get response from your customers.

8. SEO: 

This is the biggest term that is dominating the market with its unique importance. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. It is the practice of making your travel website rank first in Google SERP with its on page and off Page categories. Once you have created your travel business website, Social media will spread its awareness but what about the people who are looking for the same service in your niche? At that time your website should pop up first in Google Search engine result page (SERP) or otherwise you are losing your valuable customers. So SEO takes that responsibility but also asks you to follow some guidelines to optimize your website to rank first in Google SERP because without pain, there is no gain. As already mentioned, on page seo asks you to optimize your webpage to rank first while off page seo involves getting a link back to your site from highly reputed sites to get more traffic and authority to your website.

9. Advantages: 

Apart from the above advantages that digital marketing provides, it also provides Flexibility and easy progress tracking facility. When you are promoting your business digitally, you always have the facility to edit the content you have written in your ads, social media postings, website content and so on, thus in turn provides you flexibility. Progress of your campaigns, social media postings and lead generation can be easily tracked through this great source. It is the best cost effective platform to be used for business promotion.

Digital Marketing brings a great opportunity for all the tour operators, travel companies, travel agencies to promote their business easily and effectively with its multiple possible options. So it’s time to act smart now. Get benefited with its unique features that will create miracles for your business. Let’s go digital!!

Contributed by Mugdha Dalal, Digital Marketing Executive at iTours