How and Why You Should Implement Tourism Marketing

In a booming industry such as hospitality, differentiating your hotel through tourism marketing becomes that much more critical. You want to give consumers a reason to choose your hotel over the multitude of others in the vicinity. How do you create a tourism marketing plan?

Here are some tourism marketing strategies to implement:

• Segment your audience
• Optimize your site for mobile
• Build an email marketing list and connect
• Develop your brand
• Use social media 
• Produce valuable content
• Improve your SEO

In today’s article, we’ll discuss in more detail what tourism marketing is and its importance for hotels. We’ll also delve into the channels and strategies listed above to improve your destination marketing campaigns.

What Is Tourism Marketing and Why Is It Important for Hotels?

Why tourism marketing is such an important part of a digital marketing strategy for hotel managers?

Tourism Marketing Explained

We’ll start with a definition. 

Tourism marketing encompasses the marketing tactics that hospitality businesses use to reach their target audience. The goals of tourism marketing are usually multiple. A hotel may wish to increase its leads, bolster its branding, and increase bookings. 

Through destination marketing, those goals are all achievable and then some! 

The Importance of Tourism Marketing for the Hospitality Industry

As we touched on earlier and detailed in our guide to hospitality marketing, standing out among the competition is crucial for increasing your hotel’s bookings. That’s the chief reason your hotel should consider tourism marketing.

Hospitality marketing uses elements such as storytelling and branding, and that’s what truly sets your hotel apart from the competition. 

It’s not only your dedication to customer service, as any hotel should be dedicated to customer service.

Through tourism marketing, you can communicate unique elements. You can tell about your fabled location, your staff, and your story to a receptive target audience.

What Are the Main Channels and Strategies of Tourism Marketing?

Next, per the information in the intro, let’s delve deeper into tourism marketing channels and strategies that can propel your hotel to the next level. 

Audience Segmentation

You must be cognizant of the makeup of your audience to benefit from tourism marketing. Segmenting your customers is the way to do it.

You should split your audience into groups based on demographics (age, gender, marital status, income), geographics (location), and psychographics, which are motivating behaviors that often fuel purchasing decisions. 

Your hotel might wish to create customer avatars or profiles to personalize your bigger, more dominant audience segments. 

As a matter of fact, avatars help you better understand the pain points and motivations of your varied audience groups.

Having segmented your audience, you can now ensure that your tourism marketing messages reach only those who are interested and could be receptive to those messages.

Website Optimization

According to marketing resource HubSpot, across only the first quarter of 2021, global website traffic from mobile devices hit a whopping 54.8 percent. 

This stat tells you that most of your customers and prospective customers are going to browse your hotel’s website from their phones or tablets.

It’s no wonder that a mobile-optimized website is one of our top hospitality marketing trends for 2023. 

If your hotel’s website isn’t already designed for adaptivity between desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets, that’s your first order of business. 

That might entail you reworking the design of your site so it’s more responsive and looks good on smaller and larger screens alike.

When it comes to website design, simpler is often better, as exemplified in our collection of luxury travel websites. 

As you browse through, you’ll notice that although some design elements are certainly disparate, many consistencies appear.

Travel and hotel websites should embrace inviting images of the nearby area that invoke a sense of calm, luxury, and relaxation. Use bold fonts, large typefaces, and brief headlines. 

Ensure your navigation is streamlined and easy to use as well.  

Email List Building

Within the umbrella of tourism marketing is email marketing.

Your hotel needs a robust email list. You can keep the line of communication open even once your customers have left the hotel (and your tourist destination) and are back to their day-to-day lives.

Sometimes, all it takes is a well-timed email full of photos of lush landscapes or tropical beaches to inspire someone to book a getaway. 

Building an email list will rely on some of the other tourism marketing strategies we’ll discuss, such as branding and content marketing. 

Your website needs both opt-in pop-ups and exit intent pop-ups timed to grab a site visitor’s attention. 

Once you have your email list, here are some pointers for keeping your audience engaged.

• Use graphics: According to email template resource Unlayer, you could see a 1.12 percent higher click-through rate just by adding graphics to your emails. 
• Personalize your subject lines: Email automation makes it easy to schedule your messages, but you have to add the personalization yourself. Another stat from Unlayer notes that email personalization can increase email opens by up to 26 percent.
• Nurture with newsletters: Monthly or bimonthly, you should send newsletters to your email subscribers. You can nurture relationships by keeping leads and customers in the loop about what’s going on at your hotel. 
• Don’t forget their birthdays: This might sound silly, but it’s anything but. A 2020 report from Campaign Monitor found that birthday emails boost your transaction rate by 481 percent more compared to sending a promotional email. The revenue per email is also 342 percent greater! 

Branding

Going back to our point from before, branding is a must-have component of your tourism marketing strategy.

As we detailed in our post about hospitality branding, branding encompasses your customer experience, values, ideals, story, color scheme, logo, and tone. 

Finessing your hotel’s branding can establish trust among your current customers and incentivize curious leads to look into your hotel. 

You and your key stakeholders will have to sit down and thoughtfully consider every element of your brand. 

Two different colors and typefaces can have very different emotions associated with them, so think carefully about what you’re trying to convey! 

Content Production

One pillar of your destination marketing strategy is content marketing.

Your hotel should determine which goals you want your content marketing to solve, be that lead generation, awareness, or brand building. 

Then you need to create a content strategy that will document what kind of content you’ll produce and how often.

Don’t just dip your toes into video marketing; jump in headfirst. This Statista chart shows that digital video content is being viewed by Americans at an increasingly higher rate. 

The content you produce can be funny or educational, but above all else, it must be valuable. Perhaps you do a video series on tourist destinations around your hotel or write a blog post about the history of the area. 

SEO

Website optimization is technically SEO, but that’s not all your hotel must focus on as part of your tourism marketing plan. 

The following tips can elevate your website’s standing in search engine rankings.

• A/B test: Before new elements of your website go live, split-test them to determine which version is likelier to perform well among your audience.
• Focus on high-quality content: That’s right, content marketing is an SEO strategy as well. As you write content, try to win the featured Google snippet for that topic or keyword.
• Use long-tail keywords: Long-tail keywords are the current trend in the Google algorithm. The specificity of these keywords offsets their lower search rate, as searchers who want the information contained in the keyword will get exactly what they were looking for.
• Repurpose old content: As your hotel’s blog grows, it pays to go back at least every year and reassess old content. Update old posts, add more sections to sort content, or even delete some posts. 

How Effective Is Social Media for Travel Marketing?

The social media jungle grows larger and denser all the time. 

Your hotel is expected to have a social media presence. That’s why the use of social media must be a part of your tourism marketing strategy.

In our post on hospitality social media, we wrote about the many benefits that social media can deliver for hospitality industry professionals. Here’s a recap.

Betters Your SEO 

Social media is a great vehicle for SEO. In fact, by maintaining a healthy social media presence, you can increase your organic traffic. You can also expand the lifespan of the content you post when you share it on social media. 

Strengthens Relationships

Social media is a chance for your customers to directly interact with you. 

Sure, some of your audience will leave likes on your posts, but many more will comment. Some will even direct message you. 

Whether you use your social media accounts to respond to positive customer comments or to smooth over poor experiences that customers had, you’re building rock-solid foundations for professional relationships. 

Builds Trust Through Social Proof

Social media is also a great way to generate social proof. Your customers can review your hotel on platforms like Facebook. Others who find your public Facebook page can then read the reviews and decide whether they want to book with you.

Conclusion 

Tourism marketing focuses on areas such as branding, email list building, SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing. To increase bookings, solidify your brand, and set you apart from the competition.

Mediaboom is a digital marketing agency that serves professionals in the hospitality industry. Whatever your marketing goals, our expertise and long-standing experience can get your hotel the results you want.