Experiential Marketing Will Set Your Tours and Travels to Explode

Tours and travels are travel agency’s products, which travelers buy. But a travel experience is what travelers remember. In this blog post, we’ll talk about experiential marketing. Including the reasons why tour companies should embrace it. You’ll learn the best ways to grow your tour or activity business. Moreover, you’ll set your tours and travels to explode. If you’re interested, read on! 

To Begin With, Can Anyone Tell What Experiential Marketing Is?

It is a type of advertising that allows people to experience your products or services. How? With one or more senses. Such as sight, taste, touch, hearing or smell.

Traditional advertising (radio, print, television) points out product benefits and features. On the other hand, experiential marketing allows the customer to sense your service. It immerses them in a fun and memorable experience. That’s how a closer bond between the customer and the travel company is created.

If you interact with a company’s product, you develop a much better understanding of it. For example, you can interact with a perfume in a drugstore by smelling a tester. And you’re much more likely to buy it afterward! Delightful experiences encourage sales and customer loyalty.

Experiential Marketing in Travel Industry

Travelers can’t feel a thrill of adventurous activity by looking at an advertisement. But marketing through experience makes it possible! It offers a memorable, multisensorial interaction between traveler and tours and travels.

Want to know how?

The travel agency from Florida made the winter campaign “Escape the Cold”. There they gave a taste of what they have in their offer to the potential consumers. The travel agency offered zip-lining in Chicago, in the middle of winter. Besides that, they spread warming tents with real, living alligators inside! The adventurers could drink hot cocoa there. In a not everyday company of dangerous animals. While being warmed up, participants couldn’t think of the winter. Instead, they felt like they were somewhere else. And the goal was achieved!

Of course, most travel agencies don’t have the budget to offer 1,400 free zip line rides. But, small travel companies could:

• Take part in a local tourism fair.
• Organize smaller giveaways.
• Buy a pair of inexpensive virtual reality headset and create the breathtaking promotions. For example, VR promotion of honeymoon packages.

Experiential marketing campaigns only work after being transferred to social media. That helps travel companies to spread their messages. Don’t worry if your marketing campaigns are much smaller. Events with less than 50 people attended, can reach a million impressions online! Once you give a great experience to people, it’s no wonder they want to share it with the world.

PROs – Why a Travel Company Should Embrace Marketing Through Experience?

Here are 3 main benefits:

1. Emotional connection with travelers
   Evoke emotions to truly connect with your travelers. Give them a feeling of your tours and activities through content you share with them. Such as pictures or videos. Add your local knowledge in this bonding process. Then, think things through. What experiences can you provide, that no one else can? What feelings will travelers experience on the journey that you have set for them? Give them the opportunity to experience their next tour or travel before they even plan it.
2. Differentiation
   Involving potential future travelers in your marketing process will create an experience. That’s how you’ll stand out from your competitors! By devoting your attention to customer experience long before they packed their bags. So, we encourage you to do so!
3. Opportunity to upsell face to face
   Once you have involved people in a fun and memorable promotional event of yours, they are there. Physically present, in front of you. That opens the door for you as a travel agent. Sell products and services connected to your tour business. E.g. branded luggage tags, waterproof phone cases, or even travel insurance.

Show people what they can experience. Be unique and bold! Finally, they will walk away from the promotional event, post or an ad with a memory. A memory associated with your tour company. A memory that sells.

Reach out to us in case you need some help! If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. Or share it right here. 

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Until the next article, have a nice day!

ORIOLY
on February 20, 2017

by Lidija Šomodi