You Need To Know What Your Travelers Actually Want

You provide great tours. Great! Now you need to promote your tour business to get more travelers to book your tours & activities! But research your customers’ online behavior before investing time and money in online marketing.

You’ll know what, where and when to promote when it comes to your tours and activities. And you’ll spend your time and money effectively.

These are some ways you can detect the online behavior of potential travelers. As well as some examples for tour and activity providers.

Ask your Travelers Directly

Depending on your travel business profile, you may find that your clients prefer some social networks more than others. This way you can decide to put more effort into this specific social media platform.

Ask your group of tourists how they heard about you and which social networks they use. Maybe you’ll discover some other sites, social networks or influencers. And thus find a great new promotional channel for your tours.

At the end of the tour, you can ask them to follow you on social media. Tell them you will publish photos from the tour on your social media pages to spark their interest. Once they follow you, you’ll be able to explore their profiles. And thus, get a better idea about their interests. Apply this knowledge for future customer targeting.

Create a Survey

If you have enough followers on your social media, this is a great way to collect all relevant data. Create a survey with Survey Monkey, an online app for free online questionnaires and surveys. Put your survey link to your website and other sites where your target market is. Send the survey link to your e-mailing list members. To persuade your potential respondents to complete the survey, organize a giveaway. For example, offer a free tour for the winner.

Use Google’s Free Tools

With Google Keyword planner, you can see which terms people google when they’re searching for tours. Google Dominator tells us which questions people ask Google using our keywords. Google Trends will tell us where and when people google for a tour. Google Correlate shows which terms people google at the same time. It helps in guessing our potential customer behavior and interest.

     1. Adwords Keyword Planner

Adwords Keyword Planner is a helpful tool when it comes to your potential customers. You’ll be able to determine what are the travelers googling when searching for tours. Discover new key phrases people use and incorporate them into your online content. In our example, we’ve used “African safari”:

     2. Google Trends

Investigate which terms, topics, keywords are trending with a tool called Google Trends. You can even find out in which country and in which period of time. Use it to find out in which country/towns (and when) the interest for your tours is the highest.

Check our report how to use Google Trends. You could be surprised with the details of your customers’ search when it comes to their next trip.

     3. Google Correlate

With this tool, you can find which terms in the USA are googled at the same time as your tour. A lot of terms have no direct connection or causal relationship, but you should find those that do have. For example, Google Correlate can tell that there’s a great correlation between safari and Wikitravel in the US. So we can assume that travelers are looking for information there. We can also see which states in USA search for term “safari in Africa” the most.

     4. Google Keywords Dominator

Google Keywords Dominator will tell you what questions are people googling in search for answers. You can use sign (*) in the middle of a question to see what people are searching the most.

     5. Google Analytics

Having Google Analytics on your website is a must have. It can show you what social networks are generating the most traffic for your site. You can also see interests of your audience. In our next articles, we’re going to give some examples and show how to do that.

Forums and Blogs

Search relevant travel blogs and forums and read what people are discussing. Ask for opinions directly and provide interesting information to add value to the group. Some of the most followed portals/bloggers are TheRebelChick, JohnnyJet, LandLopers, ThePlanetD, NomadicMatt, TammiLeeTips, MappingMegan, TrueNomads, MalloryonTravel, Elliottdotorg…

Use Free Twitter Tools

These are some of the tools that you can use to improve engagement on Twitter. Soon we’ll publish an article on how to use them. They have many features and some of them can tell us about our customer’s behavior.

     1. Followerwonk

Use this tool to see what people are saying about your industry on Twitter. With Followerwonk, you can investigate followers of your competitors to find out their interests and behaviors.

     2. Tweriod

Use Tweriod to find out when your audience is online on Twitter.

In our next articles, you can find how to use this tools effectively.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is an online tool that allows users to find out what content is popular by topic or on any website. It helps you find travel influencers, blogs, and posts which are popular with your audience. You can see ten most popular articles for your keyword by the number of shares and likes.

Quora

Quora is a question-and-answer website. It’s interesting that questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. Check out Quora to read discussions on questions that are relevant to your business.

Instagram

You can use Instagram to analyze your competitors’ followers. As well as see their likes and interests. Discover the time when your photos might receive the most engagements with Iconosquare.

As you can see, you don’t have to pay for an expensive market research. It has never been easier to find the information about travelers – your potential customers. As mentioned in the introduction, it is extremely important to do that before you start promoting your tours. You just need to invest a little time and make research as we’ve shown you in these examples. With all gathered information you can make a clear definition of your ideal customer. In our next article, you can read how to create your ideal customer avatar. You will also be able to download the template created specifically for tour and activity providers.

ORIOLY
on November 4, 2016

by Lidija Šomodi