Social Media Marketing Strategy for Tourism: Save Time With 6 Tips

Developing and implementing a social media marketing strategy for tourism can be challenging and time-consuming. Especially if you take care of numerous aspects of your tour business alone.

Creating content is important, but it can also mess with your regular schedule. For that reason we bring you useful tips that will save you a lot of time when creating and publishing content on your social media accounts.

1. A great social media marketing strategy for tourism starts with a plan

When you go on a vacation you don’t simply hop on a plane and fly to a random destination. First, you plan your trip, at least I hope you do so. Why it should be different when creating a strategy?

It’s like everything else in the world of business—you must make a plan before executing any action.

Creating a social media marketing plan will save you a lot of headache and time when managing your profiles. Besides, it’s the first step for a winning social media marketing strategy for tourism.

Start your marketing plan by figuring out your goals. There’s no point using social media regularly if you don’t set up clear objectives first.

Of course, you want to use it to sell more tours and activities to people around the world, but how? Are you simply looking for brand awareness? Or is it traffic you’re after? Or are you going to run special offers continuously?

Whatever your goals are, make sure they’re clear from the beginning. Learn how to create a social media marketing plan and watch results coming over time.

2. Optimize your time, be organized

Getting organized and figuring out a publishing schedule that works for your tour business is key to any social media marketing strategy for tourism.

The best way to do that is to create a content calendar and/or a blog editorial. That will help you keep track of the content you’ve already published and know in advance which content goes next and when.

Also, previously posted content that generated many comments, shares, likes, or retweets can be reposted. Alternatively, you can republish content you posted on a particular network on other networks, i.e. from Instagram to Facebook, or from Facebook to LinkedIn.

This practice is a great time saver for busy entrepreneurs.

3. Back up your flow with a content stockpile

As important as producing the content is setting up a time during the week for brainstorming content ideas.

During this time, you and your team should develop ideas for blog posts, status updates, tweets, posts on Facebook, and other social media.

Ideas on the table, hands-on! Create your content and repurpose it. An article can become a video, an infographic, a city guide, or a podcast.

The goal is to build a stock of publishing material that will serve your social media for the next weeks.

This will eliminate any stress of creating content at the last minute. After all, you will always have something to publish, even during a busy week.

When the time comes, just select something from the pile and post.

• Content Marketing Tips for Tour Operators

4. Automate as much as you can

Social media marketing can be overwhelming if you do everything manually.

The best way to streamline your efforts is by automating tasks related to content scheduling. Don’t worry, it’s easier than it sounds, especially if you have a content stockpile ready to be used.

There are several tools on the market for scheduling social media posts. Hootsuite is one of the most popular, with it you can manage several social media accounts at the same time.

This doesn’t mean you can put all of your social media posts on auto-pilot, you still need to respond to your audience when needed and take the time to actually interact with potential clients.

Social media management tools can save you hours every day. Many of your competitors are likely using them as part of their social media marketing strategy for tourism.

• 12 Best Tools for Tour Operators to Boost Their Social Media Marketing

5. Interact with your audience at the right time

The success of the strategy you’re building for your social media depends on your followers’ engagement with your brand. To entice your audience’s interest you should be present in discussions where your target customer is paying attention to.

The problem is that engaging with potential clients can take a lot of time, even more than creating content. What’s more, not all interactions will have the expected result.

Endless scrolling through your Twitter or Facebook feeds to monitor threads which you can join with a piece of sage advice, a link, or a recommendation—often a waste of time.

But there’s a smarter way to engage with your audience.

You can do that by setting up alerts to get notified when your tour company’s name or a topic of interest gets mentioned.

You must be wondering how you can do that. One simple way is to use Google Alerts. With this free tool you’ll be able to monitor the Web, including all social media channels, for finding interesting discussions to take part in.

6. Focus on few platforms

There are many different social networks out there, but not all of them are necessarily a fit for your tour business.

Choose the right channel and you will have your message in front of the right people. No need to spend time on multiple social platforms.

To avoid networks that simply don’t bring you back enough, it’s important to step back for a minute and look at your own numbers.

You can use built-in analytics provided by social networks. That’s the easiest way. If you’re skilled with Google Analytics, you can cross-check it too and use a combination of both for more accurate data.

Whichever you use, make sure you look at the data from all angles to determine the lifetime value of customers for every channel.

This simple approach will help you focus on the one or two social channels that bring you the most profit.

Conclusion

If you follow all the tips in this article, you’ll definitely be able to organize your time and energy in implementing an effective social media marketing strategy for tourism.

If you want to expand your knowledge on digital marketing for tours and activities, don’t miss our eBook “Comprehensive Guide to Online Marketing in Tourism“. You can get a free copy of it by clicking the link below and filling out the form.

ORIOLY
on June 30, 2021

by Felipe Fonseca