This post concludes our series of 3 blog posts to give you the tools and knowledge to market your tourism business online. The initial post focused on understanding how to work with keywords and search engines to attract visitors to your website, the second looked at techniques to entice your visitors to turn into buyers. Today you will learn how to relate to your past guests using social media.
Step 3: Relate to your past guests using social media
Social media is a real asset to tourism businesses as it gives past customers the opportunity to brag about their holiday and tell the world about the wonderful experience they had. TripAdvisor in particular is often compared to the online version of a guest book. The key difference being that those wonderful comments that guests left are now viewable by potential guests and read by search engines instead of remaining locked in the tour bus!
Situation
Your guests are here, about to have a wonderful experience which you need to capture to entice potential future clients to book with you instead of your competitors.
Case study
One of the most cost-effective ways to ensure you capitalise on past guests experiences is to share them via social media. Let’s imagine you are a tour business in the Northern Territory. There are 2 different phases during which you need to conduct different activities to ensure you maximise all those wonderful guest experiences:
Phase 1: During the tour
Ensure the tour guide has a camera/video camera/iPhone handy to capture those exciting moments and ask guests a few questions on camera about their tour, what they preferred, how they rated the experience or to share a few quirky stories.
- Once back in the office, upload these videos to your YouTube channel as well as your Facebook business page and feed them into your website.
Use this camera to take pictures as well (with the guests’ permission).
- Once back in the office, upload these photos to your Flickr page as well as onto your website.
Phase 2: Post tour
Approximately 10 days after the guests have left email them and ask them to leave you a review on TripAdvisor, your Facebook Page or a website of their choice. Make sure that you include the direct links to your TripAdvisor review page and Facebook Page.
- To do so all you need is create an email template on a system like MailChimp.com and regularly upload your list of past guests. If you upload your list of past guest the day after their visit you can for instance setup what is called an Auto Responder that sends then the pre-configured message on “day uploaded + 10”. Once the system is properly configured, all it will require is for you or your staff to add the guest’s contact details one day post visit and the technology will take care of the rest!
