The world is full of bad news at the moment, so let me try and start your week on a more positive note.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve delivered £1.16m of sales for our tourism clients and I’d like to share with you the 5 key steps in achieving this so you can replicate this success.
Firstly, let me start by saying the new challenges we are now facing, need a new approach to our marketing strategies. All marketing activities should have the following 3 properties, and please feel free to pick the terminology you like the sound of most.
- Agile / nimble / adaptable
- Transparent / measurable
- Proactive / fast acting / immediate
I will expand on these points in a future article, but for now, if we can consider these three areas, you will quickly come to realise that digital marketing ticks all these boxes, and it is the digital marketing strategies and actives we deliver for our clients that have delivered £1,159,193 of tickets sales as of 17:00, Thursday 30th July.
Here are the 5 key steps we implemented for tourism businesses that achieved this.
1. Lockdown content
During lockdown, many organisations started to produce great content. We advised clients to think strategically on this, to craft content plans and strategies around key themes that resonated with the new audiences they wanted to attract, with a single-minded objective of utilising the content to build website traffic for future retargeting.
We also suggested email gating some content to capture email addresses of newly acquired audiences, for future email marketing.
2. Social Advertising
Social advertising has always been a favourite media of ours, but its effectiveness seems to be growing month on month. It has been relatively cheaper to purchase recently and its quite clear that the rich media content that is the basis of great social media advertising, is the kind of content consumers want to engage with nowadays.
We advised our clients on a big shift towards hyper-targeted social advertising content, with rich media content that really gets across the great experiences people can have when visiting our clients. This advertising built on the content themes our clients built out during lockdown, whilst also recognising the need to reassure customers and demonstrate a socially distanced, safe and exciting/inspiring day out.
3. PPC advertising
Expertly delivered PPC advertising really is second to none for driving tickets sales. It’s the only channel with true intent behind it, and it’s the leading media format for transparency and measurement. As soon as attractions opened again, we built our brand new PPC campaigns and executed our tried and tested processes to implement, review and optimise.
4. Retargeting
Remember those people that were visiting our clients’ websites throughout lockdown? Retargeting these audiences through social media and rich content has been delivering a fantastic return on investment and high conversion rates.
5. Email marketing
Finally, email marketing is still a great way of communicating with your future visitors. Many of our client’s email databases have ballooned during lockdown, thanks to creative campaigns implemented to capture email addresses, and these email addresses are now being used to full effect to communicate with new and existing customers and drive ticket sales. A secondary benefit is that these email addresses are also being used brilliantly to create new audiences within digital advertising channels to reinforce and further compel visits.
So, there we have it. The recipe for delivering £1.13m of tickets sales over the last 4 weeks.
By combining the 3 core properties of your new marketing approach (agile, transparent, immediate) with a strategy informed by industry insight and years of understanding consumer behaviour will ensure your attractions can grow ticket sales now.
If you feel it’s too late for this kind of strategy for your organisation, it’s not, and I’d be more than happy to provide some ideas for you so please message me directly if you wish to chat.
I always look for the silver lining, and one of the great thing about our new world is that its constantly changing, and there are always new challenges around the corner. Each of which requires a great strategy and excellent execution to ensure success.
So don’t worry if you think it’s too late for your summer holidays strategy, because Autumn / Winter 2020 is potentially one of the most important seasons in our industry of all time (here are some thoughts on this) and you have a great opportunity to begin crafting this strategy now, to make sure you do the right marketing, the right way to ensure commercial success for your tourism business during these challenging times. Good luck.
