The touristic industry is quite competitive, which is why bringing tourism leads your way can be the most difficult task here. However, if there wasn’t space for more businesses in it, people wouldn’t mind opening one. The key is to focus on the right audience and ensure you are covering the basics. Like creating your site and making sure it is properly optimized for visitors to convert into high-quality leads.
Next, work around the lead generation strategies that are both online and offline. For the first ones, your website will be the “touching” point with tourists. But for the offline ones, you may have to recur to lead them to your direct business.
The idea is to improve your lead capture or lead scoring over time, and for it, you need to implement more than one or two lead generation strategies.
Here, we will be discussing the most important ones and ensure you’re going in the right way to marketing qualified leads.
Identify Your Target Visitors
You can create the most effective marketing strategies by knowing who your target audience is. It is important to consider all reasons people might want to visit your region.
Get a piece of paper and write down the categories you want to target.
Consider whether the country you are promoting appeals to younger generations, retirees, families, business travelers, and students or couples seeking honeymoon destinations.
You might also appeal to adventure seekers and those looking for peaceful beaches. Once you have identified your target audiences, you can create a marketing strategy that is most relevant to each one.
Finally, you should consider tapping into nearby markets and encouraging locals to visit your area. You can do this by highlighting the rail network connecting your region to its neighboring countries or the similarities in culture and language.
You want to strike a balance between where your target visitors are from and what country they come from so that you can be less dependent on domestic tourists.
Use Data to Get to Know Your Visitors.
Part of your role to work with the lead generation process and make it a success is to collect and use all relevant data about your target audience.
If you have a website, you can use Google Analytics and similar online tools to better understand your visitors by gathering data about their demographics, backgrounds, interests, motivations.
You can also gather information online about your visitors. You can find out the average age of your visitors, what destinations they like, their preferred accommodation, and other details.
You can also conduct offline research. After you have collected the data, you can use it to determine the best way to reach your visitors.
Branding Is the Key
Most businesses use branding to distinguish their products and services from other merchants. Your logo, overall image, and color scheme can all be used to brand your business.
This is where you highlight the unique characteristics of your target country to make it easily identifiable and stand out from other countries.
You can quickly apply the techniques to a destination by creating the right tools that meet the needs of your target audience. You can, for example, post an image of a country along with a tagline that describes the location and reasons why it is a great place to visit.
You can make it easy for people to find your region by using hashtags on Instagram and other methods, so they choose to book with you as well.
Create A Compelling Destination Website
It is easy to research a specific region online before making travel plans or booking a specific tour where people are going.
The best way to show your target country’s most popular attractions is to create a website that is focused only on it or on anything you have decided to cover with your agency.
This website will allow you to interact directly with your reader via compelling videos, images, and virtual reality tours.
It can provide detailed information about the destination to help visitors plan their trip and several options in tours to ensure they are going where they want to.
Make sure to include information about the best attractions and places to eat and drink. Your website should be mobile-friendly and include a blog section with interesting and engaging articles promoting the tours.
Mobile and Website Optimization
For starters, consumers are more likely today to search for travel agencies online and to book holidays. Therefore, a website is essential to generate leads.
Next, your website must be optimized to offer the best user experience (UX). This means a fast-loading time, a visually appealing layout, great use of images, videos, and most importantly, optimizing it for mobile viewing.
If you want an idea of what a well-designed but also optimized website is, think about this:
- Visitors are immediately engaged by the homepage, which features the latest offers and promotions.
- The website’s interface is consistent across all pages, with clear calls to action to encourage sales.
- Customers are less likely to abandon their purchase if the ‘Search for Flights’ and ‘Book’ pages are easy to use.
- Customers can also access the website from their mobile devices and view it properly.
Make an Irresistible Piece
Even though someone may not be able to pay upfront for your tours, it doesn’t mean they will leave your website empty-handed.
If you offer something totally irresistible, free of charge, they won’t hesitate to visit your website.
However, for this to be profitable, only allow users to opt-in for access to the content.
Now, this isn’t exactly “free” for potential tourists, but, indeed, they won’t have to pay anything.
In order to opt for the content and valuable piece, they will need to provide their email addresses.
For this to work, your valuable content will be “gated.” It will be available only through an opt-in form, which the viewer must fill out with their personal details.
Anyone visiting your website will not immediately see the content offered. Instead, visitors will be presented with an opt-in pop-up form that displays the lead magnet (the content) and the contact information.
Get Started with Your Email Marketing
Once you have their email addresses, it is time to start email marketing.
It’s not easy to get a steady stream of email addresses. But they will be useless if they sit around collecting dust. They should be used to their full potential.
Thus, send them immediately the piece of content you created once they opted for it and send them additional information as well.
You can send them information such as safety tips, restaurant guides, and monthly events organized by your tour or travel agency. You might also send them emails based on their behavior on your site.
Did they look at a particular tour page, for example? You can remind them by sending reminder emails and stating that the tour is nearly sold out. Follow up with the email two days later to offer a special discount on that tour.
It may seem like a waste of time for some companies, but email marketing can be your best tool for lead generation in the long run. Thus, just think about it in this way:
- Even though you may find email marketing annoying, it can build trust over time. It also converts 40x more than Facebook or Twitter.
- Take it slow, and you will succeed. We suggest starting with a basic service such as Mailchimp (free). You will learn how to create regular emails and welcome emails and how to manage your lists. You can then move on to more advanced mailing strategies once you are comfortable with these.
Work on SEO for Your Website
You can get more organic tourism leads by optimizing your website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO is about helping potential customers find your business through an internet search. When people search for your business, you want to be in the search engine results. More than your company, it is about appearing when they search for specific details and keywords.
Imagine that you’re a travel agency that specializes in all-inclusive vacations at an affordable price.
In this case, a couple is looking for an all-inclusive holiday in Iceland to enjoy the country’s beauty. To find the right places and enjoy the trip, they type in the search term “cheapest all-inclusive Iceland” into Google.
Your SEO skills will ensure that your travel agency appears in the top three Google results. The couple then clicks the link to your site. You’ve just generated a lead for your company.
SEO includes many elements such as keyword research, optimizing titles and meta descriptions, link building, and more technical aspects to ensure that your website offers the best user experience.
You could hire an SEO expert if you don’t have the time or budget to learn. You can find tons of free resources online and affordable courses.
Keyword search is, without a doubt, the most powerful source for driving leads and sales. After all, Google is the king of finding buyers.
An expert can help you determine the keywords that will bring in the tourists. For it, the best advice we can give you in case you are not going for an expert is that you should identify the long-tail keywords that people would most likely type into search engines to find your services.
Pay Per Click (PPC) for Ads Traffic
On the other hand, you can generate leads quickly with Pay Per Click advertising campaigns.
Anyone looking to get high-quality leads for their business can use pay-per-click advertising. They are very similar to SEO since keywords are what triggers them. However, you pay for each click someone does in any of the ads you see on search engines.
How does it work, and where will your ads appear?
When customers search for your services, you can choose the keywords or phrases they will use, just like with SEO, and your advertisement will appear in paid search results if a user searches for your keyword.
You can see the Google search results for the keyword “full-day tour in Paris.” You will notice that the first three results will either be organic or mostly paid with the “AD” added to the title.
You can use your website to serve as a landing page for your campaigns. If you want to be successful with paid advertising campaigns, your website should be designed to aid lead generation.
Now, if you are thinking about relying on this lead generation strategy, we can give you some tips to make it work properly:
- Display ads only when it is most appropriate.
Only customers who are actively searching for your services using keywords that you have chosen in your campaign will see your ads.
- Precise targeting.
Targeting a specific country, state, or city can help you target your customers. Only customers who live in the area you have chosen will see your ads.
- You can reach anywhere and anytime.
Customers will see your ads at any hour of the day if they are located in the target area.
- Different types of ads.
Text ads are not the only option. Depending on the target audience and user’s interests, you can use image, text, or video ads. Tourists are attracted to visual ads.
- Low cost.
There is no minimum spend. You decide how much money you wish to spend per day or month. You only get paid when potential customers click on your ad to visit your site!
Chat Live Online
Only 45% of travel businesses featured a chat option on their websites by the moment of writing this. Probably the biggest mistake.
You might feel that a chat solution is redundant in an industry where calls dominate. In reality, live chat can be cost-effective to generate more tourism leads and encourage people to book with you right away.
Chat is a great way to start conversations with clients. You can encourage customers through pop-ups or nudges to speak with advisors at any stage of their customer journey.
Maybe a customer requires more information about an all-inclusive vacation. Live chat allows customers to ask questions in real-time without leaving the website and quickly receive their answers without leaving the website.
Talkative live chat has the advantage of being connected to a phone system. This allows for chat interactions to be escalated quickly to a phone or video call if necessary. This allows for seamless omnichannel customer experiences, which can help to generate more travel leads.
Referral and Incentive Programs Online
Use your existing customers to generate more sales qualified leads. Referral programs online are an easy way to get more customers with little effort on your part.
These are particularly effective for more expensive services like yours since people don’t want to spend their money randomly. Instead, people are more inclined to choose a company that people they trust have had a positive experience with.
It’s a great idea to offer existing customers a discount or incentive for recommending you to their friends and family. If the customer is referred, you could provide a discount for both the existing customer and the referee.
Although it might sound intimidating to offer discounts, an effective online referral program will help you save money on marketing and increase your leads.
You can also offer referral incentives online, such as first-class or early booking discounts if you don’t have the budget. Anything that is related to your tourism services.
You have the freedom to be creative. Keep in mind that the better your incentive, the more tourism leads you will get.
Look for Partnerships
This strategy is about building trust and gaining new resources by looking for partners with organizations that share similar interests. These partnerships could include hotels, restaurants and tour operators, travel agents as well as entertainment venues. Anyone that is connected to the touristic industry.
You will need to create country marketing strategies to convince the parties involved in your campaign to support you.
These parties will be able to discuss your branding goals with you. They can implement your marketing campaigns along with their advertising methods to generate visitor interest in your target tours.
Make Your Tours & Destinations More Popular with Social Media
One of the best ways for your message to be heard is through social media. You can promote your country on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook by posting videos and contests. In addition to presenting your country or those you cover with the tours, you can include images of the activities themselves.
You can, for example, create a hashtag to represent your country and yours and then market it on Instagram by sharing images that promote the region. This is all possible at no cost.
These platforms also offer paid marketing opportunities, such as sponsored ads that can help increase visibility.
Social media has the greatest advantage: You can target people based on their age, location, or demographics in order to promote your business.
Attract Influencers
Influencers are another effective way to market your country and tours. Celebrities, vloggers, and bloggers can all be influencers. It is important to trust influencers with engaged audiences.
Remember that the following numbers are not the only thing that matters when choosing influencers to help promote your business. You’ll get better results when you work with niche influencers.
Although it might sound easy, finding an influencer takes some effort. For example, you could offer free tours in return for a blog post or video promotion about their experience or the countries you cover.
Promote on Popular Travel Websites
You should not only create your website to promote your country but also use trusted travel websites such as TripAdvisor to reach your audience. It can sound a bit too much, but the tourism part will either be about tours only, or you can add travels to the equation.
Whatever it is, you will notice your direct competitors focus on both.
If you don’t know how to start, you can include images, stories, or videos on these websites and monitor visitor reviews about the countries and tours. No matter how negative or positive comments are, you need to reply to them with a smart comment.
The Challenges in Lead Generation for Tour Agencies
Running a tourism business isn’t simple.
And as we mentioned earlier, the most challenging part is generating leads.
Since leads are nothing else but your prospective customers, it is critical because you need a steady flow of them to grow your tourism business—that simple.
The demand for good tour providers is high across the globe. Then why do so many tours and travel businesses find lead generation too difficult? There are many reasons.
- Competition is huge in this sector, and it is very difficult to create a unique identity in an almost saturated market.
- Most of the tourists now depend on the internet to find suitable destinations and tour packages. Still, there are many tour businesses without a proper business website.
- Those who created a website still don’t know how to attract potential customers to it.
- A lot of tours and travel websites are not suitable for lead generation.
- Some businesses still don’t know how to reach their targeted customers using new digital channels effectively.
- Many tour operators still depend on buying leads from third-party vendors, who sell the same leads to multiple businesses. This hugely affects the conversion rates from these leads.
If you want to overcome these challenges and create a steady inflow of high-quality leads to your business, take the time to learn a bit more about tourism lead generation and apply the previous strategies once you have gone over your business plan.
In addition, ensure you are using as many lead generation tools as possible as long as they prove to be useful.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Tourism Business
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Tourism Business Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Tourism Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.