A Beginner’s Guide to Digital Marketing for Travel Business

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the method by which you can increase the traffic to your website through organic search engine results. It is a technical, analytical and creative process to improve the visibility of a website in search engines.

Reviewing site architecture, doing On Page optimization and then Off Page Optimization to create link building are the basic steps of doing SEO for a website. Details have been described in the section.

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization also known as On-Page SEO refers to all measures that can be taken directly within the website in order to improve its position in the search rankings. The most important on-page ranking factors that could affect your travel website’s search visibility are title tags, meta-descriptions, on-page content, internal links, URL structure, and alt text, etc.

Site Architecture

The most important part of website architecture is making sure users are able to find things quickly and easily on your website. Having a great user experience should be a primary focus. A good site structure provides your website with site-links having SERPs which makes your site architecturally friendly for search engines.

Link Building

Link building is an important part of SEO services. Without link-building, websites cannot rank in search queries. Link building is the SEO practice of obtaining links from external websites to your own to improve both direct linking to the site and search engine ranking and is all about increasing web- link popularity.

Paid Media

Channels (Search, Display, Video, Social)

Paid media is advertising your travel business while paying for it. The most common forms of paid media include Display ads, Sponsored ads, Paid search, Google Ads, Social Networking ads to name a few.

Travel companies can get the benefit of targeting audiences based on website content, geography, and device types. Digital advertising can be done in several forms such as banner ads, video ads, interactive ads, and rich media ads. Similarly, within video advertising, a video ad typically plays before, during or after the video that audience wants to watch. The video ads can be made clickable so as to drive more traffic to your travel website.

Remarketing and Retargeting

Another paid media advertising include Remarketing and Retargeting. Often a few times the best segment to target the people who either have visited a website or have already digitally interacted within the past. Retargeting and remarketing will permit you to succeed in making the existing customers purchasing a new product rather than going for first time visitors.

While Retargeting is most often used to describe online ad placements and display ads, served based on a user’s activity on a website, re-marketing is typically the term used to describe re-engaging customers with email. It is considered as a second chance to convert, up-sell, or retain customers with online ads or campaigns.

Social Media

Social media marketing is a must to get new customer from being targeted audience quickly. Social networks utilize user data to serve extremely relevant advertisements based on user’s profile and interest group within the network. At several instances, as the target market aligns with the user demographics of a social network, this type of advertising at a lower value of acquisition can provide a huge increase in conversions.

Social media advertising is one of the most effective advertising types where users will actively engage with some of the ways are described below.

Content Strategy

Content strategy while doing social media marketing include steps like establishing website’s social media marketing goals & objectives, identifying the best social media platforms for your travel business, researching keywords relevant to travel on each social media site and with which keywords your competitors are gaining business and updating the content regularly.

Paid Ads

Paid social media advertising is a cost-effective way to promote your business. Each platform uses the pay-per-click (PPC) payment model. This means that you pay only if the user takes the action you want. This also increases brand and product awareness.

Giveaways/Contests – Running a social media contest or giveaway is a great way to start an online exchange about your travel business. A contest on one hand attracts and rewards audience, with a prize item while a giveaway creates buzz about a product or a brand.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is designed to work on an existing group of followers on social media. This is done with a Social Media Influencer who is an established and credible user in a specific industry and thus has access to a large audience.

Analytics and Conversion Optimization

Web analytics and conversion rate optimization (CRO) goes hand in hand. Analytics is defined by the Web Analytics Association as “the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and marketing initiatives.” Similarly, conversion rate optimization is the method used for improving a website’s performance by utilizing analytics and user’s feedback.

Tracking System Setup

To sharpen your applied marketing strategies, tracking is a key process. Google Analytics and some other tools monitor the page-view with the source from where the visitor came from and media or different kinds of traffic that the visitor originated from.

Conversion Analysis – Heat Map

Heat maps can provide you with the data and insights needed to optimize your website, user experience, and conversion rate optimization to their fullest potential. The “hot color” sections attract the most amount of traffic, and the “cold color” sections attract the smallest amount of attention. Scroll maps, Click maps and Hover maps are the types of Heat maps.

Conversion Optimization & AB testing

A/B testing is the process of comparing versions of a web page and is a test where two or more webpage variants containing words, phrases, images, videos, and other elements are shown to users at random, and statistical analysis is used to identify which variant performs better for an agreed conversion goal.

LTV Analysis

Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer is the expected revenue that a customer will generate during their lifetime with your company. LTV analysis shall be done with the right Resources, Visualization Tools, and Segments to analyze which could help identifying your highest-value customers than to acquire new.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Relationship Management focuses on managing and tracking of potential and existing customers. Digital marketing and CRM goes hand in hand. Digital marketing with CRM helps establishing visibility, providing relevant and timely insights, executing and managing long-term goals.

Loyalty Points

CRM helps your business in identifying your customers’ behaviors and habits. Loyalty programs are demonstrated to be extraordinarily productive in replicating sales for brands with primary focus on retaining the existing customers and encouraging their repeat purchases.

Personalized Offers/Discounts

Way to gain higher conversions is providing personalized offers and discounts specifically targeted to a customer’s interests that will lead to elevated conversions, improved ROI, and significant growth for your business.

Questionnaires and Surveys

Digital marketing activities like questionnaire includes questions about online activities of the customers, their preferences, choices, and what they like and what they don’t. Similarly, the focus of the survey is to capture responses based on their travel choice that could help in making the website more optimized for customers.

Conclusion

The observance of digital marketing is improving with technology innovation which promotes comprehensive opportunities that adds credibility to the travel companies. It is difficult to survive in the market without adopting a proper digital marketing strategy. Businesses, who have understood this, are getting ahead of their nearest competitors in the market. Travel domain has vast opportunities while going with Digital Marketing using a number of methodologies and thus chance to uplift the travel business.