subject: How the Travel Industry Should Be Marketing Online - Do You? [print this page] How the Travel Industry Should Be Marketing Online - Do You?
The backpacker might not know their next destination while at home but they have some holidays coming up and need a destination! Their friends are less nomadic, so what is the solution for travel inspiration when its cold dark outside?
What makes you want to travel somewhere? Is it a recommendation from a friend who went there last year. Or was it a photo that you saw somewhere. A film perhaps. For my own inspiration it has often been the recommendation from fellow backpackers that I come to trust to know what I like as we often like the same things.
It could be a certain sport that you do that is better performed in a more suitable location for example Scuba Diving in the Caribbean is better than in your home area. Or you might like to ride horses up the side of the mountain in Chiapas in Mexico.
What do you look for in a destination? Perhaps like me when you got your hands on a lonely planet from the library you first check the night-life. You don't want to end up somewhere boring after all! So that's something that social sites can provide for people. We want to be that coffee table chat in the youth hostel or the breakfast bar. Where nomads - backpackers collide but online in a social networking context.
Part of the fun of travel is meeting new people who like travel. If your in the travel industry you will almost certainly be advertising on the internet but if your extent of your website is a digital version of your brochure your doing it wrong.
Your internet presence should be partly your own site but mostly you will be hard at work marketing on other websites such as Facebook or Twitter and in the travel industry 'landed at'. Your portfolio of social networking sites becomes the online real estate you use often in addition to updating your own site with news.
You should have the following tools available to you within this Social Network Site
RSS feed enabled profiles - so you have an RSS feed of your hotels or tours or just news right? This can be fed into your social networking portfolio so updates on your own site go into the RSS content on your site and it updates automatic in the social network site.
Reviews - your customer should be able to review your services and you should encourage them to do this.
Network with other members - Add friends and some competitors as you will see what they are doing. The best salesmen just chat about their products not push them.
Videos and Photos - nothing sells a tour like energizing and captivating photos and videos. Along with reviews tagging photos of past customers in photos will validate the reviews they have written. If you don't have past customers on the social site invite them and they will enjoy the benefits too.
Don't write too much - give enough detail just to whet the appetite, the photos and videos are more important.
Share your profile pic on Facebook and Twitter - also share a link to these sites from your home page showing how networked your business is.
Being on trip advisor is not enough! Be there but don't be a part of the crowd in a sea of competitors where is the dynamic energy you will get from a great video or photos tagged with satisfied customers.
You can deep link and share as much as you like.
Facebook has a limitation of being to personal mixing with your business.
You want a similar tool set to Facebook that is not purely your business but is mostly that - enter http://www.landed.at Landed will allow your business to network and advertise itself including all of the above. It has been designed to supp
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