Tourism Marketing: Meaning, Importance, Types and Strategies

What is Tourism Marketing?

Tourism Marketing refers to the act of marketing and promoting tourism by making people aware of the new attractions and services. Every form of tourism service utilized encompassing airlines, hotels, car rentals, restaurants, tour operators, and travel agents falls under the broad category of tourism marketing. Tourism marketers tap different platforms such as social media, emails, websites, and online advertisements to promote their brand and build a competitive advantage. The more the marketing effort, the better the business is compensated with the profits floating in. There are a range of benefits accrued from tourism marketing such as better brand visibility, expansion of the tourism marketing as a whole, and better customer experience.

Geeky Takeaways:

• Tourism Marketing refers to marketing and promoting tourism to benefit service providers and make different destinations more attractive for tourists.
• Tourism Marketing is important because it assists with brand introduction, brand utility, and brand expansion.
• The different types of Tourism Marketing are digital marketing, email marketing, influencer marketing, destination marketing, and community-based tourism marketing.
• Some of the best marketing strategies are personalization, virtual reality tours, experience-based marketing, review marketing, retention, and remarketing.

Importance of Tourism Marketing

With a range of destinations as well as travel companies and commuting services to choose from, the tourism industry is cluttered. To stand out in this sea of service providers, it is imperative to put in marketing efforts. Highlighting the USPs that make one superior to all other service providers is integral to success. Tourism Marketing is important for the following reasons,

1. Brand Introduction: Tourism Marketing introduces the customers to the brand. It details the brand’s USP along with the various services it provides the potential tourists. It helps the brand come through to the audience and introduce the brand to them as a potential service they might want to utilize.

2. Brand Utility: With an introduction to the brand, it brings about the value the brand has to offer to the audience. With appropriate tourism marketing, the brand can create a need the potential tourists to avail of their services. As a result, it introduces the brand as a service provider adding utility to the customers.

3. Brand Expansion: The primary benefit of tourism marketing is that it provides avenues for brand expansion. It creates awareness about the services and helps reach the final customer. In doing this, it provides avenues for brand expansion. Further, people willing to collaborate can also be reached easily via tourism marketing efforts.

4. Stakeholder Engagement: There are various stakeholders for a tourism service provider including local communities, industry associations, and government entities. A collaborative approach with all these stakeholders assists in gaining better returns on the marketing initiatives. With active efforts made to increase the business, the stakeholders also remain engaged.

5. Increased Traffic: The ultimate utilization of tourism marketing is to ensure an increased number of visitors to their website who avail of their services. However, meanwhile, this also contributes to increasing the number of tourists and adding to the tourism industry as a whole.

Benefits of Tourism Marketing

With an understanding of what is tourism marketing and why is it important, let us look more closely at the benefits of tourism marketing. It is the plethora of benefits that tourism marketing delivers owing to which it is becoming an essential component for all tourism service providers. These include,

1. Increased Visibility and Brand Awareness: The foremost benefit derived from tourism marketing is better visibility and brand awareness. The marketing efforts familiarize people with the services offered and create a trustworthy brand image. It is only when the brand is visible to all potential tourists that companies will be able to gather their attention and convert their interest into sales. As a result, the direct benefit of tourism marketing is increased visibility and brand awareness.

2. Customer Acquisition and Retention: Loyalty programs and targeted advertisements help companies retain their clientele. While targeting new customers is paramount, marketing efforts also help retain the existing customer base. With a solid base of loyal customers, a company can grow many times. They have a ready audience to introduce their new strategies and destination offers to. With constant marketing efforts, the customers stay engaged and attracted to the services.

3. Competitive Advantage: Even when two companies provide the same services, the one that markets better wins the customers. Effective marketing can create a unique presence and appeal to the potential customers. Successful market strategies appeal to the customers and make them move towards the company’s services, leaving behind all competitors. With the competitive advantage, it is easy to multiply the business manifold and reach the customers better.

4. Enhanced Customer Experience: Another benefit derived from tourism marketing is enhanced customer experience. This benefit accrues from assisting the tourists in building their itineraries, providing them with travel destination ideas, facilitating access to services, and ensuring a seamless experience.

5. Measuring Performance: Lastly, the most effective return of engaging in tourism marketing is an insight into the performance of the company by evaluating key performance indicators. It helps track social media engagement, website traffic, conversion rates, and feedback to get an insight into the performance of the service provider.

Types of Tourism Marketing

1. Internet Marketing: Internet marketing encompasses social media marketing as well as content marketing. For example, service providers such as MakeMyTrip, and Agoda, and target platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc, run targeted campaigns and also create awareness about the destinations. Alongside this, content marketing can create awareness in the form of blog posts and videos to engage potential tourists and introduce them to an attraction.

2. Email Marketing: Next up we have email marketing that promotes a company’s services via emails. It creates an attraction for them right in their inbox and encourages them to read more about it. For example, travel service providers such as MakeMyTrip send emails with travel plans and hot deals to customers who have either subscribed or availed of the services before.

3. Influencer Marketing: The most common means of marketing cropping up these days, influencer marketing is when companies hire travel bloggers and social media personalities to market their services and destinations for them. People often follow certain travel pages or bloggers who go out on exciting journeys. As a result, partnering with them can build a channel to reach potential customers. For example, Airbnb uses influencer marketing to spread its reach and tap potential customers.

4. Destination Marketing: In this marketing channel, companies often collaborate with the tourism boards to advertise an entire destination, appealing to potential tourists with the uniqueness of the destination.

5. Community-Based Tourism Marketing: Another source of marketing for travel service providers is engaging the local population in their marketing efforts to make it more authentic. When the locals are involved, the true essence of the destination comes to the forefront, helping tourists get an idea of the destination. For example, this is a commonly utilized technique for places that have an authentic appeal such as the north-east India.

Service providers use a mix of these tourism marketing strategies to capture a wide audience base and reach a diverse target. Tourism is one industry that depends little on the personalized details of people and more on the places they are interested in. A tourist can plan a vacation anywhere, irrespective of their current location and other factors. As a result, tourism service providers have a wider audience to engage with and showcase their travel plans.

Best Tourism Marketing Strategies

1. Focus on Personalization: We live in the age of personalization where it has become a norm to get personalized emails delivered to the inbox. As a result, companies must use software to track user engagement and attempt to deliver personalized results. This could include sending them a tour package to a particular location they have been eyeing or sending a list of budget-friendly options that match their recent search.

2. Virtual Reality Tours: A leading strategy where tourism service providers can invest immensely is providing virtual tours to potential customers. It has become a common practice ever since COVID-19 and allows customers to come face to face with the destination and get a glimpse into the tourist spot in a more nuanced form. Virtual reality is an extraordinary means to attract potential tourists.

3. Focus on the Experience: While advertising tour services, it is extremely important to primarily focus on the customer experience. Like all other marketing works, the customer is not paying for a product or a service. Instead, the point of focus here is the experience which must be paid attention to. Airlines can focus on the food and entertainment provided during flights, hotels can pay attention to the absolute comfort and fun-filled package they provide, etc. The pain point in this form of marketing is the experience that should be appropriately appealed to.

4. Benefit from Influencer Marketing: It is extremely important for marketing efforts to be synced with the latest marketing trends and influencer marketing is one of them. With the increasing traffic on social media channels, the share of influencer marketing is on a steady rise. Service providers can partner with influencers who post about their experience with a particular airline, hotel, restaurant, etc. Further, shooting pictures at an attractive destination and showcasing them also significantly attracts people who follow these influences. Once the service is trending, it will be the most sought-after service provider in town.

5. Focus on Safety and Hygiene: The focus on safety and hygiene was gathered around COVID-19 but it has not died down ever since. As a result, tourism service providers must focus on how hygienic the tourist destination is. Besides these, whenever traveling to an unknown place, safety becomes the first question that pops into the mind of the tourist. Addressing these issues will assure the tourists of the services and boost sales.

6. Do not Overlook the Review Marketing: Modern tourists neither book a hotel nor so much as eat at a restaurant without glancing through their reviews. This makes the review base an extremely important factor in attracting customers. Further, address all the negative reviews and work on minimizing them. If the past customers are happy, the new customers will want to try the services.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Is Tourism Marketing important?

Yes, tourism marketing is important since it creates awareness about new destinations and services available.

What is the scope of Tourism Marketing?

Tourism marketing is concerned with understanding the needs of potential tourists and serving them.

How to classify Tourism Marketing?

Tourism marketing can be classified based on domestic tourism, inbound tourism, and outbound tourism.

How can I expand the awareness about my tourism services?

Tourism marketing is an extraordinary means to expand knowledge about the tourism services. It helps create awareness and present the USPs of the services to attract tourists.