Operating a business in the travel industry is never an easy task – you need to put a lot of effort into getting quality attention from travelers and converting them into your customers.
Luckily, there are many tested and validated marketing strategies that can help you get attention from travelers from all over the world and offer them your services to enhance their travel experiences in your destination.
One of the most prominent approaches is called destination marketing, and in this article, we will tell you all about the steps you can take to execute this strategy in an effective manner.
What Do We Mean by Destination Marketing?
Simply put, a practice of showcasing and promoting specific locations and their benefits with the aim of selling your services along the way is called Destination Marketing.
Let’s imagine you are running a cute Co-living space for Digital Nomads in the heart of Lisbon, offering them residential apartments for up to 6 months.
How would you approach promoting your Co-living space? We suppose you would talk about the beauty of this historic city, highlight the legendary Portuguese cuisine, and share a thing or two about the vibrant life that it offers.
That’s exactly what the Destination Marketing approach entails. It is a process of advertising your business with the goal of increasing your prospects’ awareness about certain destinations around the world.
Essentially, with this marketing approach, you are inviting your potential customers to visit a certain destination, making the chances of them purchasing your services along their journey higher.
This model applies to traditional businesses, such as hotels, restaurants, travel agencies, and music festivals, as well as more specific service providers, like co-working spaces, surfing camps, educational tours, and others.
Why Is Destination Marketing Beneficial?
Depending on the nature of your business, there can be countless benefits to executing Destination Marketing.
Firstly, taking the selling points of cities, countries, or even smaller destinations and using them to captivate an audience will help you increase engagement with your audience and bring more trust, which makes them more likely to convert.
At the same time, this strategy gives you an opportunity to offer valuable information to your prospects about certain locations, positioning you as the main point of authority in this field and attracting attention from all over the world.
For example, if you are a local tourist company offering day trips to smaller villages from a specific region, starting a campaign about those small, unique destinations and talking about them will increase the likelihood of getting more tourists to join your trips.
But how exactly do you achieve these results in practice, you ask? Let’s discover it in the next section of this article.
5 Steps for Successfully Executing a Destination Marketing Strategy
In order to be successful at implementing the Destination Marketing approach into your everyday process, you must think strategically and take certain steps to see the results.
Here are 5 steps you can take to get started with this approach:
Learn All About Your Ideal Customer’s Needs
First things first, it is important to get started with thorough customer research – if you want to get attention from the right people, you should know what interests they have and what gets them excited to engage with you.
What is your audience’s primary motivation when they travel to your destination? How would they like to spend their time? How long do they typically spend in a certain location?
Answering these questions will help you understand your ideal customer’s approach to visiting your destination, assisting you to draw conclusions and come up with ideas.
Focus on Crafting USPs of Your Destinations
Now that you have an idea of what your customers enjoy and how they like to spend their time, you must invest your energy into identifying Unique Selling Points (USPs) of the destination you are promoting.
For example, if your business is offering services in the city of Amsterdam and your research shows that your potential customers are into Art, then you can emphasize on the Van Gogh Museum and other artistic places that this city offers.
In order to be successful at this, it is important to have good knowledge and put effort into discovering the unique characteristics of your locations.
The more specific your USPs are, the higher chances you get to attract attention from relevant people for your business. Specificity also helps with SEO and gives you better positions for long-tail keywords.
Create Content That Resonates With Your Audience
After mapping out the key selling points of the destinations you are promoting, it is time to get started with creating quality content to attract attention and grow your business online.
Firstly, identify the channels you’d like to create content on. This entirely depends on where your audience likes to get their travel information from.
Let’s say you are offering one-week-long Surfing Camp tours in Morocco. Where would your prospects search for those types of retreats?
Do they like to explore their tours on Instagram? Then invest your time in creating Reels. Do they Google this information when planning their journeys? Then SEO is what you should focus on.
Utilize the data you have from research and apply your USPs to the content you create. This will only help your marketing efforts to be more successful.
Read more: Travel Content Marketing: Turning Wanderlust Into Bookings
Team Up With Influencers and Collaborate
Influencer marketing has been one of the prominent marketing strategies for some time now, especially in the travel industry.
Think about it – there are not too many better ways to showcase the benefits and advantages of certain locations than showing it from the real person’s perspective who has a massive following on social media.
When planning your influencer collaboration activities, it is important to keep in mind that there are different types of influencer campaigns you can execute, and the effectiveness of each campaign entirely depends on the nature of your business.
For example, if you are running a hotel business, inviting an influencer to your venue for a week and letting them share their experiences in that location with their audience might be an effective way to attract attention to your hotel.
Check Results and Analyze Performance
Finally, you must always remember to check the performance of your ongoing Destination Marketing campaigns to determine which approaches are effective and which ones need some iterations.
In order to achieve that, you must set different goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to properly measure results and understand what works best for your business.
Use the tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and others to monitor ongoing activities on your website. Also, track numbers and growth on your social media pages to see what types of posts bring you the biggest conversions.
This approach will help you adjust your business strategy in a way that benefits your growth and gets you results in an effective manner.
Place Marketing vs Destination Marketing – What Is the Difference?
These two concepts – place marketing and destination marketing – are oftentimes confused with each other, but in reality, they are two completely different types of approaches.
Place marketing is all about promoting a specific location with the aim of attracting businesses, residents, and/ or investments there. Attracting visitors, such as tourists, might be a by-product of this action, but it is not a primary goal.
Destination marketing, on the other hand, refers to the process of promoting a specific location with the aim of growing your business along the way. This approach aims to get tourists to a certain destination and increase the number of your customers.
The main differentiator between these two approaches is the target audience. While place marketing is talking to businesses, corporations, or governments, destination marketing is communicating with regular people who want to travel to certain locations.
Therefore, the tone of voice, messaging strategy, marketing channels, approach branding, and sales funnel can be completely different for those two approaches.
Level up Your Destination Marketing Efforts With PRNEWS.IO
Properly executing your Destination Marketing strategy consists of many layers. One of those layers is all about getting the right publicity of your locations on the right news outlets to reach more people and attract quality attention online.
Introducing PRNews.io – a platform for all sorts of businesses worldwide to maximize the outcome of their press releases and get guaranteed placements for sponsored content in international online publications.
Sounds interesting? Have a look at the list of our news sources for your potential placements, and reach out to us in case you have any questions.
Case Study: How PRNEWS.IO Helped Tickets Travel Network Achieve Its SEO Goals
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