How can digital marketing help the tourism & hospitality industry?

Digital marketing is essential for the tourism and hospitality industry. As with any other product or service, consumers search online for helpful information and reviews on accommodations, hotels, restaurants, and destination activities. Therefore, companies can benefit greatly from having on-brand & effective digital marketing to retain their current customers and reach new ones. 

Incorporating digital marketing trends needs to be at the forefront of a hospitality company’s overall marketing strategy to improve customer engagement and show that your brand represents a unique travel experience. Travelers are utilizing digital platforms to search, purchase, and communicate. This means that transparency and responsiveness to customer inquiries and concerns are paramount to success. If customers have a good experience and trust your brand, they are more likely to recommend your services and products on social platforms like Facebook or on online directories like TripAdvisor. 

Further, digital marketing offers measurable results through advanced analytics built into platforms like Facebook Manager, or through top-rated tools such as SEMrush or Google Analytics. These tools help to measure the effectiveness of your digital campaigns,so that you can adjust and make improvements accordingly. 

4 Digital Marketing Tactics to Drive Revenue for Tourism Businesses

1. SEO Optimization 

People search for high quality content and images to gain a sense of what a destination offers. With ample competition online, companies can differentiate themselves by providing informative, visually appealing content that speaks to the customers needs. Optimizing your website to include target keywords will help you drive organic traffic and raise your website’s ranking in search engines like Google. An experienced digital marketing agency can research and implement keywords for SEO, content for landing pages and blogs, images, and videos. 

For example, Elysium Marketing Group works with North Beach Atlantic City’s tourism agency to promote numerous dining, accommodations, and activity options in North Beach by creating relevant, informative blog articles that are optimized for SEO. 

2. Social Media Marketing

More people are sharing their travel experiences and leaving reviews on social media marketing such as Facebook, which can influence the way other consumers make traveling decisions. Social media platforms are one of the best digital marketing tools to build brand awareness, trust, and two-way communication between companies and their target audiences. In turn, this will help capture leads and stimulate higher conversion rates. A digital marketing agency can help accomplish these goals through tactical social media campaigns on leading platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

3. Social Media Event Advertising 

Social media advertising is one of the best tools to create hype, and spread the word for an upcoming event. A skilled marketing agency can leverage your company’s social platforms to engage customers in unique ways that lead to higher engagement and conversions. 

From Facebook and Instagram, to YouTube and LinkedIn, there are a myriad of channels to tap into for the best results. For instance, Facebook allows users to create events, share updates, respond to followers and invitees, and utilize paid promotional services to target specific groups. Twitter uses short posts and hashtags to build buzz around events, while Instagram focuses on image-heavy posts, live reels, and videos to capture attention. On the other hand, LinkedIn is geared towards industry networking, so this can be your opportunity to connect to vendors and entrepreneurs via your event. 

For the hospitality industry, we’ve seen a ton of success with event advertising on Facebook. This is for a few reasons – one, it is relatively cheap (if done correctly) and two, you can get in-front of your target demographic easily through geotargeting, age targeting, interest targeting and more! Over this summer, we ran event ads for the Steel Pier in Atlantic City for events they were hosting. For one event in particular, we set up and advertised an event that received 200 event responders in just two weeks for just $85 in ad spend – that’s only .43 cost per event response! This is .60 cheaper than the Facebook average! 

4. Digital Communication 

Digital Communication via email marketing offers another means to stay connected to prospective, current, and past customers. By offering relevant information such as a company’s annual reports, new blogs, discounts, or new products and services, you’re encouraging lead generation and customer retention, while also educating your customers about any new and pertinent information. 

Recently, the Elysium Marketing Group team was tasked with creating the annual report for the Valley Forge Tourism Convention Board. They had been hopeful they could communicate this information via their annual conference this year but decided to pivot to a digital form of communication to keep the health and safety of their event attendees in mind. The best way to present this information was through a digital version of their annual report to share the news and progress that was made over the past year. We created and designed the report to live on a landing page for people to peruse the annual report at their leisure. We incorporated movement, imagery, texture and more to capture people’s attention while they navigate the report. We then designed an email to deploy to the members of the boards to announce that the report is live. 

Take a look on this awesome >>>ANNUAL REPORT<<<

Interested in learning more about how digital marketing can take the tourism and hospitality industry to the next level? Contact Elysium Marketing Group today for a free consultation!