How to turn travel website visitors into customers

Turning website visitors into customers plays a big part in a tour operator’s content marketing strategy. This step in the process helps you increase actual sales.
How to turn travel website visitors into customers

Increase sales by generating leads

One of the main aspects of content marketing is turning your website visitors into leads. Basically, if you do not have a proper plan for this in order, your content marketing won’t result in any financial gain for your business.

Before starting to convert your website visitors, make sure you’ve got a strategy in place to:

Content marketing model

3 easy steps to turn website visitors into customers

Once you’ve freshly created website content, it’s important to not just wait for something to happen. We can compare this to fishing: you can’t just sit in a boat and wait for a fish to magically jump into your lap. Therefore, before you take your boat out, equip yourself with the right tools, such as a fishing rod and some bait.

The following 3 easy steps help you equip yourself to go fishing for new leads:

1. Create a travel lead magnet

First of all, your newly written content is supposed to draw your ideal target group to your website. Thus, when you succeed in this, it’s of the utmost importance that you actually try to convert your websites visitors into customers.

An excellent way to do this, is by giving away something of value. In marketing terms, this is called ‘lead magnet’. As said before, your lead magnet must be something that is of value to your website visitors and can be easily obtained. For instance, you can implement the following lead magnets as a tour operator:

  • Travel destination guides
  • Pre-travel checklists
  • Example itineraries

Your lead magnet is a free offer you make to every visitor of your landing page. In addition, use pop-ups to draw attention to your offer.

2. Ask for relevant traveller information in return

In return, for the offer you make with your lead magnet, you can ask your website visitors for information that is relevant to you. Equally important is to make sure that what you ask is easy enough for them to give. Consequently, to get a high number of visitors that complete your form, it should only contain a few fields. To illustrate, types of form fields you can use are:

  • Name
  • Email address
  • Country of origin
  • Type of travel they like
  • Travel construction

3. Turn travel leads into paying customers

Following, once a website visitor subscribes, it’s time to try to turn them into a customer. Always follow up your leads. At this time, they’ve shown interest in your business by subscribing to your lead magnet. So, chances are relatively high they might actually buy one of your tours.

Use the information they’ve provided you with to email your new leads an offer, specific to their interests. The more personal your offer, the higher chance you have of turning a lead into a customer.

Depending on the number of leads you are generating, it might come in useful to have this process automated. In particular, for email automation there’s an endless list of tools for you to use. They may seem pricey at first, however it’s well worth once set up properly.

The content marketing process in practice

To give you a better understanding, we’ve described the process from written content to automatically sending an offer to a new lead. In short, imagine the following situation:

The process of turning website visitors into customers

You’ve written a piece of content on a tour for a specific destination. For this, you’ve created a great landing page on which visitors can easily consume your content. To generate some visits, you’ve promoted this page in several ways.

New visitors are drawn to this page from different channels, such as the Google search engine, social media and email. On this particular page, your visitors receive an offer to download a free destination guide for the tour they’ve shown interest in.

In return for the free downloads, you’ve obtained traveller information of potential customers. A few days after, the leads are contacted automatically. They receive an offer that is specific to the information you’ve gathered.

In conclusion, turning website visitors into customers is easy in theory. However, it’s a process that consumes a lot of time and energy.

The next step: analyse your data

Because content marketing requires a lot of your time and energy, it’s all the more important to analyse your data. Analysing website, social media and email data allows you to see if your strategy actually works. It’s a great way to further improve the process of creating content, promoting content and converting website visitors into customers.

Responses

  1. Excellent!! Writing valuable content, promoting it on the social media, using a lead magnet, analyzing of data by using google analytics and other tools has helps me to closely understand my customer and tailor as per their interest. Good direction of the trends and leads to improved thought after pieces for my blogs.

    Bravo to the brainers!!

    1. Hi Harriet,

      Glad to hear! Getting started with all this might feel overwhelming but if you take it step by step, I’m sure it’ll help you grow your business.

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