How many times have you been told that you need to optimize your website(opens in a new tab), continuously publish fresh blog content, and develop a content marketing strategy for your tour business? And that’s all on top of fielding customer inquiries, managing schedules, and actually running the business itself. Managing your blog might get pushed to the bottom of your to-do list and may seem irrelevant, but it can actually provide your business with many important benefits(opens in a new tab).
Your blog isn’t just for SEO purposes, though it certainly helps. Instead, focus on how your blog can both attract new customers and improve the customer experience. With the right content and strategy, you can turn your blog into a valuable asset(opens in a new tab) for your travel company.
Write for Your Customers, Not SEO
While blogs can certainly help with your website’s SEO, keywords shouldn’t be the main focus of your writing—your customers should. Adopting a user-centered design(opens in a new tab) for your blog means your content will be accessible, easy to read, and engaging for your customers. It also means you’ll be providing valuable and useful content, not necessarily writing just for SEO purposes.
Think about how you want to represent your business’s tone and brand(opens in a new tab), and write your blog so that it reflects that. Depending on the type of tour company you run, this may be the same tone you use during your tours—informative, friendly, and fun. Try to write your blogs as if you’re leading a tour and talking to your audience. This will result in content that your audience is more likely to connect with.
Connecting with your audience is great, but you also need a way to capture their information and turn potential customers into paying customer(opens in a new tab)s. Include calls to action in your blog posts prompting your readers to sign up for an e-newsletter or discounts, or to call you to take advantage of a limited-time opportunity. For blogs referring to a recent tour experience, include a link to your upcoming tours so that customers can quickly and easily see how they can take part in the tour they’ve just read about.
Connect with a New Audience
To effectively use your blog to attract new customers to your business(opens in a new tab), you’ll need to write content for people who haven’t heard of your business before. Your blog gives you a chance to introduce potential customers to what you do and to showcase why your tours are better than the competition. This is also the perfect time to highlight how and why tours can make an occasion extra special, and you might suggest that customers schedule a tour to make vacations, anniversaries, birthdays, or other events more memorable.
Because you’re communicating with a new audience who hasn’t previously heard of your business, you can also use your blog to build potential customers’ trust. There are many ways to do this—it could be by giving customers tips on how to prepare for and have the best tour experience possible, or by highlighting testimonials and reviews from happy customers. You can use your familiarity with your area to your advantage and offer important travel tips about the local culture(opens in a new tab). You might also write blogs that introduce the audience to each of your tour guides in fun and entertaining ways, so the audience already feels like they know their guide by the time their tour begins.
Once you’ve created your blog posts, you’ll need to share them in places where your potential customers will see them. Share your blog posts on your social media profiles and consider writing guest posts for local tourism websites to help drive traffic back to your blog and your website.
Do Something Different
Focus on changing things up with your blog to get customers excited. Potential customers who visit your blog may have already read a dozen posts from other tour operators, so you need to stand out.
Take a look at how other tour operators are using their blogs, and then do something different. Think about what is missing. Could they be offering customers valuable travel information about lodging, sales, and the best places to get a good deal on a meal in the area? Are they using video content to their advantage? Are they running contests or events to get their customers involved and interacting with their travel business?
There are countless great blog ideas for tour operators(opens in a new tab), from featuring a photo of the day to showcase what customers could expect from a tour, to answering frequently asked questions so your customers are well-informed. If you find a way to do things differently than other tour operators, your business will stand out.
Customers want a tour company that goes above and beyond to ensure that they have a great time, and your blog may be the first point of contact you have with some of your potential customers. Rather than putting off working on your blog, embrace it as the powerful marketing tool it can be. By improving the customer experience with your blog, you’ll get more bookings, better reviews, and happier customers.
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