Getting Faster Results for Small Travel Companies
As we enter 2025, small business outlook still remains somewhat subdued. It’s creating inertia and making travel company owners cautious about investing in travel marketing excellence in 2025.
However, given President Trump has won and is implementing a very strong Pro-US business agenda, with balanced trade and lower interest rates ahead, the small business economy is headed for strong growth, even with a few bad actors still trying to get in the way of the rebirth of America.
It’s not a hang-on environment. It’s a time to be audacious and effective and this post is about doing both.
The US economic outlook and stock market forecast for the United States are very positive as is the travel market outlook. With so many GO Signals, now is the ideal time to expand and grow revenues. This means creating and activating your sterling Content/SEO/PPC/Social media marketing strategy to get results faster.
With me, it’s very affordable too – customized, dedicated and reliable!
Starting With the Most Accessible Lead Sources
For you or a startup travel company, getting results soon helps to ease trepidation about investing in marketing. You’ll be wanting a campaign that insists on generating the best leads available. Rather than delaying your organic marketing efforts, it’s a key part of ensuring your 2025/2026 strategy gets on track.
Two goals are a priority now:
(1) planning your market leader strategy for 2025/2026.
(2) taking action with active sales promotion to generate leads right now.
We can do both. In fact, it’s expected that you would want leads/customers out of your budget soon and those leads will better inform your 2025 marketing strategy. PPC ads for instance tap into a rich vein of specific travelers giving you feedback on your trip packages. Note: we can also do a variety of other initiatives, discussed below, including improved post-travel marketing to make current, active, satisfied customers feel better about the trip they took and to inspire them to make more.
After reviewing your market/customer profile, UVP, brand and marketing assets, we take immediate action to generate lead flow. (Just a note between you and me is that change by itself is sometimes sufficient to move the minds of customers. A fresh new views helps them re-visualize your brand/UVP which may help customers break inertia). Consider that inertia is an issue, and that it’s not always a weak brand, weak content or a poor offer. People need a nudge.
Customer’s inertia or buying hesitation might not be as fixed as you think. So rather than working too hard to improve your brand/UVP, we might want to just change the view and promote via effective digital marketing channels.
A Highly Affordable Approach to Consider
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ROI-Focused Lead Generation
Lead Conversion Campaigns: Create highly targeted content for a single campaign, and design attention getting ads to generate leads and convert them into paying customers quickly. This would be a focused, themed set of graphic ads on a specific, rich topic/customer pain point. Creating engaging posts and paid-boosting the very best-performing helps us learn faster.
Social Media Reach: Building targeted new people connections and posting interesting visually exciting posts begins building social reach to travelers. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, are the staples, however there are likely many travel websites we might place excellent content on for a reasonable cost. Social influencers are another avenue we can explore to get fast reach to the right travel audience. Whatever is affordable.
PPC Ad Optimization: Advertising on highly relevant longtail keyword phrases, using techniques such as winning the 4th spot on Google search ads as one way to keep PPC click prices down while getting high-quality exposure. I will improve your Google Adscore rating and help you avoid bounce-backs.
Landing Page Optimization: Build new landing pages or improve your current ones by testing their content, and enriching/optimizing via analytics to ensure these pages are high lead converting. It’s in the testing of landing pages that you discover what your audience actually does like. Landing page design is critical to ad success.
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Budget-Friendly, High-Impact Strategies
User-Generated Content (UGC): Encourage, enable and leverage customer reviews, testimonials, and to share travel photos and experiences to build trust and relevance which is a very low cost approach.
Email Marketing: Develop new automated email campaigns via a testing of email content strategies and tactics to ensure you get the key actions you must have including views of your about page, highest converting trip packages, or contact to an agent.
Content Improvements: Ensuring your travel content provides the maximum pre-trip planning enjoyment, guidance and confidence. Image is important, and that can be conveyed in only a few blog posts, social posts or landing pages.
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Hyperlocal and Niche Targeting
Localized Ad and Promotional Campaigns: Work a local or defined audience first (your best customer profile) and create content that resonates with specific, niche audience which helps you focus your budget to it will generate the highest return.
Tourism Community Partnerships: Foster collaborations with local travel and tourism businesses to support your content, events, trips, and promote their offerings as an extension of the value of your trip packages.
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Building Trust and Credibility
Reputation Management: Clearing up negative reviews/events to recapture trust and mitigate competitor’s attempt to disparage your company and brand online.
Authoritative, Respected Content: Publish expert articles, guides, and market insights to position the company as a company that is trustworthy and a significant, empowered and reliable provider. This is where a strong marketing campaign resonates since it proves you’re a reliable company that will fully honor your promise of satisfaction – no doubts.
Social Proof Strategies: Encouraging reviews from satisfied travelers, showcasing testimonials, joy of travel experiences, relevant case studies, and engaging success stories to reduce hesitation and boost trip/tour bookings.
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Capitalizing on Immediate Revenue Opportunities
Testing Promotions and Deals: The power of the specific offer to specific well-qualified customers. Create campaigns and sweeten them with extra value to make your packages irresistible, and remove any hesitations or questions of value and quality.
Upselling and Cross-Selling Content: Develop content for already engaged customers which lets them know they can upgrade to an even better experience, not available elsewhere.
Seasonal Marketing: Tailor your current content to seasonal trends to capture demand that exists right now.
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Analytics-Driven Decision-Making
Cost-Effective Campaign Analysis: Use high-quality analytics to identify what’s working and allocate budgets to the most successful efforts. Maximize use of platform’s targeting and AI personalization features to ensure you’re reaching the best, qualified and actively engaged travelers online.
Capturing Customer Insights: Use engagement analytics data to refine content and trips for customer preferences. Ensure agents are asking questions to identify why travelers want to travel right now, so this can be infused into your ads and content.
Lead Scoring: Use a lead scoring service or a marketing platform to prioritize high-quality leads for follow-up, ensuring your agents aren’t wasting their precious time and energy. Some tools offer AI-assisted features and may be worth investing in.
The Incredible Power of Now
What I like about the power of now, is that it forces you to focus and strategize to get results soon. But it’s not about forcing it, because customers know instinctively when the heat’s being applied and that they’re headed into a high-friction relationship with your travel sales agents.
The power of now celebrates spontaneity, confidence and urgency and getting them over their booking hesitations. Travel has so many moving parts that hitting on value and offers will be tough. Sometimes it’s better to peak their urgency, intent, joy of travel, and confidence.
When you make travelers feel confident and stimulate their travel-induced self-esteem, your ads and content are going to perform much better.
Contact me, Gord, at 416 998 2646 to activate the power of now, and position your travel marketing strategy so powerfully, that market leadership is a possibility.
