Content
7 Ways Travel Agents Generate Leads
December 19, 2023
10 mins
With a global shift to digital marketing, travel industry businesses are extremely focused on attracting potential clients, boosting online presence, and driving more bookings.
A core strategic focus of your digital marketing effort is on winning qualified leads. These are people who’ve visited your website or social media and made a solid action there: filled in the contact form, signed out for a travel newsletter, or booked a consultation.
In all cases, qualified leads provide you with their contact information and signal their preliminary interest in your travel services. With contact details of interested users in hand, your team further re-markets them into the actual customers of your offers. This is what happens in the conversion stage of the customer journey.
By definition, there are marketing qualified leads (MQLs) who express interest in your travel services and customized solutions, and sales qualified leads (SQLs) who intend to pay you. In both cases, you should focus on the intent of your target audience and tailor deeply customized approaches.
The truth of lead generation for travel companies, however, is that a mere percentage of qualified leads will turn into customers who will order and pay for your travel services. To dive deeper into the proven ways of lead generation in the travel business, Promodo travel marketing experts are sharing top insights for 2024.
While nobody provides free travel leads for travel agents, a pool of potential clients presents a solid strategic asset you should retain. Throughout your customer journey, sustained personalized communication is a key to success. Close-knit engagement with digital travel leads is how you cultivate trusted relationships with your clientele and increase their lifetime value (LTV).
The mainstream trend for booking travel tours and holiday trips online will hype in 2024 and beyond. Answering the question of how to generate leads for travel business, you should craft a decent travel website.
Your major task here is to turn into a crucial digital touchpoint to attract qualified leads. Serving your target audience as a one-touch travel hub is what will provide you with a competitive advantage.
While all players are striving to deliver the best possible user experience (UX), make the maximum use of AI tools and mobile marketing options. This means you have to optimize your online presence to the best quality standard by ensuring:
✈️ Mobile optimization of your site
✈️ Fast loading times of all pages on your site
✈️ A proper mix of textual, visual, and video content
✈️ A visually appealing and clear layout
✈️ Effective use of multimedia and AI tools.
As a long-haul search engine optimization (SEO) game, competitive travel agents start their digital marketing path with an SEO audit to ensure that all tech issues are well in place:
SEO is about ensuring that potential customers can easily discover your website when they perform online searches. Your prime SEO goal in travel agency lead generation is to secure a high ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) once consumers search for keywords relevant to your business.
A core SEO priority is to maintain informative, easily navigable, and engaging content on your travel website. A good piece of user-friendly advice here is to segment your content by major types of your typical clients:
✈️ Leisure travelers
✈️ Business travelers
✈️ Luxury travelers
✈️ Holiday travelers
✈️ Event travelers
✈️ Cultural travelers
✈️ Weekend trippers
✈️ Adventure tourists
✈️ Eco-tourists
✈️ Extreme seekers
Beyond relevant travel content, generating qualified leads much depends on clear calls to action (CTAs). These buttons play a pivotal role by guiding your site visitors toward the next stages of your sales funnel:
With an exceptional user experience (UX), you considerably increase the likelihood of converting visitors into qualified journey leads and actual customers.
Phone calls hold specific importance in generating leads for travel agencies.
Live interpersonal communication covers various inquiries and detailed guidance that most travelers want to hear in person before booking their trips. With that, travel agents apply voice calls as an efficient means to provide their customers with all the needed information.
This is why incorporating web calling and web callbacks substantially enhances the influx of digital travel leads. Both options simplify the process for customers to connect with you:
✈️ Web calling enables customers to initiate a call directly through your website
✈️ Callback features allow your customers to schedule a call at their convenience.
Placing a click-to-call button and a callback option on all pages of your website is an effective way to generate more travel leads.
Yes, this is your competitive advantage over the closest rivals. Be sure to craft engaging blog posts with AI and video content and share them all through social media platforms to generate more qualified leads.
Take blogging as the foremost content marketing tool that will help you generate a wider pool of qualified leads. By consistently creating fresh and catchy content, you’ll attract potential customers on a shoestring marketing budget.
While tough rivalry among travel bloggers is nothing new these days, stand out from the crowd by targeting your posts to individual travel needs and preferences shared by your typical clients. Herewith, diving deeper into your ideal customer portrait is an absolute must-have.
Yes, social media platforms will help you:
✈️ Make the brand name for your travel business
✈️ Elevate brand visibility
✈️ Foster customer engagement, and
✈️ Spread your travel content.
Continuous engagement with a wide pool of potentially interested users in travel and tourism is pivotal to your content marketing strategy. Sharing your clients’ travel experiences across social media platforms is essential to maximize an overall reach and drive your brand awareness.
A strategic move here is to launch a video blog on your agency’s YouTube channel. This is your golden chance to share first-hand travel experiences and make connections with your target audience.
Even further, TikTok is most suitable for short 15-second videos to emphasize hyping trends.
Take social media as a supplementary digital marketing option to your website promotion. This way, you’ll generate qualified leads from user forms and calls-to-action (CTAs) beyond visiting your website.
This makes a stark difference if compared to deploying paid social media ads. The latter option proves highly effective once you need to retarget those users who have previously visited your website but have not converted into actual customers.
Live chatting has proven as an exceptionally cost-effective way to boost lead generation across the travel industry.
Live chats serve as a valuable means of initiating customer conversations. Through properly placed pop-ups and gentle nudges, you prompt potential leads to engage with you by responding to their immediate travel inquiries on all stages of their customer journey.
With live chat available, your potential customers may inquire about a real-time interaction or prompt answers from one of your travel experts.
A notable feature of readily available live chats is their seamless integration with phone systems. Through such integration, you’ll achieve a seamless user experience (UX).
Despite its seemingly old-school reputation, email marketing remains a highly valuable strategy in the digital landscape. It serves as an excellent way to place content directly in front of your audience, with the added benefit of being an effective call to action.
For instance, a monthly email newsletter showcasing your latest holiday deals can include compelling icons like 'Book and Save Now' or 'Get a Quote Now' at the end, directing customers to an online booking form or a dedicated page on your website where they can engage with your booking team. This simple yet strategic use of email marketing significantly contributes to generating digital travel leads for your travel business.
Pursuing email marketing, it's crucial to cultivate and expand your client email database. The most effective approach involves offering a lead magnet—a reward customers receive in exchange for providing their emails. This could take the form of a/an:
✈️ Downloadable travel brochure
✈️ Access to destination videos
✈️ A monthly newsletter with vacation package options.
Harnessing the power of your customer base is among the best ways to amplify your digital travel leads.
Online referral programs help to expand your customer base with minimal effort. The strategy is particularly impactful for premium or luxury services like holidays, where individuals are more inclined to choose a travel agent advised by a friend or family member.
Consider extending benefits to both the referrer and the referred customer by offering them discounts when the referred customer makes an online booking.
While the idea of offering discounts may seem daunting, a well-executed online referral program will help you save on your budget, while more qualified leads will compensate for the marketing costs. And the more appealing your referral incentives, the greater the influx of travel leads you're likely to attract.
If you are still asking how to get clients for travel agency, get in touch with our niche experts to help you through your digital marketing journey.
Content Marketing Manager at Promodo
Taras has 16 years of hands-on copywriting experience overseas with 3000+ unique copies.
Accredited with Certificate of Proficiency in English (C2 level) by Cambridge University. Studied at Writing Launch Academy (United States) and owns an Academic Writing Certificate from Oregon University. Author of 12 dictionaries with Apriori Publishers.
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