Using Inbound Marketing for tourism businesses

Inbound Marketing is a technique that is increasingly popular with businesses, particularly in digital tourism. It is used to close long sales cycles or to attract qualified, targeted contacts through relevant content tailored to their concerns. Find out how this marketing strategy works.

The principle of Inbound Marketing

This is a long-term method: this content creation strategy aims to bring potential customers to you. When it is well executed, less prospecting is needed. The principle is to create quality content that offers real added value.

There are several channels you can use: social media, your blog, your newsletter and many others. Inbound Marketing lets you attract by capturing attention, then convert and build loyalty.

The benefits of Inbound Marketing are:

• starting a conversation with your target audience and creating a connection;
• gaining visibility on the internet;
• growing your contact list (targeted visitors you may one day convert into customers);
• building customer loyalty;
• lower costs;
• it is sustainable over time;
• it helps align your sales and marketing teams.

It is worth noting that in 2020, Inbound Marketing was the main approach for 74% of marketers.

The key elements of an Inbound Marketing strategy

To put a good strategy in place, you need to understand how Inbound Marketing works. It is based on 4 key elements.

The buyer persona

One of the main points is to clearly define your target audience and their expectations; everything will be based on this analysis. You therefore need to identify their main characteristics (age, gender, socio-professional category, geographical location, consumption habits and role in the company).

Content creation

First of all, you need to define the type of content you want to use (long and technical or short and easy to read), the format (video, infographics, images) and the medium (blog, social media, newsletter, podcast…). The medium you choose will determine the first two. Why? Because each medium has its own codes: you won’t write content the same way if you publish it on a blog, Instagram or LinkedIn.

It must address a real issue in order to attract prospects. Posts can be informative, educational and inspiring. 80% of the content should attract and interest the customer, compared with 20% “sales” content.

Hosting the content

This content must be hosted on a high-performing, user-friendly site. For example, if it is on a website, the website must be well referenced (with good SEO to ensure the content ranks well in search engines) and easy to use. If you use social media, you need to put in place a social media strategy and hashtags, and think about the visual design.

You also need to think about planning, because to have good visibility on the web, you need to be consistent. That is the golden rule. The technical side (posting frequency, when to publish, SEO, strategy…) is just as important as creating the content.

The user experience must be optimal for you to achieve your goals.

Marketing automation

Today’s digital resources make it possible to automate certain actions such as prospect acquisition, follow-up emails and scheduling your social media posts. This saves businesses time and increases their productivity.

It is important to choose your marketing automation tool carefully, because it will determine the workflow of tasks to be carried out and generate emails to contact your prospects at the right time; but above all, it will be able to analyze all the content to suggest areas for improvement.

Different levers for different goals

Inbound Marketing adapts to 4 main phases, each with specific levers. This is essential for your future customers’ buying process.

1. acquire visitors through content creation and SEO;
2. convert these visitors into leads with levers such as calls to action, forms and landing pages;
3. convert these leads into customers with lead scoring, email campaigns and marketing automation;
4. build customer loyalty with personalized content (for example, a birthday). It is important to maintain a relationship of trust and good communication with your customers.

Inbound Marketing is a method that takes time and requires many skills. To make sure a good strategy is put in place and that it is profitable for your business, this is the kind of task that is best delegated to a professional.

Julie
Communication Manager
In partnership with Jennifer Therond