The year-end is upon us, and our readers have voted! We’ve tallied up the most viewed, watched, and read posts of 2022 from the Blend Travel Marketing Blog. Every month, our marketing team creates a collection of detailed articles or videos, client spotlights, and easy-to-digest marketing tips. Our goal? To provide practical, actionable information for our tours, activities, and attractions operators so they can thrive.
Here’s a curated list of the most popular tourism marketing articles of 2022 (drum roll, please!). Perhaps you’ll discover some new resources from this list to help you along your tourism marketing journey:
Blend’s Most Popular Tours & Activities Articles & Videos of 2022
9. How to Use Search Marketing to Maximize Your Direct Booking Revenue [Part 3 of the Direct Booking Video Series]
The winning golden ticket for any tourism business is a direct booking, no commissions, no hassles, simply a completed sale on the website. This topic continues to be one of the most popular in our industry, so it’s no surprise it hits our top list.
This article (and video) is part of our Growing Revenue through Direct Bookings Series, a 7-part video series. The series shares several key strategies to get direct bookings and how to build a plan to execute those strategies.
In this installment; part 3 of this series, you’ll learn how to prioritize search marketing opportunities and build strategies for organic and paid search bookings. Watch and read How to Use Search Marketing for Direct Bookings here.
8. Why You Really Need to be Using Google’s PMAX Campaigns
2022 was a big year in advertising because of the impact of Google’s Performance Max (PMAX) Ads. No other advertising format has performed this well in a long time. Other industries have seen significant results from PMAX, and now tourism brands are unleashing the power of this Google ad platform. Find out what PMAX ads are all about and how they work. This is the ad format to consider complementing your advertising efforts. Read about PMAX campaigns.
7. The Missing Benchmark: Current Customer Demand (And How to Find It)
How do you review your business results accurately when your revenue hasn’t typically followed seasonal trends? Is your business doing well or not? Likely, you need to include a valuable piece of data. In this article, we share the missing link—current customer demand. You’ll discover how to find it so you can evaluate your business performance confidently. Learn about The Missing Benchmark: Current Customer Demand.
6. Building a Search Marketing Plan Grounded in Real Data [Part 2 of the Direct Booking Video Series]
Direct bookings are a continued theme in our top list of articles (and videos) of 2022 because it’s a huge topic in our industry. In this video, Ben Page, Director of Search Marketing, shares how to build a plan using free and unlimited data at your disposal to attract those valuable direct bookings. You’ll also learn about consumer behavior and the tools you can use to uncover what customers want. Watch Building a Search Marketing Plan.
5. Why Direct Bookings Fail and How to Change That [Part 1 of the Direct Booking Video Series]
This article is the foundation of direct bookings and the first video of our Growing Revenue through Direct Bookings Series, a 7-part series of building a strategy to enable direct bookings and how to execute a plan to get results. In this video, Blend’s Managing Director, Nate Andrew, introduces all elements of Direct Bookings and starts with why direct bookings often fail. Watch Part 1: Why Direct Bookings Fail and How to Change That.
Missed a video in the series? We’ve made it easy to catch up on the entire Direct Bookings Video Series.
4. When to Split Tourism Brands into Multiple Brands
Do you have any distinct types of tours or activities within your business? Have you ever wondered if splitting these into different brands could improve your business performance? This article answers when it’s an excellent time to start a new brand(s). We’ve included a specific example of how a Colorado tour company did just that.
Read about when it makes sense to split your brands into multiple brands.
3. 5 Steps to Website Data You Can Trust
Data is essential to make your marketing decisions and ultimately grow your revenue. Sometimes, though, data on Google Analytics is challenging to use, and at times, it can be outright inaccurate. This video tutorial with Blend partner and data expert Brian Nicholson shows how to ensure your performance data is accurate and trustworthy. Watch 5 Steps to Website Data You Can Trust.
2. The Top Misconceptions about Working with a Tourism Marketing Agency
Do you ever wonder how a marketing agency works? This is a transparent article about some common misconceptions about engaging in a client-agency relationship. We’ll even answer concerns like, “what am I getting for my money when I work with an agency?” Read The Top Misconceptions about Working with a Tourism Marketing Agency.
1. The Importance of Video in Tourism Marketing
Our number one article read by tours, activities, and attractions in 2022 is all about video. It’s no wonder, as video continues to be the most engaging and well-performing medium on tourism websites, organic social posts, and paid advertising. This article goes deep into how it can help your marketing with many examples that can be applied to any tourism business. Read the full article about video in tourism.
All-Time Favorites on the Blend Blog
It would be a miss not to mention a few more articles that remain popular year after year because they are still highly relevant to our readers. Here’s a selection of reader all-time favorites:
Why I’m Booking on Tripadvisor and Not Your Site
We hate to say it, but a lot of the time, we’d rather book on an OTA site than an operator’s site. This article covers seven reasons for that, and how to reverse it. Some of fixes are so easy that you could implement them today. Read: Why I’m Booking On Tripadvisor and Not Your Site.
Own the Map: The Tour & Activity Company’s Guide to Ranking #1 in Google Maps
How do you make it easy for potential customers to find your business when they are ready to buy? Improve your local SEO by learning how to rank on Google Maps. Read The Tour & Activity Company’s Guide to Ranking #1 in Google Maps.
The Guide to Remarketing for Tours and Activities Part 1
How does remarketing really work? We’ll get you up to speed with this introductory article, so that you’ll be able to talk confidently with your agency and your team about remarketing ads. Read The Guide to Remarketing for Tours & Activities.
What topics do YOU want to learn more about in 2023?
As we plan our articles and videos for 2023, we want to hear from you. What marketing challenges are you facing, and what tourism marketing topics do you want to learn? What burning questions do you wish you had answers or solutions to? Please get in touch with us and let us know. Let’s Chat.
Thanks for reading the Blend Travel Marketing Blog; wishing you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2023.
