Welcome to Part 5 of our How to Grow Revenue Through Direct Bookings video series.
In our last video, Part 4: Building a Plan for Social Media, we shared how to build your social media strategy to drive direct bookings by looking at the competitive landscape, understanding customer behaviors, and using available data.
In this video, we’ll put that strategy into action.
Highlights of This Video: Direct Bookings with Social Media
Organic Social Tips
- Start with the channels you like to work on personally. While you need to be where your customers are, working on a platform you enjoy will give you the energy to kick off your plan and find your voice and rhythm.
- Ensure your posts are relevant to the consumer. Use the audience insights for each platform. This will help you create a customer persona for this channel that is most relevant to them.
- Social posts are exactly that—social! Tell a story and show an aspect of your business instead of selling your tour, activity, or attraction. Most of your posts should be fun and informative instead of asking your audience to click a link to book.
- Find the posts your readers liked the most by looking at your audience insights. The posts with more likes, shares, and comments are clues to writing the best topics for future posts.
- Don’t forget YouTube. Some of the industry’s largest advertisers, such as Vrbo, Hotwire, and Airbnb, spend the majority of their social media budgets on YouTube [source].
Paid Social Tips:
- In this video, find out what the Fogg Behavioral Model is and how it can help determine who you should target in your advertising and when.
- Seasonal changes: The changing of the seasons—especially in the northern hemisphere—is a great opportunity to inspire people to visit your tour or attraction. For example, the fall season brings visitors to see the changing of the leaves.
- The tourism shoulder season is a great time to segment your audiences and to advertise to couples who tend to look for getaways and things to do when their children are back in school or when they know that there will be fewer families and crowds.
- Great weather can be used to your advantage for outdoor tours and weather-dependent activities. If the weather is going to be great, it’s a reason to share this with your social audience and encourage them to visit. Weather ads can also be automated via platforms such as weather.io.
- Use your abandoned cart traffic—specifically consumers who went through all the stages to purchase but left at some stage during purchase, and connect directly with this audience through ads. You can serve audiences to help them along their journey (even provide a discount – if it makes sense) to complete a sale.
- TikTok – Like other social mediums, there are some great advertising tools on TikTok to influence direct bookings, such as dayparting (showing ads during the times of day your audience is most likely to convert) and hashtags.
- Leverage your DMO: Your local DMO (Destination Management Organization) probably has valuable audiences that they can share with you for your campaigns. Find out how you can ask your DMO to share their audience in the video.
Watch All The Videos In The Series
Part 1: Why Direct Bookings Fail and How to Change That
Part 2: Building a Search Marketing Plan Grounded in Real Data
Part 3: How to Use Search Marketing to Maximize Your Direct Booking Revenue
Part 4: Building a Plan to Optimize Your Social Media Presence for Direct Bookings
Part 5: Executing Your Social Media Direct Bookings Strategy
Part 6: Uncovering Opportunities on Your Website to Drive More Direct Bookings
Part 7: Top Tips For a Higher Converting Website
See all of the Growing Revenue Through Direct Bookings series here.
