Are you already doing all five of them? Or do you need to step up your game?

During these uncertain times, an extra effort to attract travellers to your region is needed. Maybe in previous years your region’s beauty and attractions were already a magnet to visitors with little marketing, but now, with travelling restrictions and safety concerns, marketing what you have to offer to travellers is essential!

We gathered below 5 things you should be doing to attract travellers. You might be already doing some of these things, so we also included some insights to improve your strategy and keep your region in the visitor’s mind, even if they’re not planning on travelling right.

1. Promoting not only tourist attractions, but showing the local lifestyle

More and more, tourists want to get to know the real thing. They’re running away from tourist catered attractions and activities and searching for authentic experiences in the destination. That’s why AirBnBs, workshops, and private activities became so popular in the past years: it’s a way to connect with the local culture and people.

2. You should be selling experiences

The majority of travellers are motivated by experiences. Instead of showing them attractions, use your marketing material to show how people experience them. One way to do this is to encourage the sharing of user-generated content so that people share their own moments and experiences on your website and on social media. 

When you achieve this, you turn your own locals and visitors into ambassadors for your destination. Training front-line workers and tourism operators to understand and share these experiences with visitors is also an amazing way to market your region and boost your hospitality. Word of mouth promotion can be extremely successful! That’s because it is considered more trustworthy than hearing from an organisation with a clear motive. (P.S.: Did you know that the Experience Specialist Program was designed to help you achieve that? Check us out later!)

3. Using Pinterest as a marketing tool

Did you know travel is more popular on Pinterest than on other platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter? And still a lot of tourism associations are not using it. Pinterest might be famous between art-crafters, DIYers, and brides-to-be, but thousands of users go to the social media platform everyday to plan for their vacation and get holiday travel inspiration.

Travel and tourism are visual experiences, and in the era of the selfie, people want to visit beautiful places and capture them in memorable photos–and they usually plan on going to a specific region because of pictures they saw online! For this reason, Pinterest holds a huge advantage when it comes to the travel industry: it is designed especially for visual discovery. You should invest some time upfront to compile a lot of imagery and categorize them into boards, and add an image at the end of articles inviting people to pin it on their accounts. You can even advertise your pins to gather more attention!

4. Partnering with Influencers

We, as internet users, learned to have a natural distrust for direct virtual advertising, since it’s always interrupting our feeds, videos, and online newspaper, not to talk about all the scams practiced through sketchy advertising online. However, your target market might be able to be reached indirectly, through influencers: people with an established following on social media platforms, such as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or their own blog.

Their followers tend to be loyal and tend to trust the influencer’s opinions more than they would trust an organisation–or an ad that just interrupted their preferred content. By partnering with influencers, especially local ones that can show all your region has to offer, you can promote your destination across different platforms and get people to react more positively to the message that is being promoted since it’s being published by a real person, someone they trust and already follow.

5. Sharing drone footage and 360º virtual tours

Drone footage can show your destination from a privileged view. If your region has a lot of natural beauty or particular landscapes and attractions, hiring a specialized drone professional to shoot pictures and videos from up above is an investment that can attract a lot of attention–both to locals that might not realize how beautiful their region is and to tourists who would dwell into visiting it.

Especially important in pandemic times of travel bans and social isolation, virtual reality marketing goes a step further and provides ways for your target audience to actually experience aspects of your destination from the comfort of their own home. A virtual tour of a local hotel, a virtual travel experience of a boat ride, or 360 degree tours of attractions or landmarks can attract people to keep in mind to visit your region once it’s possible so they can experience all you offer upclose.

Ok, I attracted visitors. What now?

Now it’s the time to make them feel like home–and provide a great experience so they will tell their friends and family and come back another time! And we offer a license package special to help you your region thrive when it comes to visitor experience!

The Experience Specialist Program is your workshop in a box, a step-by-step program that will guide you through creating and marketing workshops for locals and front-line workers to ensure they are selling your region to its full potential. Make every visit and every dollar count. Discover all we offer and turn your locals into Experience Specialists!

Get to know more about the Experience Specialist Program and request your free marketing information package!