bookingkit Marketing Challenge: Essential Marketing Measures for Tour and Activity Operators

Already have a great selection of tours, activities and events up and running? Already using booking to manage your listings, bookings and resources? With these two major business boosters already out of the way, you might find yourself wondering what other marketing tools and measures there are out there that you could be using to improve your services and grow revenue. Well, you’re in luck. Introducing…the bookingkit Marketing Challenge!
Below, we’ve put together a list of essential measures categorized by difficulty and time to help you take your marketing strategy from zero to pro. For best results, we recommend tackling each measure one at a time and trying to get into the habit of implementing them properly and consistently before moving on to the others.

LEVEL: BEGINNER

Create a Google Business Profile to improve the discoverability of your activities

When potential customers use Google Maps or Search to search for your business or for tours and activities which are similar to the ones you offer, your Business Profile appears in a prominent position in the Maps search results. This is an incredibly powerful way to generate new business, but it only works if you have a Google Business Profile. If you don’t, you can create one quickly, easily and completely free of charge, which makes it an essential first step in improving your marketing game. Start by creating a Google My Business account, if you don’t already have one. Your Google My Business account is where you manage all your Google Maps listings. The most important thing is to make your Google Business Profile as informative and media-rich as possible. That means adding well-written descriptions and lots of good pictures and videos.
Challenge: create a Google My Business account and fill your Google Maps listing with high-quality content
Time requirement: about 60 minutes

Learn more about Google My Business

Get the most out of your customer touch points with great visuals

As the saying goes: a picture is worth a thousand words. And this is especially true in marketing. Which is why you should spruce up your listings, website, social media pages, coupons and newsletters with great-looking pictures. Try to keep things fresh by regularly replacing old pictures with new ones for all your tours and activities — not just for special events. To get started adding pictures across all your channels, use existing pictures from your own tours and activities (if you have them) or hire a professional photographer to create a series of shots for you. You can also find suitable images on online stock photo platforms, and some will even let you use their images for free for commercial purposes.
Challenge: create a photo collection with 15 different shots for your tours and activities
Time requirement: about 1 hour
Some popular stock photo platforms:
https://www.pexels.com
https://unsplash.com
https://pixabay.com
https://pikwizard.com

LEVEL: BRONZE

Engage in local marketing partnerships

If your customers tend to combine your tours and activities with other services in your area, you can easily start cashing in on this trend with the bookingkit Partner Program, which lets you cross-sell tours, activities and events from other operators and earn an attractive commission on each booking! At the same time, other partners on the network are able to promote and sell your activities and put you in touch with new customers. Leverage your customers’ interest in your tours and activities to suggest other services to them and start growing your revenue today!
Challenge: activate the bookingkit Marketing Network and select 3 add-on tours and activities for your listings
Time requirement: about 15 minutes

Click here for more Information

Activate the bookingkit marketing network now

Starting compiling your catalog of add-on tours and activities

Create a dedicated section for vouchers and coupons on your website

As you probably already know, bookingkit provides plenty of features for selling tour and activity vouchers. But how about creating your very own voucher shop? To do this, start by creating a series of activity listings without any defined date or time so that the “Buy Vouchers” button appears next to each listing. Then create a dedicated page or section on your website (e.g. “Voucher Shop”) for these listings and add links and attention-grabbing graphics to let customers know it’s there.
Challenge: create a new Voucher Shop page on your website and create 3 voucher listings to display there (remember to leave the date and time undefined)
Time requirement: about 15 minutes to create the vouchers + 1.5 hours to set up a new page on your site

Click here to learn more about creating your own voucher shop

LEVEL: SILVER

Establish a routine with annual planning and templates

If you’ve already identified the peak season for your tours and activities and you already know which holidays and occasions are best for bookings and selling vouchers, then you already know what to expect in the months and years to come. Instead of throwing together special offers right before Valentine’s Day or Easter, starting prepping for the entire year now, right through to Christmas. There are a lot of features and measures you can use for this, including voucher templates, prefab text blocks, dedicated pages, teaser banners, newsletters, special offers and thematic merchandise. Generate all your material and content in one go and simply use what you need when the time comes.
Challenge: create an annual plan + a photo collection for Valentine’s Day, Easter and Christmas + a dedicated page on your site for Christmas
Time requirement: about 4 hours

Get your copy of the bookingkit Valentine’s Day Checklist

Keep in touch with existing customers with the bookingkit Email Campaign Manager

Existing customers represent an important source of revenue for your business. Not only are they already familiar with your products and services, it’s also less expensive to keep old customers coming back than it is to acquire new ones. To ensure that your communication with these customers is GDPR-compliant, the bookingkit Email Campaign Manager provides a range of built-in features which completely remove the guess-work, including recipient lists, available tours and activities, GDPR-compliant content and premade designs. Five clicks is all it takes to create a new email campaign. bookingkit also uses a direct marketing exception and a written statement at checkout (as of October 24, 2018) to collect email addresses for future campaigns.
Challenge: familiarize yourself with the Email Campaign Manager and create a Christmas campaign
Time requirement: about 30 minutes

Start creating an Email Campaign

LEVEL: GOLD

Cross-selling during booking

From T-shirts and coffee mugs to refreshing beverages and snacks, selling add-on products with your tour and activity bookings is a simple and effective way to boost revenue. The Cross-Selling module even lets you make and sell high-quality printed vouchers for tours and activities.
Challenge: activate the Cross-Selling module and create two add-on product listings (we recommend starting with drinks and snacks)
Time requirement: about 30 minutes

Add new content regularly to improve your search ranking

Here’s the rule of thumb when it comes to content: the more current your descriptions and posts are, the more valuable they are to Google’s search algorithm. To increase the likelihood that potential customers will find your website, you should update — or at least change — your content and media regularly. The best way to do this is to create a dedicated page or section for current news and information and to keep older content in your blog or news archive. Even something as small as making thematic changes for Christmas, Easter and Summer can go a long way to improving your ranking. And if you don’t feel like writing new content yourself, you can easily hire someone else to do it for you.
Challenge: write 2 new posts per month for the coming 3 months
Time requirement: about 3 hours if you do it yourself / about 1.5 hours if you use a content creation service
Popular content service:
https://www.textbroker.com