Tourism Lead Generation – The Importance of Your Website
An engaging website is vital in tourism lead generation.
In this post you will learn how to create a winning website for your tourism business.
Tourism Lead Generation – Overview
More than 80% of prospective tourism customers start their research on the internet.
If you want to attract a part of this potential audience, then you should create an inspiring website for your tourism business.
For effective tourism business lead generation, your website should inspire an aspiring traveler to select 2 things;
- The destinations that you are offering over other destinations, and
- Your business as their service provider, over your competitors.
If you want to achieve this, you should have the following important components and features on your tourism business website.
How to Create a Tourism Website Suitable for Lead Generation?
Design & Content
- Professional and elegant design
This is the most important trait for a tourism business website.
The initial few seconds are very important during a website visit. Your website visitors are not going to stick around for long if your website design is poor.
A visitor just scans the site during the initial few seconds. Only a good design can grab visitor attention and lead them to important information on the website.
When you create your tourism business website make sure your website gets a professional design. It may cost you bit more money, but a good design is definitely a great investment for a bright future.
It takes a lot of effort to get an interested visitor on your website, but you can lose him easily just because of poor website design.
2. Fresh and Interesting Content
People visit websites for information. Your website should have riveting content to grab visitor attention and retain them on the site.
Your website should provide clear, easy to understand and enough information to help your visitors to make a purchase decision.
Tourists will be looking for information about four major aspects.
Destination – Attractions and Activities
You must learn to effectively sell your destinations first, if you want to be successful in tourism business.
Selling your services is secondary!
The biggest attraction in tourism business is the destination. People will look for all sorts of information about their travel destination.
Tourists will be eager to learn more about local tourist attractions in your destination. They will be interested to know what they can see and experience when they visit the place.
You should provide extensive information about local history, attractions and activities on your website.
This information will be a major factor in persuading a prospective tourist to select your destination and eventually your services as a local guide and tour provider.
Specific Interests and Categories
Tourists will have different tastes and interests when they consider a tourist destination. They will be looking for different types of attractions as per their tastes. So you should segment and include details of all available attractions and activities on your site which will be appealing to a wide range of target audience.
Based on availability, categorise tours like family tours, honeymoon tours, adventure tours, wildlife tour or luxury tours. You can also segment tours based on their geographical state like beach tours, mountain tours, hill station tours or backwater tours.
You can also categorise based on activities – Skiing tours, snorkeling tours, biking tours, trucking tours, hiking tours and more.
Provide detailed information about available activities if you provide cruises, diving lessons, safaris, or sky diving tours.
Also include information about local food, events, music and art forms, which will be appealing to lots of visitors.
These information will be the vital ingredients in your tourism lead generation process.
Travel, Accommodation and Other Information
One of the other major concerns for tourists is travel facilities.
So include details about nearest airports and travel facilities available within the destination on your site. Also share information about cost and availability.
Another major concern for tourists is accommodation. If you provide hotel booking services, share details.
Else share details about available options and price.
Share information about weather, currency, language, culture and security.
All this information will help potential tourists to choose your destinations and your services.
Your Services and Offers
Once the destination and activities decided, tourists will look for details about the services that you offer.
Give clear and transparent information about your services. Creating and delivering trust among customers will be the biggest asset for any tours and travel company.
If you provide customised services as per client’s needs, then share that information separately.
Add detailed itinerary and related information on your site. And then highlight your best offers.
Pro tip: Always keep fresh and updated content on you site. This is a great way to showcase your expertise and credibility.
3. Photos, Videos and Maps
Photos and videos can offer glimpses of the ‘real tour experience’ to prospective tourists.
They are the best tools to attract tourists during their initial research phase. These visual elements can effectively convey the true ‘spirit’ of tours to customers.
The quality of your photos and videos are as important as your website design. Low quality photos and videos will put off a lot of potential customers.
Try to include tourists in your photos (do not just include plain destination photos). Add photos of tourists enjoying some tour activity. This will help your website visitors to relate themselves directly to the ‘tour experience’, increasing the possibility of purchase.
Interactive maps are also a welcome addition as a lot of people will be interested in them.
4. Readability & Presentation
This one should go with your professional website design. The extra mention here is because of it is important.
Make sure the font and the colour you use on your site is easy on the eye. Make sure the content on your site is clear and readable.
Use bullet point so it will be easy for users to scan your website and understand the content fast. Use images and videos to break large chunks of content. This will make it easier for users to read.
Better Website Functionalities to Increase Lead Generation
1. Easy navigation, finding information should be very easy
Information on your site should be divided to separate categories. All main categories should be accessible from the home page. The website structure should help visitors to find specific information very easily.
2. Optimize your site for mobile
Now people use mobile devices, more than they use computers. Your entire site (design, fonts, images, videos and call to action buttons) must be optimized to give best possible user experience on mobile devices. This is very important for the future as mobile searches are growing at a very fast rate.
3. Your site must be very fast
If your site takes longer to load, that will be a big drawback. Especially when a user is accessing your site using a mobile device or slow internet connection. Even search engines will penalise slow websites. So make sure you optimize your site, images and videos to load faster.
4. Browsers & Screen Compatibility
Your site should be optimized for different web browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Mozilla, Safari) and display screen resolutions as your website visitors can use any browser and screen.
5. Contact Information
Make sure your contact information can be found easily on your website. Display your phone number on top of the website header, easily visible for your prospective customers.
Create a separate ‘Contact Us page. Include your complete business address, phone numbers, email addresses and chat/message tools (like Skype, Messenger or WhatsApp) on this page.
Reviews and testimonials
Reviews and testimonials are a great way to show your service expertise and how your customers value it. This is a great way to boost your credibility in front of potential customers. But don’t overdo this as it may have a negative impact on visitors.
Contact Us Forms and Call to Action Buttons – Important Tools in Lead Generation
Even after finding detailed information on your website, potential tourists will have questions that they need answers.
Customers will be reluctant to ask their questions over phone during the initial phase of their interaction with their tour provider. Lots of them will prefer to start the interaction over e-mail, collect more information and then talk to you directly.
So provide them an additional option to contact you, other than your phone number.
A ‘Contact Us’ form will be an ideal tool here, which will help you to generate leads from potential customers. A thoughtfully designed data collection form will help you to convert your website visitors to customers. Have a look at a simple contact us form below.
With these types of simple forms you can collect necessary information and start a very meaningful conversation with your prospective customers.
The information or requirements provided in the ‘comments’ section of the form will help you to identify the actual requirement of your customers. This will help you to create a customized plan. This will save a lot of valuable time during your initial interactions.
It is always advisable to create simple contact us forms. But make sure the link to ‘Contact Us’ page is visible on every page of your website, where visitors can easily find them. As these forms are very important in lead generation, test them regularly and make sure they are functioning properly.
The information you collect using these forms are very sensitive (personal identifiable information). So create and follow a strong privacy policy to protect your customer’s privacy. Include these policies in the privacy statement on your website. If you are in Europe, you should follow the guidelines as per GDPR.
Once the form is filled and submitted by a user, take them to a separate Thank You page. Create a separate ‘Thank You’ page, rather than a ‘Thank You message. This page will help you to accurately track leads from your advertising campaigns later.
You will be able to create custom destination goals in analytics, if you have a separate Thank You page. Or you can implement conversion tracking codes on this page the track the number of leads generated from a digital channel or campaign.
Look at the example above. The green button with the ‘submit’ text is called a ‘Call to Action’ button. You can use any suitable wording on this button (it is advisable to avoid ‘Submit’ (used in the example) as your call to action text as this is the text redundantly uses across millions of websites, and lost its charm). You can use ‘Send’, ‘Get in touch’, Start Planning, Get Started or similar suitable call to action text.
Test different button colours and button text. Sometimes minor changes to these elements can dramatically increase conversion rates.
Professional Business Email
You can choose any email service provider, but make sure your business email id comes with your official business domain name. For example your business website is ‘www.mytourismbusiness.com’, then your business email ID should be ‘yourname@mytourismbusiness.com.
Your potential customers may not take you seriously if your email id is from a generic free email service provider, like yourname@gmail.com.
Reliable Web Host and Up Time
Make sure your website is up and running every day, every time. This is very important in tourism business as your customers will be visiting your site from around the globe and from different time zones.
It will be a disaster when you spend a lot of time and effort to attract your prospective customers to your website and the customer finds your site is not available. This will be more critical when you run paid marketing ads, pay for each click, and your potential customers see a broken site. So make sure your website is hosted by a reliable web hosting company.
Enable Web Analytics
There are some incredible web analytics tools completely free of cost, like Google Analytics. Use it to measure your website and website traffic performance.
Information from these tools will give great insights about your customers, which you can use to optimize your website, web traffic and ultimately your tourism business lead generation processes.
Now create your user friendly website and start generating high quality leads for your tourism business!