The inbound marketing methodology is all about understanding your ideal guests/customers so that you can use that understanding to attract more visitors to your website and, ultimately, convert those website visitors into paying guests at your tourism destination. But once you understand your buyer and the research process they go through while planning a trip, how do you actually bring them to your destination’s website? The answer is through content.
Free Guide: Inbound Marketing for Tourism
Everything You Need to Know to Increase Traffic, Capture Leads, and Gain More Customers and Bookings Through Your Tourism Destination’s Website
Content is an important component at every stage of the buyer’s journey, especially in inbound marketing for tourism destinations. It’s the message that you deliver through your inbound strategy: It’s the “stuff” that you put out on the web to both attract visitors to your website and then convert those visitors into customers.
What Counts as Content?
In the world of online marketing, the word “content” can mean a lot of things, and that’s because content can take many forms.
Ultimately, content is anything that you put up on your website with the intention of attracting, informing, entertaining, or influencing visitors to your website. Below is a list of some examples (that is definitely not exhaustive):
- Basic information on your website (such as your homepage, “About Us” page, directions to your destination, or FAQs).
- Blog posts on topics that your potential guests might find interesting.
- Social media posts sharing your blog content.
- Visual content, like images and video.
- Calls-to-action
- Ebooks, webinars, checklists, and other free content offers.
- Emails
The kind of content you would create for your website depends entirely on the kind of destination that you own. You need to take special care to only create content that your potential guests will find helpful or interesting; you can do this by truly understanding your guests and creating buyer personas to use in your brainstorming sessions.
How Content Drives Conversion
Content is critical to inbound marketing for tourism destinations for a couple of reasons. First of all, it attracts visitors to your website. And if it is successful, it will convert those visitors into actual paying guests.
Having a hard time visualizing the job that content performs? Let’s walk through how each type of content can help work towards converting your website visitors into customers.
Blog posts draw visitors to your website through organic search when your blog post answers a question that they are searching for. Once the visitor is on your blog, other content like additional blog posts, videos, images, etc. help to build trust and establish a relationship with your potential guest.
Then, basic information on your website (homepage, FAQs, directions, etc.) help your website visitors evaluate your destination as a potential place for them to visit.
Calls-to-action like buttons and banners encourage your website visitors to take the next step (signup for a newsletter, download a content offer, or just book a visit). Ultimately the goal is to convert the website visitor into a paying guest.
Free content offers like ebooks or webinars on subjects that your potential guests would find helpful or useful offer you the opportunity to capture contact information (names, email addresses), which you can then use to send them targeted automated emails designed to push them further along the process of becoming a guest.
And, of course, along the way things like newsletters and social media posts help you directly attract visitors to your website who maybe weren’t actively looking for destinations in the same way as those you attract through organic search.
Content Fuels Your Inbound Engine
Once you have set the framework for a successfully optimized website and begun creating content that will attract and convert visitors to your website into guests, your inbound engine will begin to take off. But this isn’t a one-time deal: You need to be consistently creating unique content that your potential guests find valuable, or else the engine will stall. Content is the fuel that your inbound engine needs if you are going to be successful.
Ready to get started creating great content? Check out this list of cheap or free tools you can use to create great content!
