Earlier this week I evaluated the marketing strategy in my travel business. It’s a competitive environment out there in the world of online travel and I need these travellers to find and purchase my travel product or service rather than my competitors
I started looking at the definition of marketing in Wikipedia.
1 Discern consumer desires
2 Design product or service to fulfil these desires
3 Direct consumers to purchasing your product or service.
It’s all very well reading three apparently simple marketing steps but the trick is how you translate these into actions that will be effective for your travel business.
I believe that there is a niche for Europe a la Carte in providing information to travellers who want to experience authentic travel in Europe on a modest budget. I see the rise in the value of the euro against the dollar and sterling as an opportunity for me to attract travellers who want to squeeze more of off their holiday euro but still travel in relative comfort. Also more UK residents are considering taking holidays on home shores and my site has a lot of content about Scotland.
Therefore in order to follow step 2 of fulfilling the desire of travellers to visit authentic Europe on a modest budget I write destination guides to less well known cities and regions where travellers can experience more of the real Europe away from the tourist crowds and inflated prices.
The blog plays a crucial part in part 2 by offering readers posts giving tips and advice about destinations, travel deals, accommodation and links to useful resources.
With regard to step 3, that should follow logically on from the content of the site and blog if my content can be found through the search terms used by potential site visitors. Around 50% my site traffic comes in through the blog, making it a crucial part of my marketing strategy.
With more than half of my site traffic coming from search engines keyword identification and search engine optimisation are crucial. However I find that visitors referred to my site stay longer and look at more pages highlighted the importance of having links on other sites and blogs.
However merely driving traffic to the site is not my aim, I need a percentage of visitors to go on to purchase accommodation, car hire or insurance through the affiliate links and/or click on ads on the site in order to generate revenue. I find that it’s contextual text links that bring the most revenue. You can’t just stick a few banners on your site and expect that to be effective.
You can see that my blog is an excellent fit in my marketing strategy as it is an integral part of satisfying my visitors desire for information to assist them in planning authentic travel in Europe on a modest budget through the content of the blog posts. The blog contains some Google Ads and affiliate links which generate revenue. The blog also has links into the destination guides and search and book facilities in the main site with the likelihood of further revenue generation there.
You really have to ensure that your blog is a good fit with your marketing strategy to maximise the potential of your blog to justify the time and effort you have to spend to research and write quality, unique content for the blog.
