Comprehensive Guide to Marketing Your Tours + Adventure Travel
From summer camps to snorkeling trips, cruises, and adventure vacations, marketing your tours and guided trips is a big job!
The Importance of Outdoor Education & Travel Experiences
As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.
Naturalist, Writer, and Advocate of Conservation
Project Highlights
As an educator or tour operator, you may be more challenged than ever to market your tours and fill spots in your programs. Travelers expect engaging content, memorable experiences, and high value for the cost of each trip! In addition to creating an incredible experience for tourists or student travelers, you may be responsible for creating all the marketing materials, managing social media channels, sending emails, and running ads. Furthermore, if you are part of a non-profit, your resources might be affected by a small budget and limited staff!
We experienced all this first-hand during our 20+ years working with large non-profit organizations such as NYC Parks & Recreation and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In addition, we’ve also had the opportunity to work with smaller non-profits such as the San Diego Mountain Biking Association and Outdoor Outreach. Lastly, we’ve helped for-profit clients like Maui Snorkeling, American Avalanche Institute, and Colorado Mountain School with marketing their tours and outdoor education programs.
What marketing your tours and trips might look like for a travel company, non-profit, or outdoor educator
Often you are not just marketing your tours. Or summer camps, bike trips, full vacation packages, or cruises. You may also be expected to sell apparel, tour add-ons, and other offerings. Furthermore, you may need to support the students, volunteers, and staff that make the magic happen at your organization!
Here are just a few examples of tour + travel marketing strategies we can support you with to drive more traffic to your website and increase revenue:
- Manage Printed Materials + Direct Mail Campaigns: Content creation + graphic design for your brochures, postcards, and flyers
- Optimize e-Commerce Websites: Develop a more customer-friendly booking experience with easy payment options
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Improve SEO to allow for your travel tours and experiences to appear in search
- Email Marketing: Creation of monthly email campaigns to announce your events, highlight tour guides, run promotions, etc.
- Google, Facebook, and Instagram Ads: Manage paid advertising across multiple platforms
Have a vacation package, cruise, travel tour, or summer camp programs you need help marketing this year? Drop us a line and let’s start at the trailhead together!
Goals
Tour operators, guides, and outdoor educators wear many hats. That of a teacher, coach, researcher, event planner, and fundraiser. Advertising and marketing your tours + programs are where we can help!
As a part of the team at the tour operators and non-profits mentioned above, we were able to meet big goals! Here’s just a few:
- 89% of outdoor recreational summer programs were booked within the first 3 weeks of launching a new e-commerce website!
- Summer camps were fully booked months before summer began, allowing for adequate staffing, training, and preparations
- Significant decrease in spending, elimination of printing full-color 20+ page brochures, plus mailing costs. Over $15K in cost savings!
- Reduction of staff time by 70%! Instead of spending time on the phone or in person with potential customers, staff was freed to work on other projects.
- Reached a new audience of kids and adults and generated brand awareness for client tours and adventure vacations!
How Do You Get Started?
Getting started with marketing your tours + adventure travel means finding a marketing partner who lives and breathes in your industry. Let’s chat!
We can help you stand out from the competition, and make it easy for potential customers to find you in a Google search. In addition, we can make your sign-up or checkout process super smooth and pain-free!