Social media and paid search campaigns are a great way to create awareness and attract traffic to your website to boost bookings, particularly if you have a special offer or you have a seasonal campaign in mind. 

Let’s look at the key components for planning a campaign and apply it to a Mother's Day campaign. If you follow this basic approach each time, you will find it easy to build and implement campaigns regularly to meet any marketing objective and it will become a key tool for marketing your tourism business.

1. Identify your Target Audience 

Determine who your target audience is and what they might be interested in. In the case of a Mother’s Day campaign your target audience may be anyone with a Mum living in New Zealand (or you may break it down by region). With...

If you are looking for truly effective ways to attract bookings, then the answer will lie in understanding the process your target customers go through to make a booking. Having insight to this decision process then allows you to plan a marketing strategy that will resonate with travellers to achieve bookings time and time again!

This brings us to "The 5 Stages of Travel".

Foundation for Marketing: A Travel Cycle

Tourism and travel is the second most common reason why people use the internet. It's an incredibly fast and reliable way of sourcing information about travel destinations, and making the necessary bookings.

As the internet is so highly utilised for travel and tourism, Google spent two years researching the travel experience. They found that: 

• Almost all...

All-inclusive packages and Gift Vouchers are a popular and growing trend in tourism again! Travellers love the convenience and ease of booking that two-night romance package that includes a sunset cruise and dinner or that super combo hike and bike tour in just one click.

And with the new ‘revenge travel’ mindset post covid and Tourism New Zealand’s on-going voucher promotion, buying Gift Vouchers as a present for experiences and travel is hitting an all-time high.

Step One

So how can you benefit from these trends? First, find out if your booking engine has Gift Voucher capability and “upsell/add-on/packaging capability. If not, Tomahawk can help with a free Gift Voucher Module.

Step Two

The second step is to create irresistible packages that add value to the current...

Digital marketing is essential to creating more awareness of your brand and what you offer. The biggest challenge for small businesses is attracting the right people to find your business online. In the scope of tourism, digital marketing plans and strategies are all about The 5 Stages of Travel. Besides making an effort to create engaging content on your social media or website, it’s always important if the high-quality content can reach your customers before your competitors do!  

The key objective is to make sure that your website can be found at the top, and on the first page when people search for what they want or need. To better achieve this, you can use both organic and paid search strategies.  

What are the differences between organic and paid search...

Digital Marketing or "online marketing" for tourism has now become the key marketing focus at all stages of a traveller's interaction with your business.

If you think about this customer journey in marketing terms, and more specifically for tourism marketing, we talk about The 5 Stages of Travel which include: Dream, Plan/Research, Book, Experience and Share.

The 5 Stages of Travel

There's a lot of information about digital marketing and plenty of sources of advice - it can actually seem a bit over-whelming to try and figure out your own digital marketing strategy! This guide is aimed at providing an "overview" of all the different components that might make up your digital marketing plan, with links to information on topics you may want to delve into further.

Digital...

For many years the primary focus for building reviews for tourism businesses has been with Tripadvisor listings. However the ways in which travellers now access information and reviews about your tourism business has evolved.

Travellers no longer solely use Tripadvisor - now they will make judgement calls from a variety of review sources including Facebook (pages and friend referrals), Instagram, OTA review listings, and most prominently, from your Google Business Profile.

Why Google Reviews are important for your tourism business

Your business reviews are part of the Google local search results.

For travellers, local search is a vital tool for both travel research and as a guide when on the road. Your Google Business Profile will appear in results along with your...