1. Plan Your Paid Search Budget Well
Manage your budget carefully so that you have more to spend during the summer, particularly at the start of the year when people are planning and booking their trips -- plus you may get some late opportunities in August when you can scoop up last minute bookings.
2. Don't Settle for the Sale Alone, Build Relationships
So if you've delivered great travel service, stay in touch with your customers. Send them e-mail offers, welcome their feedback, and remind them to book again the following year.
Chances are that if you served them well once, they will book with you again.
3. Invite Reviews
Again, the web allows people to read more about their specific travel destination than ever before -- and they will search for reviews. Don't risk losing them from your site before the sale because they go looking for a review elsewhere. Give them what they want. Encourage satisfied customers to post a review of their trip on your site so new customers will be able to book with confidence.
4. Let People Share Content
It's not just reviews that get people coming back to your site. Why not encourage happy travelers to leave photographs to inspire future customers? You could run competitions for the best travel picture each season and award a prize (perhaps a small discount on their next trip).
5. Run a Travel Blog
Travel content containing lists and photos always works incredibly well to generate social media traffic and natural links. Here are some sites that will all help inspire a sense of possibility and excitement in your clients:
Many people want to do more than sit on a beach two weeks every year, but lack ideas. A blog is the perfect platform to inspire.
6. Make Use of Affiliate Marketing
Whether it's a travel comparison site, a blog, or a highly specialized website devoted to a particular travel niche, there's often good value for money in making use of affiliates.
7. Show You Care
Make sure your e-mail marketing is targeted to their demographic. If they booked two adults and two kids onto a family friendly cruise last year, there's probably not much point in offering them an adults-only trip to some island of excess.
8. Join up Your Online and Offline Marketing
Online and offline promotions should complement each other if you want your budget to work as hard as possible.
9. Usability Has Never Been so Important
One thing many travel sites fail to do is let people search by their own criteria. Not everyone knows what destination they want. Instead, they want to pick some dates and see some offers. Others may want to state their budget and be offered deals within that amount.
Make it easy for them to choose their trip based on their criteria, not yours.
10. Optimize for the Long Tail
Search engine optimization is hugely important for successful travel websites and it's most definitely worth targeting the more niche phrases. People search for some pretty specific stuff when they're looking to booking a vacation, so this is a perfect opportunity to optimize your pages. For example, [cheap flights] will be very hard to rank for but [cheap flights to Berlin], [cheap flights to Moscow], [cheap flights from London] -- these will be slightly less competitive. On top of that, you're targeting customers who are expressly interested in what you're offering and likely to be toward the latter stages of the travel buying cycle.
