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10 Tips For Tour and Activity Suppliers

With my background in travel and technology I can’t really help you with the business management or HR for your tour company. So to be fair, these are 10 tips that a SME Tour and Activity Suppliers can use to help market their business online.

1) Set your online foundation before getting online - Planning your web strategy before you dive right into the Internet will save you time and money. You have to know who you are accessing and what message you want to tell them, and what you want them to do with that message. A little consultation here can go a long way.

2) Make small steps - You don’t need to have the fanciest new flash driven high graphic website with its own community network interlinked with video etc. Start small, see how you can engage your target audience on a more personal level using established community sites like FaceBook, or TravBuddy.

3) Get your feet wet - If you are new to website creation or representing yourself online, you can still try it out. These days you don’t need to be a programmer and designer in order to have a decent looking site, but if it is in your budget, I would recommend bringing in some experts to help you out. If you are on a shoe string, consider using WordPress as a site management tool. You can download free templates and customize the look and feel quite easily.

4) Track your steps - How do you know how well your site is doing if you don’t see who is coming to your site. Some common measures are counting page views, but this really lacks any useful information. With tools like Google analytics being offered for free, it only makes sense to see who is coming to your site, which pages are the most popular, how long they are staying on your site and a whole world of other useful information. This data can help you evolve your site to maximize your goals.
5) Frequency = Success - Blogging is a great way to keep your site relevant, recent and allow your customers to gain a better sense of who they are doing business with. Another great advantage is that if you are blogging, the search engines will index your site more frequently. Being indexed frequently and having great keywords can result in a higher search engine ranking!

6) Structure your products - Let your customers know what you sell. Easy to follow clear product offerings are a great way to answer those secondary questions that customers have. Be sure to include pricing, dates times and places. Remember that transparency leads to trust.

7) Let technology do the work - Online Booking can let your website do the work for you. (Self Plug Start) You can utilize inexpensive powerful software like Rezgo to sell your products through your existing website. (Self Plug End) It is getting easier to sell online and what a great way to increase revenues by selling directly to your customers with no additional labour!

Grow your presence - Once you have established your website and have worked out the usability issues, structured your products and have online sales abilities you should consider spending some online marketing dollars. Working with the big three search engines (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) you can structure a very targeted and cost effective advertising campaign that will help to drive traffic to your website.

9) Stay engaged - Let your customers know what you are up to and give them an opportunity to respond. Have a newsletter that links to your blog articles and encourage your readers to post comments. (One great program that I use is iContact.) This will help to create a sense of community and gain more face time with your customers, thus helping you understand the people that pay you!

10) Have fun! - Be creative, think of unique ways that you can engage your customers and keep them coming back to your website. Maybe consider a photo safari where the best photo of your tour gets posted each week. The sky is the limit and the technology is more accessible then ever! HAVE FUN!

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