Internet marketing strategy for a small touring company

I agree. But since you are looking to increase the number of "former buyers", you need to communicate with potential buyers. In the US, people often take more time and care planning a vacation than they do major investments. Instead of worrying about people who have already been there and are unlikely to return, focus on finding the people who want to go there, but haven't been there yet.


Can you be a little more specific on how I can do this?
Add a blog to website? No one contacts me on social media or email asking for advice.

Do they know you can give them advice? If you want prospects to contact you, you have to invite them to do so.

Here's an example. Say you find a question on a forum or social site asking where they should go if they want to see volcanoes. Your island has volcanoes. You post back saying that your island has beautiful volcanoes and provide a link to a blog post with some of your photos. You also provide links to the volcano-related tours you offer, as well as a contact form for more information.

Another example. You mentioned that access to your island can be a bit tricky. You could do a blog post about the best way to get to your island, with links out to the airlines, etc. You add a soft call to action at the end offering links to your tour pages, letting people know some of the things you can offer. Very low key, non-spammy.


Thanks a lot for the valuable feedback.[/QUOTE]

You're quite welcome.

I totally get this miguelsoares. One of my clients is a medium sized transport provider & repeat sales are pretty much never going to happen. But I tell you what does happen. People talking. Especially travellers. If you get into a conversation with someone about a place you've been on holiday, what do you start doing? Recommending things. Just like on this site there's people spouting off about what tactics you should try when they haven't tried them personally; the same goes for travel forums. If someone sees you amazing posts and gets captured by it you can bet that if they hear of someone going to the Islands, you'll get recommended.

What you might also be able to do is from your past clients, start creating custom Facebook audiences. If the price per click works out cheap enough, broadcasting to a similar audience as your past customers can be a way to get people talking about your tours & amplifying that word of mouth recommendation.

Lastly, like I said, I just completed a trip in Bali almost purely directed by Instagram.I asked bar/cafe owners what the surrounding towns were within say an hours drive, #hashtag Instagram searched those towns and picked which one I liked most. From the look of your island it isn't any larger. Wouldn't be surprised if the younger end of your market, after hearing about the island, does and Insta search & *if* your content does a good enough job of grabbing them (and you've got some great imagery btw), they will hop over from the mainland on a whim to check it out. As John said, if its a little tricky, a follow up post where you help them get over will help you wonders. Perhaps even set up a deal with the local ferry (or whatever it is) saying, can you promote their ferry in your social marketing and in return they offer some sort of discount to your readers?


You are spot on the money. I've got first hand experience with this and there is no way you are going to convince a former customer to come back to the island, predominantly to take your tour again. Nor are there any real after-tour upsells you are going to be able to provide to maximise your profit. What you need to do is make sure EVERY customer you get is a walking-talking-singing-dancing advertisement for you and your tour.

Go out of your way to do EVERYTHING your competitors don't and give your customers as reason to rave about you. They may not be coming back; but they aren't going to shut up about you either. Get as many photos as you can on the tour (with your guests permission of course) and post them to your social media so other people can get a real feel what your tours are like on a continuing basis. Get you customers social handles if they have them and tag them, prompt them to join the conversation once they have completed your tour. Ask them to post their favourite bit in the comments.

One trick we employed for our client is, at the end of the tour say "now we've got one last thing to show/give you today; but first we ask our customers to fill out this card". Leave it at that. Nice and simple. On the card have *really* specific questions like "what did you enjoy most about your day?" & a small note saying that you can use the quotes etc in marketing.

Its great because you can get these made up really cheap and even print your own to mix up the questions every now and again. For example, once we did a batch of "please rate the attractions you saw today from 1 to 5 in order of preference". After we collected all the cards, not only did we have a load of data of what our customers prefer; we got a blog post - the Top 5 things to do whilst in X, rated by vistors - (readers don't need to know there were only 5 to choose from) and we tagged some of the customers in the posts. This went onto various social media sites, travel forums, and we sent it out to a few independent bloggers who were happy to take it as a guest post as it was unique, quality and based on real traveller data. The amount of exposure we gained for people looking to see X whilst in city Y was unbelievable. From a little card.

Anything I haven't addressed, John has already given you a great answer for.