Get to Know the Ideal Customer for Your Tour Business

Marketing has changed a lot since it has moved to the internet. Old advertising technics aren’t that effective anymore for the travel industry.

Besides ad blockers, marketers should also overcome modern phenomena such as ad fatigue and banner blindness.

In 2021, travelers want to engage with meaningful content that will inspire them to book their next trip. Creating the right content, in the right format for the right audience is the way to go to acquire new customers.

Although traditional marketing is losing power online, its foundations are still relevant for digital marketing. Creating marketing personas, for example, is something that will help you achieve your marketing goals.

What is a marketing persona?

A marketing persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers that shares the most common characteristics of them.

The idea is to create a customer profile with name, age, background, motivations, interests, and other personal characteristics.

For example, you can create a persona called Backpacker John. A 26 years old guy who works in a marketing agency and wants to meet the world.

Of course, a marketing persona has more details. That is to help you focus your marketing efforts.

How can a marketing persona help my tour business?

When you are planning a new marketing campaign, developing a new product, thinking about a new experience or tour to offer, it’s much easier if you have a single person in mind rather than a crowd.

That is the role of a marketing persona. It personifies your target audience to help you humanize your marketing efforts and allow you to better reach your ideal customer.

You can also use marketing personas when creating content for your audience. Each persona has a preferred content format and a channel to consume it.

Using a persona in your content marketing strategy helps you eliminate the confirmation bias and deliver high-quality content to your audience.

How can I create a marketing persona?

Before creating a persona, you should have all the information you can about your market and your own customer base. That will give you valuable insights during the process.

For that purpose, do market research and interview your customers. You can use tools such as SurveyMonkey to send research forms directly to the respondents.

It’s a good practice to create one persona for each major demographics. That gives you something around 1 to 5 profiles.

Be careful! Too many personas can make you lose focus. Few of them and your strategy will not be that accurate.

You can use make my persona to assist you in building your marketing personas.

1. Filling the basic demographic information

The starting point is filling in the basic demographic information of your marketing persona. Use your experience and the data collected to add its age, gender and location.

With this basic information in mind, you will be able to go deeper into the persona’s profile later.

To better illustrate this process, imagine that the ideal customer for a trekking tour business is a 26-year-old man who lives in Denver, CO named John. Let’s call him Backpacker John.

2. Creating a background

The next step is adding a background to your persona. Think about its job, education and family.

Giving context to your persona will assist you in creating content that talks straight to your target customer.

Let’s say Backpacker John is a marketing analyst who has a bachelor’s in management. At the moment he is single and has no children.

3. Going deeper into your persona

You need to understand what motivates your ideal customers in order to determine why they would buy your products or services.

The information added on this step will help you create content that your audience can identify with. It also helps you develop new products according to your customer’s needs.

Backpacker John’s dream is to travel the world. He has a huge desire to meet new places, people and cultures.

4. Understanding their online behaviour

This is very important for you to deliver the right content in the right place to your audience.

Where do your customers spend their free time online? Which social media do they use? Do they prefer watching a video or reading an article?

Back to our example, Backpacker John is a millennial who spends a lot of time on Instagram seeing pictures of travel influencers. He also loves watching videos on youtube showing exotic destinations and reading meaningful articles on Medium about how travel experiences change people’s life.

Conclusion

Creating marketing personas for your travel business is fundamental to focus your marketing efforts and have better results.

Start with the basic demographic to shape your persona. Next, add a background that best represents your ideal customer, and finally the channels your persona is present online.

The example in this article just scratches the surface of creating a persona. More details you add result in more accurate marketing strategies.

To guide you in creating a complete marketing persona for a travel business, download this worksheet that we have prepared specially for you.

Originally published at https://www.orioly.com on February 3, 2021.