There is a common problem in the tourism industry and its when travel and tourism brands:
choose “every traveler” as their tourism target market. (also known as your target guest or target audience)
This strategy does not work.
It is impossible to be relevant to everyone, so why do they exhaust their efforts and waste money by trying to attract everyone?
I get it, it’s hard enough to find new guests – and maybe tourism businesses don’t want to be picky – after all, who wouldn’t want to take a new guest at any time?
However, not all tourism brands will fit every guest. And not every guest will fit a tourism business.
So that is ok, because guests – your tourism target market- have different wants and needs.
When you try to appeal to everyone, it costs more in marketing dollars, it costs more to develop your tours to suit different audiences, or as a hotel you spend money on advertising or room amenities specific to the different audiences.
So in order to avoid these issues, you need to choose a specific tourism target market – choose your ideal guests and develop guest personas.
A guest persona is a description of your ideal guest and it goes beyond describing their demographics. your goal here is to understand what makes them tick. A guest that we want to ENGAGE with instead of INTERRUPT THEM.
Why You Should Create a Guest Persona to create your tourism target market
So, we can speak directly to the person(s) that best resonate with your brand.
1. Back to our point about branding: Our goal is that we want the guests to come to you that GET YOU.
They will be the ones that like you more BECAUSE THEY WILL enjoy their experience with you and likely to come again and recommend you.
2. The second reason why we will go through this exercise is that the information you gather in the creation of your guest persona will be tremendously valuable to you.
Developing a guest persona will allow you to create better and more relevant:
- Website Copy
- Facebook and social media content
- Customer service and responses to guests
- Advertising and your sales materials
- Tours, or amenities you offer
- It will SAVE Money instead of a blanket approach of trying to be relevant for everyone.
Without a doubt, your Facebook ads, your google ad, your sales materials will be a waste of money if you don’t go through this exercise.
If this problem resonates with you, we have a great community group of tourism professionals in hotel, tours, attractions, events, and transportation businesses. In this group, we discuss and solve tourism marketing problems. We would love you to join us, its completely free – it’s a place we can all learn something new.
Send us a comment if this tourism problem resonated for you and if you need help defining your tourism target market, let us know.
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