San Diego’s weather, beaches, craft breweries and cultural activities make the city the perfect vacation spot, boasting over 34 millions visitors per year, according to the San Diego Business Journal. While including those seasonal customers in your target market is crucial, targeting travelers can also be a little tricky. It is not possible to establish a long-lasting relationship with them, nor is creating a positive brand experience all year long since they are in town just temporarily. You need to act fast and grab their attention at the right time.
To make an impact on your seasonal customers, your communication needs to be timely and relevant. Thanks to today’s technologies, it is now possible to have a very focused campaign and talk to people that will have interest in your product during their decision-making process. For example, they will most likely look for and decide on a place to eat when they get hungry, but will plan on what museum to visit before they depart on their trip. By using search engine history to know what activities they are planning while on vacation, it then becomes easy to place targeted ads about an exposition, a concert or any type of attraction or product you would like to promote.
Once visitors are in town, using geo-targeting information will help you to push your content to your audience using their geographic location. It is a very personalized and efficient way to start a conversation. By using their location, you can predict their needs and be more relevant. Knowing about your audience’s behaviors is important in order to be able to target them at the right time and with the right content.
When geotargeting, you can also easily guess the type of audience you will target based on the venue and time. Lunch places in downtown during the weekday? Business people. The Zoo during the weekend? Families. This a good way to find your target market.
Facebook ads are very geo-targeted. Not only does Facebook have information on users about what they like to do, their age, gender and relationship status, but Facebook can also easily know if they are visitors or locals. Using geotargeting information is a great tool to increase knowledge about your audience that will help adapt your communication toward them and increase engagement.
Tourists also lean on recommendations from other people. Yelp and other review sites are getting a lot of attention. Make sure your business is on it and you are managing it well. Gather reviews and encourage recommendations from customers to help build your network.
Remember, be mobile-friendly. Most of the content tourists are going to search for will be through their smartphone. Make sure your content is easily readable, personalized and relevant to your target audience.
Summer is around the corner, and Oster and Associates can help you put together a digital marketing campaign. Contact us to learn how we can best help you reach out to the tourist market.
