The term “marketing” is as broad as the day is long, and deciding where to put your time and budget to attract consumers and turn that attention into the all-important goal of bookings can be overwhelming.
As we kick off 2024, we want to feel like we’ve got our ducks in a row to make the most of the year ahead.
Social media marketing plays an important and valuable role in the UK market, and building your strategy around a platform such as Instagram, Facebook or TikTok can help give you a first-class ticket to maximising your efforts and driving your business forward.
The digital world has become central to how we shop: the consumer’s path-to-purchase journey has four phases: inspiration, research, planning and booking.
SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE PURCHASING JOURNEY
At the start of 2023, the UK had 49.45 million people aged 18-plus using social media. That’s 92.4% of the 18-plus total population, and they spend an average of 1 hour and 56 minutes per day on it.
In an increasingly digital world, these figures are only projected to rise. The top half of the process, inspiration and research, is digitally-led with social media coming out on top throughout.
This is where travel agents can start the process of guiding consumers on their journey, for example, in the inspiration stage, sharing short-form content such as beautiful images that engage your target audience, and then supporting their research stage with educational content which will be longer-form and provide more information which can be written or visual, and even leverage features like the Instagram Stories “Questions” function so you can respond to specific things your audience wants to know.
The second half of the process, planning and booking, is where consumers tend to move to online booking websites and apps.
To keep the consumer on their journey directly with you as an agent, and support the planning phase, you can create content such as itineraries, and move this through to bookings via several means. These include community management by responding to comments and messages, using features like “linkinbio”, Stories features like “Link” and profile set-up features like “Contact Options” and “Action Buttons”, which can be tailored for your business.
A social media strategy that integrates your expertise and human touch can help align the digital world to real human connections and help drive bookings, and repeat bookers, to your door.
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