Apart from your website and Google My Business profile, social media is one of the key marketing platforms for tours and activities. LinkedIn, in particular, is ideal for creating and fostering professional connections for your business.
With more than 750 million users worldwide, LinkedIn is well known for professional networking and tour and activities businesses can benefit greatly by remaining visible in front of such an audience.
In this article, we are going to discuss why LinkedIn is valuable for tours or activities and offer some tips on how to get more bookings through this business-oriented social media platform.
Why LinkedIn is a Good Channel for Tours and Activities
How does LinkedIn help operators like you market tours and activities?
LinkedIn is good for targeting businesses
LinkedIn has a business focus, which makes it a powerful tool for companies in the tours and activities space that want to offer tours or activities packages for companies, large and small, including:
- Team building packages
- Outdoor activities as business rewards/corporate vacation offers
- Weekend getaways for teams
- Small-group tour packages
- Corporate travel retreats
- Digital nomads packages
Companies understand sponsoring employees to enjoy tours and activities can significantly boost their productivity, loyalty, wellbeing, and retention. For this reason, they are more likely to book tours or activities readily visible on platforms like LinkedIn.
Also, 60% of LinkedIn’s 756 million users are between 24 and 35 years old, a working population. This is significant because about 34% of young millennials i.e between the age of 19 and 25, and 41% of the older millennials (age 26-35) carry the decision-making responsibilities on behalf of their companies.
What’s more, business travelers can also later become lucrative, repeat customers for tour operators. For example, people who travel for business are likely to revisit a destination for leisure if they enjoyed it the first time.
LinkedIn provides a huge potential B2C market
LinkedIn is also great as a B2C (Business to Consumer) marketing channel. This platform is available in more than 200 countries, with over 198 million members in Europe alone.
You can leverage the platform to attract individual consumers by sharing your company updates and other useful information. Professionals who know you and are part of your network may visit or recommend you to others. What’s more, LinkedIn shows your personal activity to 2nd degree connections. This means that if someone likes, comments, or shares on your post, their connections will also see this and therefore you can increase your brand reach.
LinkedIn is ideal for attracting fresh talent
Are you looking to hire new employees for your growing tours and activities company? Then LinkedIn can help out.
You can use LinkedIn to attract fresh talent and build your employer brand. Features like InMail, Job Posts and Sponsored Jobs can get you in front of a huge talent pool, especially if you are hiring for senior-level and managerial roles.
In addition, potential employees are likely to review your company page and current team members when making their decision to apply or accept an offer. Maintaining a solid employer presence on LinkedIn can help you attract and retain great people so you can further improve your customer experience and overall business.
11 Tips for Selling Tours and Activities with LinkedIn
These are some of our top ideas to help you increase engagement, inquiries, and bookings on LinkedIn for your tours and activities business.
1. Grow your page followers on LinkedIn
Growing your following is key in reaching more prospects and potentially boosting sales for your tours and activities company. The main reason is that your company’s updates will automatically appear in your follower’s feeds and that gives you a relevant audience.
So how do you increase your LinkedIn followers? Here are a few ways that are currently working:
- Post relevant and engaging content. For example, larger images can attract 38% more click-throughs than regular-sized images, posting videos gets more engagement than text-only posts, and lastly, LinkedIn Live streams attract 24 times more comments and 7 times higher engagement than standard video posts.
- Be active, for example, in discussion groups and in engaging with prospective clients. For instance, you can reply to comments in a way that will portray you as a thought leader in your industry or ask questions that will trigger further discussions.
- Update your LinkedIn page profile with recent and relevant news or with your company’s most recent events.
LinkedIn Insights found employees generate over 30% of company engagement traffic. Whatever the size of your company is, you should take advantage of employee advocacy to build awareness and sell more tours and activities packages through LinkedIn.
2. Host your content through LinkedIn’s publishing tools
Data from 2020 indicates that LinkedIn is a better platform for content marketing for organic lead generation than Twitter and Facebook.
It is considered the most credible source of content, plus LinkedIn content receives 15X more impressions than job postings.
LinkedIn users also prefer longer content, typically around 2000 words with at least eight images. For tours and activities operators, this is excellent news since your story-telling, and visual-friendly niche perfectly supports this on an ongoing basis.
Keep in mind that you should always share helpful, relevant, and engaging content.
The advantages of posting your content are that it positions you as a thought leader, can increase your brand awareness, and can also allow you to link to some of your tour and activities packages and offers in the posts to attract inquiries and actual bookings.
3. Turn Testimonials into LinkedIn Posts
You can also make use of user-generated content from your visitors’ reviews and ratings.
A great way to contextualize reviews is by making them into tiny case studies that reveal what a customer came in expecting and what they got out of one of your relevant packages.
For example, you can highlight a traveler who wasn’t sure of what to do on the weekend before returning to work the following week. Explain how they had unexpected fun on your bike or Segway city tour instead of staying put in a hotel room.
Such real-life stories serve as social proof and can influence other people to also book with you.
4. Use LinkedIn’s search functionality to find relevant prospects
LinkedIn’s focus on professionals makes it a great lead generation platform for B2B companies. With its search functionality, you can filter professionals by their roles and reach out to them with your offers.
You can also search for companies to collaborate with or sell your tours or activities to. Once you have this list of prospective companies, find their staff members and proceed to connect with and message the relevant decision-makers.
Offer activities such as wellness camps and annual leave packages or team-building tours and activities to target prospective companies in the B2B market.
5. Highlight products and offers through LinkedIn’s product directory
You can accomplish this by creating a LinkedIn Product Page. The purpose of this page is to grow a community around a product and generate high-quality leads.
Product pages are different from company pages or showcases:
As we discussed in the previous point, you can package tours and activities in a way that targets the B2B market to draw more bookings with a Product Page.
6. Share regular updates through your page
An updated page can be a good indicator that your company is active and available to serve customers at the moment. It also gives potential customers the assurance that all the details posted are accurate / up to date. Your company’s page should, therefore, have activities, events, or industry news posted on a regular basis.
7. Network on relevant LinkedIn groups
LinkedIn allows companies (including tour and activities operators) to join groups or create their own. A group brings like-minded people together to network.
LinkedIn groups provide a great way to stay in touch with the latest trends in the industry and catch up with news.
You can join groups related to the tourism industry or the kind of tours or activities your business offers. But avoid joining too many groups for the sake of it. Be a member in just a few where you know you can give your optimum contribution and get engaged with the group’s discussions.
To get the most out of these groups, be an active member and get to know other members. Post your content whenever relevant and lookout for opportunities. It is possible to get referrals from here or even team up with other businesses to create unique tour packages that include multiple activities in the respective cities you and your connections operate in.
8. Take the conversation to the next level with direct messages
Once you have connected with someone (a potential client or partner), you can email them or direct message them.
In your first message, aim to build rapport so you do not come off as spammy or salesy. For example, mention a shared interest, such as a group or sentiment they expressed in a recent post.
Once you’ve established a connection with e.g a company Office Manager, make an offer that will benefit them and their organization, for example, a relevant tour package that their employees can engage in for team building.
9. Increase your messaging reach with InMail
Direct messages (DMs) and InMail differ on LinkedIn. You can only message 1st-degree connections with DMs, but with InMail, you can also message 2nd and 3rd-degree contacts outside of your existing network.
InMail offers more opportunities for direct communication since you skip the initial connect request and your message gets highlighted in the other person’s inbox. However, the principles of engagement are similar, including building rapport before sending a message to a connection to encourage a positive response.
10. Back your decisions with data from LinkedIn Page Analytics
The LinkedIn Page Analytics tool allows you to monitor and gauge the activity on your LinkedIn page, such as how people interact with your page based on what devices they use.
You can also use it to tell who your packages, posts, and messaging attract the most and which post ideas get the most traction so you can improve your LinkedIn marketing strategy accordingly.
11. Reach ideal prospects with LinkedIn ad campaigns
It’s key to remember that 80% of people on LinkedIn can influence business decisions. So you are likely to reach mid and senior-level employees with some degree of responsibility and allocated budget.
The key benefit of LinkedIn ads is that you can promote your tours and activities to a well-defined audience, further improving your targeting. For example, you can show ads to people based on their location, job title, seniority level, making the most of your advertising budget.
Bottom Line
Since LinkedIn users are largely professionals, this social media platform can be a significant source of business customers and talent for your tours and activities company.
In summary, some of the our most important tips include:
- Growing your page followers
- Leveraging LinkedIn’s publishing tools to host your content
- Turning customers testimonials into posts
- Finding relevant prospects using LinkedIn’s search functionality
- Highlighting products using LinkedIn’s product directory
- Sharing regular updates through your page
- Networking in discussion groups
- Using direct messages and InMail to connect with prospects
- Making data-driven decisions by using LinkedIn page analytics
- Increasing your reach with ad campaigns
Implement these tips and you’ll be well on your way to increasing your employer brand and boosting sales of your tours and activities.
