7 Strategies for Successful Lead Generation in Hiking Tourism

Tourism lead generation is key to the success of your hiking business. Numerous competitors, ever-changing consumer needs, and technological advances make it challenging but doable. This article will present 5 effective tourism lead-generation strategies to help you attract new customers and grow your hiking business.

Develop a clear and unique offer

Before starting tourism lead generation, you must define and promote the unique offering of your hiking business. Clearly and concisely highlighting the benefits customers receive when they travel with you will help capture their attention and interest. A unique offer may include special features of your hiking tours, personalized customer service, awesome emotions, etc.

Identify your target audience and conduct research to understand their needs, problems, and preferences. The deeper you understand your potential customers, the more effective your marketing message and strategy will be. Use research methods such as surveys, data analysis, and competitor research to gain valuable information about your target audience.

Create an attractive and SEO-optimized hiking website

Having an attractive and informative website is an important element of a successful tourism lead generation strategy. Your website should be user-friendly and informative, with a clear call to action, and properly optimized for search engines. Use high-quality content, including text, images, and videos, to engage visitors with your hiking tours and interest them.

Optimizing website content for search engines drives organic traffic and generates leads. You should conduct keyword research to identify relevant search terms related to hiking tourism and incorporate them into your website copy, blog posts, and meta tags. Additionally, creating informative and engaging content that naturally attracts backlinks from other websites can improve search engine rankings and increase visibility among potential customers.

Bookatrekking is an awesome example of a great hiking website. Everything is transparent on their website, and every booking is confirmed immediately. Simple design with simple colors and readable fonts make navigation easy.

A convenient menu helps visitors find everything they need, while bright images convey what awaits them. This simplicity differentiates it from other competitors and even makes it memorable.

Utilize complex marketing channels

Utilize a variety of marketing channels to reach your target audience. This can include social media, search advertising, email marketing, content marketing, event participation, and more.

Each channel is different, so choose the ones that best suit your budget and target audience. Be active on social media, create valuable content that solves customer problems, and engage with them across multiple platforms.

Social media platforms offer sophisticated advertising tools that allow tour operators to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors. We mean the following social media platforms:

• Facebook;
• Instagram;
• Twitter.

You can reach potential hikers who match your ideal customer profile by creating compelling ad campaigns with visually appealing landing pages.

A landing page is a website specially designed for advertising. Its difference from “ordinary” websites is that its content stimulates the user to leave his or her contacts to select the best hiking tour or get advice.

The effectiveness of advertising will depend on the quality of the landing page and its conversion rate. Conversion rate is the percentage of users who take the target action—fill out a form, call, or write in messenger. Investing resources in developing landing pages and achieving a conversion rate of at least 2.5-3% is very important. Otherwise, advertising will be difficult to pay off.

On the landing page, it is most effective to direct PPC advertising. It is advertising in search engines shown by certain keywords or user behavior. For example, a person could search for “hiking tours in Austria” in a search engine or visit pages related to vacations in Austria. PPC advertising effectiveness is often higher than targeted advertising (advertising in social networks), where the user does not specifically search for tours but sees the advertisement while scrolling through the newsfeed.

Write detailed blog articles

In social media, content lives for a few weeks, sometimes even less. The posts you wrote on your Instagram page last month are unlikely to be read by anyone this month. A blog is good because the content in it lives forever, especially if it is content on hiking trips, mountains, regions, or attractions. It can only be updated periodically, but globally, it remains evergreen.

You can start a blog on your website or on an alternative platform like Medium. You can also combine the two options, duplicating content on several sites or alternating placement channels. Both methods will be effective if you have some knowledge of SEO and know how to select headings and subheadings and prescribe texts that “like” search engines.

A good article for a blog should be quite capacious, informative, and structured. It is important to provide several subtopics, each of which can also contain keywords. Subsections can be accompanied by pictures, to which you can add alt and description. This helps promote the article on search engines.

Bookatrekking emphasizes long reads about hiking tours in their blog. All the articles are well-optimized in terms of SEO. Just analyze Kaiserkrone articles. It answers over 9 questions, has videos describing the destination, and offers tours that readers can order immediately. Numerous images encourage people to read this article to the end, resulting in a hiking tour order.

Don’t be afraid to learn the basics of SEO. There are many terms in this topic that are not clear to a beginner. Still, mastering the basics will be useful to everyone who promotes themselves or their project on the Internet.

Before publishing an article, you need to think about what you want from the user who will finish reading it. It can be:

• Visiting the Telegram channel, where more detailed information on the topic can be found;
• Getting lead-magnet, which can be obtained for free through a link;
• Visiting the website, where people can learn more about your services.

The better you think through the client’s path, which he must pass from reading the article “Is it cold in a hut-to-hut tour through the wilder Kaiser in September” to booking a hiking tour, the higher the chances of effectively using the blog to promote and attract new customers.

There are many non-obvious benefits of having your own blog. After reading informative blog articles, users are much more warmed up and ready to buy than from other marketing channels.

Lifehack: If you don’t have time to write long articles, divide them into several parts and write posts of 1-2 thousand characters. Then, this content can be combined and published as a full-fledged blog article.

Create chatbots in messengers like Telegram and WhatsApp

When we talk about messengers, we primarily refer to the organization of mailings via private messages in WhatsApp and Telegram. We are not talking about spam when mailings are made to users who have not consented to them. We mean mailings to a base that is collected by white methods.

First, you can attract subscribers to the mailing list with the help of lead magnets. These are useful files or videos that a person can get by subscribing to the newsletter. For example, a checklist on “What to take with you on a winter hike to the Alps”, a guide to “Non-tourist restaurants in Nepal, where locals prefer to dine”, or a webinar on “Ways to hike the Everest economically”.

It is important that the lead magnet is really useful, informative, and interesting for the user and has an attractive title. Lead-magnet must make people want to download it.

The mechanics of getting a lead magnet through a Telegram chatbot are very simple—the user just needs to follow the link and click the “Start” button. This starts a chain of messages that you can prescribe in advance through specialized services.

The mechanics of collecting the base are similar to email marketing. In messengers, however, everything is much simpler—as soon as the subscriber clicks on the “Start” button, he or she permits you to send messages.

As with email newsletters, you can think about a series of emails in advance. For example, 3-5 messages after subscription familiarize a new user with your hiking company, services, country, region, or city. However, unlike emails, messengers can also add interactivity—for example, by customizing buttons under messages and menu buttons by clicking on which a person will receive the content that interests him or her.

You can send messages based on the subscriber base you have collected. For example, if you have collected subscribers with the help of a lead magnet, “5 best hiking trips in Austria for a winter vacation,” you can send them a selection of hiking tours to Austria for the coming months once a week. However, you should not abuse trust or send messages too often. They can annoy users and lead to unsubscribing or blocking.

An obvious advantage of working with mailing lists in messengers is that your competitors will never know how many subscribers you have in your base and will be unable to set up advertising for them.

Create a referral program

Positive reviews and referrals from customers can strongly impact attracting tourism lead generation. Encourage your customers to leave feedback about your hiking tours and company.

This can be done through thank you emails, review requests, and a loyalty program. Actively promote positive reviews on your website and social media to convince new customers of the quality of your hiking tours.

Implementing a customer referral program incentivizes past participants to recommend hiking tours to friends, family, and colleagues. By offering rewards such as discounts, freebies, or cash incentives for successful referrals, you can leverage word-of-mouth marketing to attract new leads.

Emphasize partnerships and collaborations

The tourism industry is constantly changing, so you must keep up with the latest trends and be ready to innovate. Explore partnerships and collaborations with other tourism companies and organizations with similar target audiences. You can partner with outdoor gear companies, travel bloggers, hiking clubs, and local tourism boards to reach new audiences and offer value-added experiences.

Co-hosted events, giveaways, promotions, referrals, and special offers can help you reach new customers and expand your customer base. Find mutually beneficial collaborations that will help you both achieve greater success.

Sierd van der Bij from Bookatrekking: “Dive into collaborative ventures that attract new clients and elevate your offerings. Through shared efforts and innovative ideas, pave the way for mutual growth and achievement in the tourism sector.”

Constantly evolve your hiking tours, adapt to changing customer needs, and look for new opportunities. Innovations and new tourism lead-generation strategies will help you stand out from your competitors and attract new customers.

Conclusion

Attracting customers in the tourism industry can be challenging, but utilizing these strategies can increase your customer base and grow. A clear, unique proposition, target audience research, effective use of marketing channels, positive feedback and testimonials, partnerships, innovation, and continuous development will all help you attract new customers and build a thriving tourism lead-generation process.