Tours & Activities - Recognising Target Audiences

In digital marketing, Identifying your target audiences allows your business to focus marketing efforts on the groups of people who are most likely to buy your tour or activity. Doing this ensures that you are generating business in the most efficient, affordable manner.

There are a few different ways to do this, let's have a look at a few practical methods below.

Analyze your offering

Nobody knows your business quite as you do, that is a fact. Ask yourself what type of person on average purchased your tour or activity during high season and what was their purpose of travel. Was it young families, couples, older people or groups?  What core demographic of people make up the majority of the people who availed of your service and why does it appeal to them?

If your service is slower paced it could be ideal for older people, if it’s high adrenaline then maybe the younger are more inclined to book. Whatever makes your business appealing to a certain type of person, write it down and define it as this will create the foundation from which you build your target audience.

Conduct market research  

Two things are true, you have a business and your business is in a location. Ask yourself, why are people visiting this location? Is it because your location is a value-for-money holiday destination for instance? There will be plenty of market research conducted on your location, why people are choosing to visit it and what is going to draw them to certain areas of your location including yours. Conducting this market research will enable you to get a picture of the buying power of the type of person who is visiting your country/location.

Consider researching these metrics to determine how viable your area is for running sustainable tours and activity business:

• Visitor surveys
• Occupancy surveys
• Airline and ferry surveys
• Tourist board research
• Market share estimations
• Economic impact surveys
• Tourism employment surveys

Create customer profiles and market segments

A customer profile for your tours and activities business is a very common starting point for recognising your target audience, based on analyzing your offering you should be able to construct a pretty comprehensive profile based on your knowledge alone, consider these information points:

• Identity [ give them a name]
• Demographic information [age, gender, marital status, parental status, education level, place of residence.]
• Job title [buying power from disposable income]
• Influences [social media, printed or visual media]
• Attitudes [what they want to get from travel]
• Pain points [what is it that will put them off]
• Information sources [Google, TikTok, Instagram, TV]
• Preferred methods of engagement [email, chatbot, direct messaging, call]

Assess the competition

Benchmarking - This is an industry term commonly used when you want to take what your competition is doing, replicate it and hopefully improve upon it. There is no harm in taking learning from your competition and doing your utmost to provide a better service as this will ultimately create a product or service which is better for the end user.

Assessing your competition can come in many forms, perhaps make a booking with them and document your entire experience with them, from the booking process to arriving, to the service and then the aftercare. Ask yourself how likely are you to return based on your overall experience and whether are there any learnings that you can apply to your own business in order to improve it?

Conducting this research into your target audience will ultimately serve your business better in the future, sharpening your ability to market your business to the exact type of person who is likely to take your tour/activity, enjoy it and ultimately pass on their good experience through word of mouth or better yet a glowing online review. At TripAdmit we are helping countless businesses to achieve exactly this, join them and us to propel your tours and activity business to a higher rate of efficiency.