8 Growth Hacking Techniques For Starting a Travel Agency?
The travel industry has always had immense potential for travel startups and will continue to do so in the future. However, the competition in the travel and tourism industry is intense, and therefore, travel businesses have to stay at the tip of their toes to sustain and be successful. The main focus of travel businesses shifts from their customers to their competitors. Instead of planning strategies to attract more customers and provide them with better travel experiences, travel businesses start focusing on how to bring their competitors down.
Entering into the highly competitive travel industry, you need to effectively market your products and services to grow your business. Adopting different growth hacking techniques will enable your travel agency to reach out to a widespread audience. You need a travel portal development company first.
Therefore, here are 8 growth hacking techniques for starting a travel agency and scaling the business within no time.
What is growth hacking?
Before we come down to the techniques, let us first understand what exactly is growth hacking. In simple terms, growth hacking is a technique driven by experiments to find the most effective ways of growing any business.
It is a hack because instead of following the conventional processes, business owners adopt innovative, quick, and cost-effective methods to scale their business. Growth hacking involves a mix of development, design, marketing, data, analytics, and engineering. You can also check this for getting motivation- Ayahuasca
You can start with services like hotel booking, flight booking, cab rental, Servizio di Taxi Nova Milanese, holiday packages etc. The hacking techniques are helpful for all these services.
8 growth hacking techniques
Irrespective of your niche, every travel startup should follow these growth techniques to increase their customers and profits.
- Offer a product wanted by travelers
As you would already know, the competition is fierce and the chances of failure are high in the travel industry. Therefore, to sustain for the long-term you need to offer a product or a service that is actually wanted by travelers. Well, of course, travelers need to book a flight or a hotel and that is what you are thinking of providing them. But, you need to look around and see how many travel agencies are providing these similar services and some have already established dominance.
So, one of the first growth hacking techniques for starting your travel agency is offering something unique to travelers that isn’t already out there in the market. Offering something different than others requires customer behavior and market research. You should study the market deeply and how certain changes influence customers’ travel behavior. You can also collect feedback from customers about your offering and accordingly make the necessary changes.
- Narrow down your target
The travel and tourism industry is a vast industry that offers a wide variety of niches one can enter into. Each niche has a separate customer base, which makes it all the more relevant for you to target only relevant customers. Targeting everybody out there just with the hope that someone would be interested in your product is not the right approach. You should narrow down your target market and focus on those customers who your product relates to. If you target everyone, you wouldn’t know whom to focus your convincing energy on.
For instance, if your travel agency focuses on providing adventure travel or extreme sports packages, you should probably target travelers aged between 25 to 35. Travelers within this age group are probably earning a salary, are independent enough to make their own decisions, and are most likely to travel with friends.
- Take advantage of referral marketing
When you are starting any business, you would definitely inform your friends and family and ask them to spread the word. This is what referral marketing is except that it is more intense. Referrals by family, friends, colleagues, etc are known to convert a lead faster than any other means. Moreover, you can cut down on your costs as well due to the low CPA of referral customers. Customers earned through referral marketing have a better retention rate as well.
You can even ask your customers to spread the word if they are happy with your services. In fact, Uber also leveraged referral marketing to create brand visibility and reach our to users when it started out. Many companies provide credits to both the referrer and the referee to encourage using their services.
- Establish brand partnerships
Business owners have realized the importance of co-marketing and partnerships to grow their business. Therefore, establishing brand partnerships and collaborating with other brands is an effective growth hacking strategy as it creates a social buzz as well as generates organic traffic on your website. Airbnb partnered with Flipboard which is a news app to enable Airbnb users to view customized content and make informed decisions about booking stays through Airbnb. In return, Flipboard aggregates user comments and reviews from Airbnb for its users.
- Leverage social media
Social media has gained significance in the travel industry a majority of travelers get their travel inspiration from social media and are quite active on these platforms. Therefore, if you are just starting out as a travel agency, one of the most effective growth hacking techniques is to leverage the power of social media to gain more customers. Social media communities can be used to promote your product and also receive feedback from potential customers. You can also engage and attract customers through relevant campaigns, offering exciting deals, and regular posts.
- Make use of influencer marketing
Just like social media marketing, influencer marketing is also the current trend of creating brand awareness. You need to collaborate with impactful influencers that have over 30,000 followers and a good reputation to effectively market your product. Many startups and established brands pay influencers to promote their products and services
- Leverage email marketing
Email marketing is still an effective way to achieve leads and conversions. Therefore, before you even launch your travel agency, you should build an email list to deliver your message across a wide range of target audiences and shoot emails at least a week prior to launch. Email marketing will also create a pre-launch hype for your startup.
- Improve your services continuously
Lastly, the constantly evolving travel industry always requires new ideas and improved services for travel agencies to survive. Travelers seek unique services and differentiated experiences. Therefore, you must work on improving your product and services to offer something new and exciting for your customers.
