Marketing refers to the promotion of your tours or company to potential clients. The reason why tour operators invest in marketing is that they want to sell tours. Marketing costs money. Therefore, the money spent on marketing should be earned back by the extra tours that are sold as a result of these marketing activities.
Offline & Online marketing
Marketing can be divided into two main groups:
Offline marketing
Examples of offline marketing are investing in a paper brochure for your company, advertising in printed media such as magazines or guidebooks, investing in company stickers for your safari vehicles or office building, having travel agents or representatives resell your tours, or paying for a booth or stand at travel trade shows.
Online marketing
Examples of online marketing are advertising in search engines such as Google, advertising on social media such as Facebook or Instagram, investing in a website for your company, sending promotional emails to former clients, and advertising tours on platforms such as SafariBookings.
Tracking your results
Marketing is about spending money with the goal to make more money. The only way to know if you are making money is by tracking the results of your marketing efforts. You want to know how much money you have spent, how many extra tours you sold and whether the money earned from those tours was enough to justify the marketing costs.
For most types of offline marketing, it is difficult to track how many tours were sold. If you advertise in a magazine, how would you know if that resulted in selling more tours? For most online marketing it is easier to keep track of this. Google, Facebook and SafariBookings all offer tools to track sales. On SafariBookings your results are presented as easy-to-understand information on your dashboard page. The dashboard shows how much money you have spent and how much money you have made. All you have to do is mark which quote requests resulted in a booking, using the SafariBookings system.
A simple comparison of different marketing channels
Below is a comparison of commonly known marketing channels. The comparison includes information on the payment structure of each marketing channel and whether results can be tracked or not. Please note that the comparison is by no means complete. It only serves to create a broader understanding of the type of marketing channels available and how they differ from each other. There are many more marketing channels out there and some of the marketing channels mentioned in the comparison also offer alternative payment structures.
| Channel | Payment Structure | Can Results Be Tracked? |
|---|---|---|
| Magazine Advertising | One-time payment for placing your ad in a magazine. | No |
| Advertising on Google | You pay when someone clicks your ad in Google and visits your website. | Yes (But only when clients use a contact form on your website.) |
| Advertising on Facebook | You pay when someone clicks your ad on Facebook and visits your website. | Yes (But only when clients use a contact form on your website.) |
| SafariBookings | You pay a fee per quote request. The fee varies and depends on the booking value of the quote request. Learn more | Yes (But you will have to mark which quote requests resulted in a booking using the SafariBookings system.) |
| Travel Agents | Travel agents add a fee on top of your net rate. | Not relevant (Tracking is not needed as travel agents deliver bookings.) |
Most money is spent on people who do not book a tour
A conflicting aspect of investing in marketing is that most of your money will be spent on reaching people who do not book a tour, while the goal of marketing is to reach people who want to book a tour.
For example, if you advertise in a magazine and reach tens of thousands of readers, you will probably only sell one or two tours. If you advertise in Google, you will need a few hundred people to click your ad and visit your website to obtain a single booking. And you will pay Google for every click. Tour operators on SafariBookings need, on average, between 5 and 6 quote requests to generate a booking. That means that 80% of quote requests that tour operators will pay for do not result in a booking. There is only one situation where all of your marketing money goes to people who book a tour and that is when you sell tours via a travel agent. But that is not the complete story, because to sell a tour, the travel agent will have to invest in the same marketing channels where most money is spent on people who do not book a tour.
Tour operators on SafariBookings need, on average, between 5 and 6 quote requests to generate a booking.
The illustration below shows that when tour operators use SafariBookings, both SafariBookings and tour operators spend most of their marketing money on people who do not book a tour.
When considering how much of the marketing money goes to people who do not book a tour, you might think that magazine advertising is the most expensive way to obtain a booking and that using a travel agent is the most affordable. But that is not necessarily the case. If a marketing channel needs to reach a lot of people to generate one booking, but the costs for reaching those people are very low, the marketing channel is still highly effective.
How effective a marketing channel is comes down to one thing: How much money does it cost to obtain a booking?
The table below contains marketing channels and an indication of the reach and costs involved for obtaining a booking. The table shows that if a marketing channel needs fewer people to generate a booking, the cost for reaching those people becomes higher. As mentioned, that in itself does not really matter. The only thing that matters is how much you pay for obtaining a booking.
Please note that the numbers and amounts used in the table below are just a rough indication based on our experience with these marketing channels. If a tour operator is an expert in using these marketing channels, they might be able to achieve better results.
|
Channel |
Reach Needed per Booking |
Cost per Engagement |
Cost per Booking |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Magazine |
Thousands of readers |
$0.10 to $1 per reader |
High (Magazine advertising is less effective for selling tours and more effective for creating brand awareness.) |
|
Advertising on Google |
Several hundred clicks |
$0.75 to $6 per click (Depending on the keywords that you target, clicks are more or less expensive.) |
Medium to high (A professional website is needed to be successful when advertising in search engines.) |
|
Advertising on Facebook |
Hundreds to thousands of clicks |
$0.75 to $2 per click |
High (Facebook advertising is less effective for selling tours and more effective for creating brand awareness or selling consumer products.) |
|
SafariBookings |
Five quote requests (On average. This varies per tour operator.) |
$50 per quote request (The costs vary depending on the value of the quote request.) |
Medium (For most tour operators the costs vary between 5% and 10% of the booking revenue. The actual costs depend on how successful tour operators are at converting quote requests into bookings.) |
|
Travel agents |
One client (A travel agent only gets paid when a tour is sold.) |
$400 to $4,000 per booking (Travel agents typically add 10% to 30% on top of your net rate.) |
High (The costs are high but there is no financial risk for tour operators.) |
Achieving success with marketing
Becoming successful in marketing begins with learning as much as you can about each marketing channel. The better you understand how clients use a marketing channel to find tours, the better you will be at creating a successful strategy for that channel.
Online marketing channels, such as Google, Facebook, and SafariBookings, have complex systems and the competition is high. As a result, it will take quite some time and effort before you fully understand how to use a marketing channel to your best advantage. During the learning phase, you will not be as successful as your competitors. Therefore, we recommend you start slowly. Don’t start by targeting areas (keywords on Google or tours on SafariBookings) that have the most potential because the competition and costs will also be high. Instead, focus on areas where there is less competition. That way it will be easier to obtain a booking, and the costs will also be lower.
A competitive marketing channel can be compared to a sporting league. It would be a mistake to join the professional league as a beginner. Instead, you should start at a lower level, gain experience, improve your skills, and work your way up. This is a process of trial and error that will take time and effort. But once you make it to the professional league, you will be rewarded.
As mentioned above, for all marketing channels, it is of great importance that you track your results. If you invest money in marketing, you must know what the return on that investment is. Tracking your results will also help to better understand how success can be achieved on a particular marketing channel. The next step would be to run experiments and learn from their results. Using these learnings, you can optimize and improve your overall strategy one experiment at a time.
Understanding how to best use a marketing channel is only half of the story. The outcome of marketing channels such as Google, Facebook, or SafariBookings is not a booking. The outcome is that a client contacts you and requests a quote for a tour. If you are not successful in converting these quote requests into bookings, you will never be successful in any of these marketing channels. The more quote requests you need to obtain a booking, the more expensive the booking will be. The fewer quote requests you need, the cheaper the booking will be. The cheaper a booking is, the more you can invest in marketing and the more business you can get. If tour operators want to achieve success without using travel agents, they need to be as good at direct sales and marketing as they are at operating tours for clients.