The travel agency industry in Nigeria is overcrowded, so it is difficult to get customers constantly. To sustain their business, the big players in the industry spend a lot of money on advertisements — most especially on traditional advertisements.
For the small players, they have to use fliers and word-of-mouth marketing, which aren’t bad but limited in terms of the number of prospective customers that can be reached.
If you own a travel agency in Nigeria, whether big or small, and you want to reduce your marketing and advertising cost but increase your revenue, this post is for you. This post will show you how you promote your agency without spending much money.
Heads-up: the easy way to market your travel offers without spending much is through digital marketing. So, this post is about digital marketing strategies that you can use to promote your travel agency in Nigeria.
How to Promote Your Travel Agency in Nigeria
A website serves as a 24-hour online office that people can visit to find out information about a business. Thus, it is the first place to start the promotion. And you want to ensure that the website is responsive to all devices – computers, tablets, phablets and phones.
Aside from that, the website should have detailed contents of your agency and travel packages. Most importantly, the website must carry breathtaking images – and videos – from the travel destinations you are trying to sell.
Having a website for your travel agency in Nigeria is not enough. If you want to promote your business without spending much, you need to invest in the search engine optimization (SEO) of the website. SEO helps drive customers to your website for free.
We have the local SEO and the organic SEO, and it is important you do the two. For organic SEO, you would need to research the keyword that intending travellers are using to find travel agencies in Nigeria. You would then make sure your website is on the first page of Google, by providing quality contents on the website and ensuring reputable websites link to your website.
As for the local SEO, you would need to verify your agency with Google My Business and get listed on local directories in Nigeria. SEO can be very technical; so you might want to contact an expert to help you out.
Blogging and SEO go hand-in-hand. So aside from trying to optimize your travel agency website, you should also open a blog on the website. Through the blog, you can write on a range of topics related to travel and use them to attract more traffic to your website.
Blogging helps position your business as a thought leader in the industry.
- Invest in online campaigns
SEO and blogging are longtime strategies. They can take as long as one year before you start getting a return on investment. Besides, Google isn’t the only platform visited by people looking for a travel agency in Nigeria. Therefore, you need to invest in paid online campaigns.
Through the campaign, your offers can reach people on social media, travel blogs, YouTube, among others. By investing in paid ads, you can make quick sales, as they will increase the awareness of your agency. Popular online advertising platforms that you can use include Google Ad, Facebook Ad Manager, and Twitter Ad Manager.
As it is all over the world, business owners in Nigeria prefer to buy an email list than to build one. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to see an email list seller that have your target audience. Thus, the surest way to promote your travel agency in Nigeria through email marketing is to build your own list.
On your website’s main pages and blog, try and integrate leads collection form. Through the forms, you can collect countless leads, and after getting the leads make sure you send them regular newsletters. The challenge of building – and growing – an email list is that subscribers are like to unsubscribe. To reduce the rate at which unsubscription happens, make sure you only send relevant and helpful contents to your subscribers.
Most of the time, you would want the contents of your email newsletters to be on travel tips, travel ideas, as well as your travel offers.
- Be active on social media
Social media provide you with the opportunity of promoting your agency without spending anything. As the owner of a travel agency in Nigeria, there are a number of things you can share. As in the email newsletters, you can share travel tips and ideas, as well as industry news and your travel packages. To ensure you get high engages, make sure the images you post on social media are stunning.
You can use social media to share testimonies from your clients; you should as well get images and videos taken by your clients while in travel destinations and post them on your agency’s pages.
- Explore forums and groups
Though Google and social media serve as the main sources of information for many Nigerians, a few people still get their information on forums and online groups. Nairaland, Quora, and travel groups on WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook are places you can systematically use to market your travel agency in Nigeria.
The thing is that to use forums and groups to get customers, you would have to share useful contents – instead of overly marketing your travel offers. You can get banned by the admins or moderators of forums and groups if they feel you are spamming members.
The above-discussed points are the many ways you can promote your agency without spending much. Depending on your marketing budget, you may not be able to do everything. However, I strongly advise your agency has a website, invest in SEO, and maintain an active social media presence. The three aren’t that resource-intensive, and they get you the intended results.
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