Online Travel Marketing

Customers make 12 travel related searches and visit 22 travel websites before purchasing.

In a recent press release, Hitwise identifies Travel websites as being particularly reliant on search engines for visits. In June 2009, search engines were responsible for 48% of upstream visits to Travel websites and 53% of visits to the Travel subcategory, Destinations and Accommodations. Press release here. Join the discussion here.

PPC advertising is a great tool for travel agencies hoping to connect with those in search of vacation deals. But unless you're armed with a travel marketing budget the size of a Boeing 777, it can be tough to compete against the big players.

That's where PPC targeting comes into play. If you're a travel agency selling to a specific local market, it's best to target your travel marketing to a specific location in an effort to get the attention of those who matter most to your business.

But before you pack all of your marketing dollars and send them off to PPC advertising land, there are a number of questions you need to ask yourself.

What are your goals? Do you want clients to call you? Or do you want them to book a trip on your website? How you approach PPC advertising depends on what you need to achieve.

What are you selling? Take the time to write it down because writing down exactly what you're offering will help you generate a list of initial keywords to associate your PPC ads with.

Where are your clients? Are they in a specific district? City? Province? If you don't have the budget to compete on a national level, that doesn't necessarily put you at a disadvantage. Advertising locally can actually position you higher than some of the big national travel competitors when done right.

That's just the beginning of smarter travel marketing through PPC advertising. Go local with PPC for travel agencies.

When it comes to hospitality marketing, PR - or public relations - is everything. And there is no better method to improve your brand awareness than through smart, strategic online PR efforts.

If you think you know everything about PR, think again. Securing a story in a major publication and coordinating with news outlets is effective, but it's also beyond the reach of the average travel and hospitality marketer. It's also very last century.

Online PR is different. It's designed to build brand profiles and drive traffic to a website. And it's designed to do it without a whole lot of effort on your part.

When you tackle online PR correctly, the internet practically takes care of everything for you.

Sound too good to be true? It isn't. The potential for successful online PR for internet hospitality marketers has exploded over the last few years thanks to some major websites and tools made available to the everyman.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, digg, forums and blogs - they're all about people exchanging information and doing it in real time. When you write an online PR and distribute it the right way to the right people, the internet practically does the work for you. Bloggers pick it up and share it with the world. Articles get written. People tweet about it. Friends share it on other friends' walls. And so on.

While the internet takes care of a lot of the distribution for you, there are lots of things you should know before crafting your story, spreading the word, and getting it into the hands of the social butterflies of the online world.

For everything you need to know to get started with your online hospitality marketing PR efforts, read Using Online PR to Build Your Hospitality Brand.