2024 marketing

These 5 easy marketing wins will give your 2024 the jumpstart it deserves.

And help you capitalize on what’s left in 2023.

With Q4 in full swing, it’s time for tour operators, adventure brands, and destination management organizations alike to capitalize on the time left in this annual calendar. This post shares 5 strategic yet relatively easy ways to maximize your 2024 pre-season bookings and holiday sales.

The Holiday Season Really Supports the Customer Journey: Leverage Dreaming, Planning, and Booking Phases

The 5 stages of travel that Google identified in its “Micro-Moments that Reshape the Customer Travel Journey” series are:

  1. Dreaming
  2. Planning
  3. Booking
  4. Experiencing
  5. Sharing

Maybe we’re biased, but nothing screams holiday feelings more than planning that next adventure or trip with loved ones. People are exploring their options, and making notes, and they may even be open to booking it as a gift or a new year promise.

To play into this, you need to consider how your business can make it easy for clients to research, pencil in the interest, educate/nurture their interest further, and then book with complete confidence.

Here are 5 easy ways to jumpstart your 2024 marketing, now.

1. Do quick and factual website and content housekeeping.

First,  you want to ensure that your website is accurate and error-free. You’ll want to review important client-facing information, like pricing and dates. You’ll want to review your cancellation policies and booking policies; these should be straightforward and easy to understand. Check out our Adventure Brand Tips for Cancellations & Refunds for more ideas. Meanwhile, website audits are an excellent way to support not only end-of-year clean-up but next year’s success, too!

2. Leverage user-generated content: find and share UGC of happy guests from this 2023 season.

It’s time to roll up your sleeves and find the juicy content your clients have been sharing about you this past year. This might be in the form of reviews, blogs and articles, social media content, video content shared through platforms like YouTube…anything that offers social proof of the fun someone stands to have by engaging with your adventure brand.

Then, you want to leverage it across your marketing platforms so that those in their dreaming, planning, or booking phases are met with solid affirmation that this is a valuable experience for them to have.

Need help finding this gold mine of user-generated content? Check out these helpful, step-by-step guides for how to find and share UGC on Facebook and Instagram:

3. Invest in a review platform.

Customer reviews are essential for any adventure tourism brand. Quality reviews raise trust in your brand, help your potential customers make an informed purchasing decision, and they support SEO. Not to mention how great they are to use across your marketing channels. But it can be overwhelming…

A low-hanging fruit you can reach before the 2024 season gets here is to implement a customer review system that automates collecting, filtering, and displaying relevant reviews. Once set up, you can go paddle or bike or create new tourism products, while your review platform does the heavy lifting to highlight the best of your biz!

PRO TIP:  Liquid Spark loves GatherUp®: a customer experience and online review engine that enables insights, empowers marketing, and converts customers. With it, you can gather customer feedback and reviews in one place to drive sales up for your business. We hold a GatherUp agency account and can offer you discounted pricing from retail rates, for the same tools. Contact us for more information or learn more about customer review platforms.

4. Explore a holiday partnership: it feels great, does good for your community, and helps expand your reach.

Partnering with organizations and groups (think: schools, clubs, and non-profits…) can be a valuable opportunity to attract new customers, boost your sales, and possibly create a new revenue stream for your business. This is also a time to think creatively about offering something that meets the needs of your community. Check out our helpful article on how partnering with non-profit organizations is good for your business!

5. Have your marketing channels professionally audited.

Audits tell you what’s working well and what needs improvement, with recommendations for what to address and how. Our audits will give you a working checklist, expert assessments and summaries, and a one-hour strategy session to review your next steps…making it a perfect, easy win for you to deploy before the new year rolls around. We offer:

  • Email Marketing Audit
  • Pay-Per-Click Programs Audit
  • Social Media Audit
  • Website Content & Conversion Tracking
  • Website SEO Audits
  • Website Technical Audits

Learn more about audits here!

The goal of these tips is to help you leverage the time you have left in this annual calendar year to maximize your 2023 pre-season bookings and holiday sales, so that you can support your clients in their dreaming and planning phase.

Have great marketing ideas, but not sure how to align them to achieve your business goals? Not sure how to prioritize marketing channels and tactics into an annual plan that is cohesive and easy to implement? We have a proven process to map your business goals to quarterly strategies and tactics across each marketing channel and create an easy-to-follow roadmap for your initiatives.

We are here to help you start and implement an effective roadmap!

Create Your Marketing Roadmap

With some creative and smart planning, you can truly capitalize on the next couple of months and set your adventure brand up for 2024 marketing success!

Want more tips specific to adventure companies?