The collaboration between Camping Business and CampingVillage.Travel comes alive. With today’s speech, we are inaugurating a short series of articles made by this important partner. Riccardo Viroli, CEO of CampingVillage.travel, explains the 7 moves not to be overlooked in view of the new season.
March 2021: a year has now passed since the “storm” began. Unfortunately, we are still not out of it, we still live in uncertainty, BUT one fact is clear: people continue to think about holidays, do research online, dream of the next trip and send their booking requests to the facilities they find and deem suitable. And you, what are you doing to let these people find you and lead them to choose your Camping Village?
Every day I compare myself with plein air tourism entrepreneurs from all over Italy and find (still today as months ago) two opposite approaches. Some, satisfied with the results obtained (albeit with enormous efforts) during last summer, look to the coming season with optimism and are committing more resources to direct marketing actions. Others, however, still remain motionless, waiting …
I would never allow myself to judge either approach, but I want to give you some advice. Even though the number of new inquiries you receive each day is nowhere near comparable to your historical standards (see 2019), tourists are actively gathering information for their upcoming holidays, and even though many don’t feel safe enough to book their accommodation, in reality they are already choosing the structure to stay in.
The best thing you can do right now, then, is to maintain contact with your target customer: entertain him, inform him, reassure him and “hold his hand” until he feels safe enough to book. All this, however, requires constant action, so if you haven’t done it yet, the time to start is NOW!
If you don’t know where to start, don’t worry, I have prepared for you a very simple guide with the 7 ACTIONS not to be overlooked: it summarizes the steps to follow and the tools that will help you sell more and better in view of the upcoming season.
1 – STUDY
Try to get to know your target customer thoroughly: what does he love about your business? Which aspects do you like least? Extract all the data at your disposal to analyze where he comes from, the composition of his family, or if he travels alone, as a couple or in a group. How long before are they used to booking? Which contact channel do they prefer (telephone, e-mail, booking engine)?
The management of your facility is a gold mine of information, but if you want a more complete overview, market studies and partner searches may be useful to aggregate data from your target market on a national scale.
2 – SEARCH
Thanks to the information you will be able to collect, you will be able to create an “identikit” of your target client. Certainly, you will identify several of them, but the macro-categories will be well defined. For each of them you will notice different ways of discovering and contacting your Camping Village.Perfect: in this way it will be easy to identify the channels to be best served. If, for example, many customers use portals as “information aggregators” to organize their holidays, this will be a showcase of visibility not to be overlooked: not being there will be like not existing in the eyes of new potential customers.
3 – CREATE RELATIONS
To date, a Camping Village is (almost) never chosen by a tourist – only – for the largest swimming pool or the most modern mobile home! He will choose you – or one of your competitors – if you can convince him that in your accommodation he will have the best possible holiday together with his loved ones. The relationship you will be able to establish with potential customers will make the real difference! You must be able to make them fall in love with the idea of a holiday in your Camping Village and trust you.
But be careful: a relationship is established between person and person, not between company and customer! So, you literally have to put your face to it, showing yourself and your staff, you have to “impersonate” your company. To do this, social networks will be your best allies, as they were born specifically to create and maintain relationships between people. A company can therefore benefit enormously from them, as long as they are able to highlight their human side.
4 – INFORMS
Every tourist – whether he is a loyal customer or who has been your guest only once, who is interested in your Camping Village or is considering you as an alternative – needs specific information. News, accommodation proposals, safety standards during your stay, new services… don’t wait for people to look for everything, make sure that the information reaches the tourists directly.
Like? Newsletters are the ideal tool! With e-mails sent on a regular basis you can keep in touch between you and the tourists who have asked to stay updated. Beware of classic mistakes: avoid sending “everything to everyone” or writing only when you have an economic offer to propose. If you want the newsletter to be a successful marketing action for you, you must necessarily:
- send consistently, to create a habit in people’s minds (they will wait for your communication to arrive)
- customize, because if you have collected information and studied your targets, you can send tailored and profiled communications.
5 – BUILD
After creating a relationship with your potential customers and informing them constantly, it will be time to show them a proposal for a stay, the ideal holiday that will make them exclaim: “This is right for me!”. That’s why you need to get to know your customers better: you will be able to understand what they are looking for in their holidays. Therefore, it creates specific proposals for each category of customers, divided by travel period (with particular attention to the most difficult weeks to fill) and by type of accommodation.
To highlight your holiday proposals, the website of your Camping Village is essential. This is your main sales showcase, here you will have to converge the traffic coming from all the visibility channels and the advertising campaigns that you will activate. The site has only one goal: to convert the maximum number of visits into requests for information and quotes.
6 – RUN
Even if your site is technically “perfect” and well structured, it is impossible for 100% of users who browse it to send you a booking request on the first visit. This is why it is very important to put in place a system to “chase” the user who leaves the site and remind him of your Camping Village.
This is the goal of remarketing campaigns: social networks (Facebook in the first place) and Google Ads will be your allies. But be careful: if you think that these actions are for free, I unfortunately have to contradict you… even if the cost will still be contained in proportion to the direct results it can bring to your structure.
7 – MEASURE
The last step (in order of time and not of importance!) Is to keep the data under control to understand if the investment – both financial and commitment – is giving the desired results. Maybe with small adjustments you could improve performance or consider “scaling” the excellent results. The tools at your disposal are different: from Google Analytics to the Facebook Business panel, up to the CRM of your structure, to check every single confirmed booking.
If you don’t know where to start and feel lost in front of the amount of data to analyze, get support from partners with proven experience in your specific sector. The tips I shared with you are – for better or for worse – quite generic: from a “macro” perspective they can adapt to any Camping Village, so you can take advantage of them! However, it is important to evaluate your specific case, analyze your data and set specific goals.
Remember that the key aspect is timing: act now, because if now you stand still waiting for things to evolve and the road to simplify, then it will be too late! Tourists have already shown us (in May 2020) that with the green light they can “trigger” a wave of requests in one day that will overwhelm your operations, if you are not ready to manage it. So, plan everything possible today (obviously, some unforeseen events will require adjustments) and organized as best as we can for a season that – in one way or another – is about to arrive anyway.
Riccardo Viroli
CEO CampingVillage.Travel
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