Hi all
Hopefully I can get some advice on the best ways to promote a tour and which system works.
I have mostly been doing Guided tours in my small seaside town of Ilfracombe in North Devon Currently I have the following voice map tours which are a history tour and a ghost tour. I have recently released another History tour in another local town Barnstaple and I am currently working on another tour in Torrington.
Up until now I have been happy with just my guided tours but over the past month I have decided to promote the voice map tours but I am not 100% sure what works and what does not. My alternate goal is to have successful selling self guided tours which will mean that I can scale down my guided tours and concentrate on producing more voice map tours.
This is a new area for me and any advice will be very much appreciated.
Thanks
Mark
Devon History Tours
Hi @mlphotos64 welcome to the forum!
Great question, we always recommend starting with the audience and connections you already have. As a working guide, I’d say start with the people who’ve just enjoyed one of your tours. You can mention your VoiceMap tours at the end of every guided tour, and hand out a card or flyer with a QR code. You can download QR codes directly from your tour’s distribution tab in Mapmaker. Read more about how to do that here and the posters we can provide for publishers here.
The second priority is ratings and reviews, especially for your newer tours. Tours that build momentum in their first 90 days go on to earn many times more over the following years. You get 10 free credits with every tour you publish. Use them to create vouchers that give access to past guests, friends, and local history groups, and ask them to leave a review. You can create voucher codes at voicemap.me/dashboard/vouchers and read more on how these work, including the instructions for friends and family to rate your tours, here.
A few other things that work:
- Print materials in the right places. Tourist information centres, B&Bs, cafés, and museums along your routes catch people at exactly the moment they’re looking for something to do. We can create A4 posters or DL flyers for you, so get in touch with your editor if you’re interested.
- If you’re using social media, focus leading with curiosity rather than a sales pitch. Start with a surprising fact, an unexpected detail, a question your tour answers, and frame it to create the feeling of discovery rather than a history lesson. Your audience might also not yet know what a self-guided audio tour is and how it works, so make sure to show the user experience through your posts and share the benefits of doing an audio tour. You can find our guidelines for social media plus some great examples from other publishers here.
- Get your tours listed on resellers. We can list your tours on Viator and TripAdvisor to reach travellers who’d never find them otherwise. Read more about how that works here.
Some helpful resources
We outline the first steps and resources available to all our publishers in our documentation on Get the basics right.
And if you missed it, our webinar last month covered exactly this. The recording and highlights are available on our blog.
Good luck with Torrington, and let us know how it goes.