Most publishers focus their energy on making the best tour they can, and rightly so. But a great tour still needs an audience. In our May webinar, Alicia Chamaillé, VoiceMap’s Head of Content Distribution, walked through the full range of promotional strategies available to you, from identifying existing audiences to building a sustainable content pipeline to making the most of VoiceMap’s own distribution tools.
The session also coincided with our rebrand, with a new logo, updated look, and a new tagline: Curiously Human Self-Guided Tours. It’s a celebration of the curiosity, expertise, and local knowledge of our more than 800 publishers, and a deliberate counterpoint to the rise of AI-generated travel content. We also launched two headline partnerships alongside the rebrand: QI tours narrated by Stephen Fry and History Hit tours by Dan Snow, Matt Lewis, and their fellow History Hit podcasters.
Watch the recording here:
Below are some highlights and insights from the session, we also share more detailed examples and tools on our blog.
Your audience is bigger than you think
Your instinct when thinking about tour promotion might be to focus only on social media followers. But podcast listeners, newsletter subscribers, blog readers, LinkedIn connections, people you meet at professional events, members of niche communities you contribute to all count. The more useful question is: where are the people who are already interested in what you know and the stories you have to tell?
Here are two great examples from our publishing community: Willem Fromm, creator of the History of Cologne podcast, already had a dedicated international audience when he published his first tour. His two English tours now have almost 200 ratings averaging 4.5 stars. Katrina Milne, a tour guide in Edinburgh with an established travel business, did the same. Her three English tours have almost 500 ratings, also averaging 4.5 stars. Both tapped into their existing audience instead of starting a new marketing channel from scratch.
Lead with curiosity, not promotion
A question we get asked often is how to promote a tour without feeling like you’re constantly selling. The answer is to lead with curiosity.
What do you know about your tour destination, the unique spots and quirky stories that visitors and locals mostly miss, those details that don’t make it into the guidebooks? Share that, and the tour becomes the natural next step for anyone who wants more.
How you frame the story matters more than the format. Take an example from this tour in Aix-en-Provence. The fact that the last public execution by guillotine there was in 1935 is interesting, but it doesn’t do much on its own. Reframing it as “there are people still alive who remember the last time the guillotine was used publicly in Aix” pulls people in. It creates the feeling of having discovered something rather than being told something. That’s the distinction worth holding on to.
Iren from City Beautiful Tours in New York does this well: she uses the stories and locations on her tours to create consistent themes, sharing hidden histories and surprising facts that make the tour the natural next step for anyone who wants more. She also takes it beyond her tours, sharing itineraries to help people explore her city.
You don’t have to be everywhere
The most useful starting point is where you already have traction and where the people interested in your subject spend their time. Pick one or two platforms and focus there rather than spreading yourself thin.
A few content formats that work well:
- Carousels are having a moment. You can use them to share surprising facts, “did you know” posts, or guides showing how to turn a tour into a full day of exploration. Keep text minimal, use clear images, and maintain a clear thread from first slide to last. Some good examples: travelbugtonic introducing the audio tour format, CityBeautiful’s guide to how audio tours work, and this new tour announcement from wherenowtours.
- Short-form video (15–30 seconds) works well for quick roundups, sneak peeks, and how-to content. Hook viewers in the first three seconds. This reel from squirrelmusttravel is a nice example, and livinglondonhistory shows how to open with a hook that pulls people in immediately.
- Medium to long-form video is where you can share behind-the-scenes content, stories from your research process, or deep dives into a location or character from your tour. These work well on YouTube: this example and this one both show what’s possible.
- Static posts are still useful for announcements, milestones, and review highlights. Strong image, clear text, a call to action. This example from nordicstorieswithausra shows a clean announcement post done well.
The webinar also covered best practices for Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube, you can read the full breakdown in our blog post. A few accounts worth following to stay on top of algorithm changes: Adam Mosseri for Instagram, René Ritchie for YouTube, and @tiktokcreators for TikTok. For a broader view, the Geekout newsletter by Matt Navarra covers all platforms weekly, and CYMI by Lia Haberman goes deeper with a creator focus.
VoiceMap’s distribution tools
Two features in your tour’s distribution tab are worth highlighting:
- Short links: create a clean, customisable URL in the format voicemap.me/yourtext to use in your social bio, email signature, or captions.
- QR codes: generate a scannable code for your profile, tour description page, or select locations on your tour. This is particularly useful for physical promotion such as stickers near the start of your route, flyers in a local café, postcards in a tourist information office.
When you post, make sure to tag us at @myvoicemap on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, and @VoiceMapMe on YouTube.
We’re also developing a publisher toolkit with ready-to-download and customisable designs for posters, flyers, stickers, and social media templates. In the meantime, poster and flyer designs are available on request, and you can download the updated brand assets for your own promotional materials here.
The session is designed as a menu, not a checklist. Take what works for you and what fits within your schedule. What’s the one thing you can do in the next few weeks to build a little more momentum behind your tour?