Traditionally, I do not believe in competition. Ask anyone who knows me, I believe that there is no business in the world that offers tours or a travel destination like you do.
That being said, I do believe in knowing your marketplace. You need to know who else is out there, what type of marketing they’re doing, what’s working and what you would improve upon for your own marketing.
Researching ‘competitors’ is an important aspect for any travel and tourism marketing, it allows you to get an idea of your global standing, and to also learn from the exact missteps and successes of other people in the industry. To this purpose, there are hundreds of pages offering services that help you discover and delve into your competitors’ drawers and see all their dirty -and clean- laundry. Since there are so many tools available, it can be hard to navigate through all of them.
These five are some of the the best tools I’ve found to research your travel business competitors and scope out your marketplace:
If you’re wondering where your competitors are posting their ads, this is the tool for you.
Adgooroo lets you get statistics for up to 10 competitor’s websites, ranked in order of page views. By seeing what your competitors are using as their advertising platforms, and how successful they are, you can redesign your own advertising campaigns. If you notice many of your competitors are using a site, and this is bringing them a large number of views, you might want to consider placing ads on that page as well. However, you might also want to look at other places where your ads won’t be competing for attention. Your course of action will be determined by your personal goals and strategies, but this tool will help you either way.
This is a paid tool. However, users can request a free demo where they’ll be able to see limited statistics for their brand against their competitors. The paid version offers features such as PPC metrics over time, click through rates, analyze your competitors keywords, and more. The SEO feature will show data changes year over year, top keywords by volume and clicks, your competitors top ranking organic keywords, and your competitors SEO strengths, weaknesses, and areas where your travel and tourism marketing can outperform others.
If this tool seems too complicated or time consuming, you need not worry. The helpful folks at Adgooroo offer a variety of training to help you get used to the features and tools so you can hit the ground running!
SEMrush is a convenient and easy to use platform that will provide a lot of important travel and tourism marketing information on your competitors. Its main focus is on keywords, but it also gives data on paid and organic search, advertising, and backlinks. You are pulling back the curtain to how your marketplace gets website traffic. One of the coolest features of this tool is that it allows you to do a cross search in order to compare multiple competitors within your marketplace. Knowing what keywords are most popular for your type of business, and what your competition is using, is a great way of learning what words you need to use on website copy and blog/social media content to boost your SEO and reach the top of the search ranks.
You are probably familiar with Spyfu, as it is one of the most helpful tools used to determine a website’s global standing. Spyfu uses data from all over the world, gives you demographic information on your viewers, and lets you put into perspective who your competition really is. Because this is one of the most popular tools for business owners and SEO professionals alike, you want to pay special attention to it and use it to your advantage. Once you know who in the travel and tourism industry ranks close to you, you can see what keywords they use and what their demographics are. Spyfu offers free features as well as a paid option that is relatively cheap starting at just $49 per month.
To get all the social media statistics of your competitors without having to go to each of their individual pages use SimilarWeb.
This tool lets you see data for your global, country, and category ranks. It also gives you traffic data so you can see how many times your page has been visited, your bounce rate, the time visitors are on your website, and more. SimilarWeb also gives you data on which countries your visitors are from- which is helpful to those planning paid advertising campaigns. The traffic sources feature allows you to gauge where the majority of your traffic is coming from so you can scale your advertising campaigns more effectively. Other great features include data on your social media traffic, display advertising, audience interests, websites with similar data, and more. The paid option, albeit a little more pricey than other options listed here, starting at $199 per month, gives you special features such as comparing your travel and tourism marketing efforts to your competitors, in depth keyword research, and even gives you insights on opportunities that your competitors may be missing out on.
All said and done, if you’re serious about marketing your business and getting ahead of your competition, then SimilarWeb is a tool that you just can’t pass up!
This wonderful tool basically combines all competitor research tools into one. If you are looking to have all the information on your travel business competition in just one place, this is the tool for you.
Simply Measured gives you data on trends, traffic, conversations, social media, brands, backlinks, and more. With the ability to let you access 35 different reports, you will be able to do a comparison of what your competitors are doing, and what you need to do to surpass them. This tool is one of the best things out there for planning a marketing strategy, and is useful to all kinds of businesses in the travel industry. Check out the free tools section to trial what will be useful in your research and consider an in-depth demo if it’s feeling like the tool for you!
The lesson here: start studying your competition! Do not fall into the black hole of compare and despair. Knowing what other people in the luxury travel industry are doing is one of the most important actions for marketing. Knowledge about your marketplace always helps you to have a clear perspective on what you could be creating with your specific marketing. It allows you to know how well you are doing, what is working for other people, and what to change & improve. It also gives you perspective and helps you set realistic but ambitious goals to work towards. With these travel and tourism marketing tools, you will be able to do the research that will help you reach your goals.
Check out these tools and share your results below. Type in a quick comment which tools are becoming your favorites and have been the most helpful in scoping out your marketplace and ‘competition.’
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