Reaching new audiences is a critical goal of most venues, and it requires a bold marketing strategy. Your museum or attraction’s presence in the digital sphere has to go way beyond your own website. The recommendations of other, trusted sites and the people who use them are incredibly important to gaining new customers. In fact, according to Trustpilot, 89% of people globally check online reviews as part of their purchasing process.
An online travel agent (or OTA) can attract a much wider audience than your venue’s website and social media efforts alone typically would. An OTA with a well-developed content strategy is also strategic in its reach, with fine-tuned ways to target specific audiences and engage people through the process of buying tickets.
As an OTA, Tiqets leans heavily into both original content and paid advertising to support our museum and attraction partners, and we offer four tiers of digital marketing packages that can help your venue dramatically increase its reach and visibility online and around the world.
Why it’s important to capture people’s attention early
In the incredibly sophisticated world of digital marketing, potential customers are typically broken down into a few phases of the “buyer’s journey.” Toward the bottom of the illustration below, customers make a purchase and, hopefully, become “retained customers” for the long term.
But at the very top of this “funnel,” people are in the “awareness stage” of buying. They’re curious about what’s out there, and looking for things to do, but they may not have heard of your museum or attraction yet. And if they have, they may still be in the “consideration” stage of comparing options and trying to decide what to commit to — in other words, whether to buy tickets to your museum, to a different museum, or not at all.
OTAs nurture customers during each stage of this funnel. During the awareness and consideration stages of the customer journey, in particular, they help by:
- Reaching a larger audience to let new people know about what you have to offer
- Convincing them to buy tickets
- Giving them a place to do so, easily and with little friction
During that first part of the funnel, an OTA offers up all kinds of creative and curated content to lead new visitors in the direction of your museum or attraction. They’re already an attentive audience. They wouldn’t be searching for things to do in a particular city if they weren’t interested in making plans. You can capitalize on that fact, and capture their attention, by showing up at the top of their search.
Why and how an OTA like Tiqets can help boost your reach
With over 60 million visitors annually to the Tiqets.com website, we reach customers around the world and inspire travelers of all ages to get out and try new things. Tiqets can target campaigns for people traveling alone or with family, friends, or colleagues.
Tiqets also tracks precise metrics so we know exactly where those website visitors and ticket purchasers come from, along with other demographics. From these analytics we know, for instance, that our top markets are France, the US, Spain, Italy, and Germany (although we reach many more). And we also know that over 50% of our ticket sales are to millennials.
Here are some of the types of content Tiqets collaborates with our marketing partners to produce.
City Pages
Tiqets City Pages are available for travelers to find things to do in a specific city. This is an audience open to suggestions and highly influenced by the opinions of other travelers. All of our marketing packages guarantee a spot in the top five venues of a City Page (keep reading for more on that).
Top Things to Do in a City
For every City Page on the Tiqets website, there’s a “Top 10 Things to Do in the City” list and a visually arresting carousel that goes along with it. Museums and attractions featured in this list have “top billing,” so to speak.
Blog posts
Tiqets also has a healthy blog readership — not just this blog you’re reading now, but our traveler-focused blog. Being featured in the Tiqets Blog can dramatically boost awareness about your venue and give it credibility. The Tiqets Premium package includes an original, exclusive post on the Tiqets Blog that might include, for example, an interview with a key staff member at your venue or an evergreen, search-optimized venue guide.
Critically, all Tiqets blog posts are optimized for search engines so they appear as high as possible in search results for anyone searching on a specific term — not just the audience that already knows about the Tiqets Blog. (SEO is the science of honing in on which search terms people are using, then integrating those terms into the organic language of posts in a way that’s savvy and effective.) And all Tiqets blog posts are automatically translated into six languages to optimize reach globally beyond English-language speakers.
Social media
The Tiqets Blog is always heavily promoted on Tiqets’ social media pages, and every Tiqets marketing package guarantees at least a static post on our social media channels. That post reaches the Tiqets core follower base and links straight to the ticketing page for your venue.
Standard and Premium packages also include a presence in our paid social media ads, which extends the reach of your museum or attraction and enables us to target the precise audience that sees the posts.
With Premium and Custom plans, we collaborate with customers to curate specific posts, stories, and reels, which often include sharing exclusive content, linking to city guides, and becoming a part of a carousel post pointing to your venue. Also on the table: collaboration with a local or even globally known social media organizer who will visit your venue in person in order to post about it from an intimate, personal vantage.
Emails
And finally, in our content canon, live marketing emails are sent to Tiqets fans and ticket buyers. If a Tiqets customer buys a ticket to another museum or attraction in your area, you’ll appear in a post-purchase email as a recommendation for “other cool things to do” in that area. You’ll also be included in select specially themed email campaigns around occasions like summertime or the holidays.
Your presence in Tiqets marketing emails could look something like this:
Tiqets marketing packages for 2024
Tiqets can help you generate extra revenue with brand-driven marketing efforts, promote special dates and events at your museum or attraction, strategize the best content strategy, and align your own business goals with what we have to offer. We offer several levels of digital marketing packages which can include activations such as:
- Placement within the top 5 on your City Page
- Social media mentions and paid ads
- Content creator collaborations
- CRM campaigns
- Dedicated blog articles
What to do next
To get started exploring the options for a digital marketing partnership with Tiqets, we recommend the following steps:
- Choose a package: We can meet with you virtually to discuss what’s best for your museum or attraction.
- Strategize: After we evaluate resources, we align with you on a creative strategy and deadlines for the campaign.
- Develop the campaign: You send us content assets — things like photographs, illustrations, funny or interesting facts about your museum or attraction, and videos — and we work on the content creation.
- Implement the campaign: We activate and run the campaign on the schedule we set in the strategy
- Gather results: In this important step, we conduct a performance review of all channels and send you a full report so you know how successful this campaign was.
Once you’ve taken step one, we’ll walk you through the rest!
Reach new audiences and boost your sales
Tiqets supports 18 languages and 20 payment methods. We’ve sold over 30 million tickets, have 4,600 distribution partners, and have seen over 3 million app downloads. Are you ready to join our league of digital marketing champions?
Digital marketing helps expand your reach, access targeted audiences, and get the most from your limited marketing spend — if you do it right.
To find out more about how your museum or attraction can take advantage of Tiqets marketing packages in 2024, reach out to your account manager today.
