It’s plain true: inbound marketing tactics will get you more customers with less work. You already believe this if you have a tourism website. But where you might be missing out is on really understanding the Buyer’s Journey and catering your online tourism content to help tourists find you during the awareness stage of inbound marketing and eventually choose your Ontario region.

Here’s a customer-focused approach to attract tourists to your Ontario tourist region website.

3 Stages of the Buyer’s Journey

Understand this: as customers make a decision to visit your tourist destination, they move through three stages in the Buyer’s Journey of inbound marketing. The Awareness stage of inbound marketing is the first stage.

According to Hubspot, “The Buyer’s Journey is the active research process a potential buyer goes through leading up to a purchase.” When creating content for your tourism website, keep in mind that you need to provide content for buyers at all three stages.

1. Awareness stage: Buyer realizes they have a need or problem; then seeks to understand and define this problem more fully.
2. Consideration stage: Buyer fully defines the problem; then considers all available options, or solutions.
3. Decision stage: Buyer has chosen which solution they will apply; they will compare products and vendors and make a final decision to purchase.

Where Everyone Else Gets It Wrong & Where You Can Capitalize

Most people are only marketing their Ontario tourist region to buyers in the Decision stage. This is an ineffective strategy, because it fails to target buyers during the first two stages when they are performing the most research. If this is you, buyers at the Decision stage have already decided what the solution to their problem is, without ever having viewed your tourism website.

To ensure your Ontario tourist region has the highest possible chance of being chosen by the buyer, you must market to all stages of the Buyer’s Journey.

Use Your Tourism Website For Marketing To Buyers At The Awareness Stage Of Inbound Marketing

I cannot emphasize this enough: when creating your marketing strategy and tourism website content, do not skip the Awareness stage. It is the crucial beginning of the Buyer’s Journey and 57% of the Buyer’s Journey happens in this stage. It’s where you stand to gain the most.

The Benefits of Marketing to Buyers at the Awareness Stage of Inbound Marketing

1. Attract all the buyers that other destinations are ignoring. This gives you the opportunity for a larger share of the market.
2. Be part of the buyer’s first impression. During the Awareness stage, buyers are still forming ideas about what they are looking for in their travel adventure. If your tourism website is what they are looking at, their ideas will begin to look like your Ontario tourist region.
3. Gain time to build trust and rapport. The longer the buyer knows you, the more secure they will feel in their relationship with you.
4. Showcase your Ontario tourist region. The more times the buyer returns to your tourism website, the more likely they are to visit your destination. You can keep them coming back with good content. Leave them looking forward to your next blog post!

Understanding the Target Market for Your Ontario Tourist Region

To successfully use the Awareness stage to attract tourists, you need to understand your target market. This requires research.  After some initial research, you will be able to divide your broader target market into segments, called buyer personas. Research each buyer persona until you become an expert on them. You should know how they make purchasing decisions - from time of day, to whose involved, to where else they’ll likely look. A lot of times this research stage involves mostly educated guesses - but just doing that puts you way ahead of the curve. Putting these thoughts down is critical: when you see them in one place it becomes much more clear how to make strategic content decisions.

Once you know exactly what they’re looking for in the Awareness stage, your expertise on that persona will guide your tourism website content creation.

Tammy the Tourist: A Buyer Persona

One example of a buyer persona created for Ontario tourist regions could be Tammy the Tourist. Here are some free content offers you could use to move tourists, like Tammy, along the Buyer’s Journey.

Remember to keep checking in to find out what Tammy thinks about the blog articles you’ve been posting. How can you do that? Hubspot is the best software for tracking this:  your contacts can be identified by persona and you can see what content they interacted with. These analytics results help you develop new content ideas.

Help Them Find You Before They Make Travel Plans

The best way to get buyers to visit your Ontario tourist region is to make sure you are the first destination to give them the idea to travel. And the only way to do that is to communicate with them during the Awareness stage of inbound marketing. Be sure to use these 5 online techniques to attract tourists at all stages of the Buyer’s Journey to your Ontario region. Here are 6 more ways to ensure inbound marketing success.

For even more tips on using inbound marketing to attract buyers at the Awareness stage of inbound marketing and move them along the Buyer’s Journey, download this Free Guide.

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