How to use photos of customers enjoying your tour or activity for business success

A guest blog by Fotaflo

In the tour and activity industry, there are always new and creative ways for operators to grow their businesses. Whether it’s through social media, email marketing, or positive online reviews, the best businesses regularly seek out new opportunities to grow brand awareness and online bookings. 

In this blog, Fotaflo would like to provide you with some valuable insights about one of those key opportunities. Sharing free photos with guests of them enjoying your tour or activity. Keep reading to discover five ways to use such photos to optimize your social media, email marketing, and guest reviews, for increased business success.

1. Offer free photos as part of your tour or activity package

The tour and activity industry is very competitive, so it’s important for your business to find ways to stand out from competitors. One of these ways is to offer free photos to guests as part of your service. 

Since guests of tours and activities want to capture special memories, including free photos as part of your experience can give you a competitive edge to attract more bookings. This is especially true for guests, who don’t like to be pressured to purchase photos immediately after the tour or activity, or even a couple of days later by email.

If you decide to share free photos with guests, this also means someone from your tour or activity must capture the photos. This is another opportunity since you can advertise that your business ensures all guests have a fully immersive experience, by having someone on your team take all the photos, so they don’t miss anything. 

In addition, because you know your tour or activity better than anyone, you know the best locations and times to take the best photos.

2. Incorporate photos of your guests into a marketing strategy for your business

It’s understood that using photos in your marketing is key to grabbing the attention of potential customers. However, sharing photos with guests enjoying themselves on your tour or activity, creates customer loyalty, which leads to repeat bookings and online referrals.

Sharing free photos with guests, particularly with a photo distribution and marketing platform, such as Fotaflo, encourages them to easily share these photos with their family and friends through email and social media. This turns your customers into advocates for your business, who are helping to market your tour and activity.

This mass sharing of photos by guests happily engaging with your business is one of the most powerful referral marketing strategies for increasing brand awareness and online bookings.

3. Personalize your email remarketing with photos of your guests

An excellent way to use guest photos in your marketing is through personalized remarketing emails. This is when you market to customers in a manner specific to them, such as addressing them by their name in a marketing email. 

Sharing photos of past guests’ happy memories in a remarketing email from your business will significantly increase the chance the email will be opened and engaged with.

This strategy will initially produce customer satisfaction, thanks to the gift of free photos of a positive memory. However, depending on how you design your email, it also creates an opportunity for repeat bookings, and for the photos to be shared with a network of people through email and social media, helping to refer new customers to your business. 

When sending out remarketing emails with photos, it’s important to consider your subject line and when to deliver them. Your subject line should mention that photos of your customer’s amazing experience can be found in the email. This will increase the chance of the email being opened.

Sending these remarketing emails on anniversaries is also helpful. This could be one year after the guest participated in your tour or activity, or on their birthday, which can be received as a pleasant surprise.

4. Use guest photos to drive customer referrals through social media

Referral marketing is an effective way to increase visibility and online bookings for your tour or activity business. With the popularity of social media, most referral marketing takes place online, so it’s important to take advantage of this opportunity. 

Anytime someone posts about your business on social media, there is a chance for hundreds and possibly thousands of people to see it. This is why finding ways to encourage guests to share photos of their incredible experience with your business on social media is a must.

One way to achieve this is by sharing free photos with your guests in a manner, where they can be easily shared across multiple social media channels. One of the best ways to achieve this is with a photo-sharing platform that provides guests with a personalized photo album, shortly after participating in your tour or activity. Within this online album, it’s important to include a visible call-to-action to share their photos on social media. 

The easier you can make this for your guests the more likely the photos will be shared. If possible, try to make sure when these photos are shared on social media they direct back to your website.

5. Use free photos to ask customers for an online review

Receiving positive reviews on the top of review websites like TripAdvisor, Yelp and Google Reviews is critical to the success of a tour and activity business. At the same time, asking for a positive review should never be done in a way that annoys your guests. This is why gifting free photos to your guests in an online album make such a request more acceptable.

After directing past guests to their online photo album through a text message, or remarketing email, consider including a message on how they can leave a review on one of the top review websites. You could also ask them to consider including one of the shared photos.

Not only will this create an opportunity for more 5-star reviews for your business, but it will also provide a visual of your tour or activity from a past guest.

The best software to help tours and activities with free photo sharing, and the business success it generates

If you want to start using any of the above guest photo strategies for your tour or activity business, Fotaflo can help you easily achieve this. With a number of tour and activity clients from around the world, we have helped businesses use the power of their guest photos to grow online customer referrals, positive reviews, and bookings from repeat and new customers. 

We welcome you to sign up for a free demo to learn how Fotaflo can help your tour and activity business grow for weeks, months, and years to come. We look forward to speaking with you!

Written By – Ryan O’Grady – CEO, Fotaflo

Ryan is the CEO of Fotaflo, which is a leading photo/video distribution and marketing solution for the tour and activity industry. He is passionate about sharing his knowledge on how offering free photos to guests can grow your tour and activity business.

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