Check out this handy guide to the best free adventure travel marketing tools you should use to ramp up your digital marketing.
Done correctly, digital marketing promotes your travel company, makes it stand out from rivals, attracts customers, and generates brand awareness. Yet with many tools and techniques available it’s hard to know where to start.
Promoting your adventure travel and outdoor activity company online is more important than ever. Research shows that 71% of people plan travel on the web and 83% have booked a vacation online. Having a strong digital presence is vital to the success of your adventure travel business.
Best free adventure travel marketing tools
Various tools, techniques, resources and technology help businesses to put in place their marketing strategies. The list below includes the best free adventure travel marketing tools that you can start using today.
We have included different tools for each aspect of marketing from social media and email marketing, to tracking and places you can advertise your business for free.
Buffer
Buffer is a Social Media Management Tool which allows you to create and schedule posts across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest and LinkedIn. This is a great way to run your social media accounts from one location.
Buffer enables you to keep your branding and messaging consistent across all platforms. This creates a stronger brand image and increases awareness of your company.
On their free plan you can add up to three social media accounts, schedule ten posts per account and include images and videos as well as text. Buffer is one of the best free adventure travel marketing tools.
You can download campaign performance reports as PDF files to present results to colleagues and clients. If sharing PDF reports via email while on the go, we highly recommend you compress your PDFs prior to sending
There are other social media management tools available. The top option currently on the market is Hootsuite. Hootsuite’s professional plan starts at £39 a month which provides much more than the Buffer free plan.
Canva
Canva is a free tool which makes graphic design and branding quick and easy. Once signed up you have access to over 200,000 images, templates and stickers. With these you can make professional looking graphics to add to your posts, you can even create social media videos.
Different social media platforms prefer different image sizes for their posts. Canva provides you with pre-set template sizes which fit the platform you are creating the graphic for.
Using the correct image size helps to keep your posts consistent and professional. This increases your chance of grabbing and keeping the attention of your target audience.
Canva does offer a paid plan, CanvaPro, at £99.99 a year. The paid plan increases the image library from 200,000 to over 60 million. You get access to their branding kit which allows you to save the logos, fonts and colour schemes of your brand making the process much more efficient.
Creating a graphic on Canva takes minutes but having CanvaPro lets you further streamline the creative process.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tracking tool by Google which lets you see how visitors are using your website. It tells you the age, gender, interest, device and location of your audience.
Through data collection and monitoring you can identify trends and patterns. Using this data you can edit your website to deliver better results.
They offer a wide variety of marketing tools to track performance and identify areas of improvement. It can be overwhelming at first, but Google have created the Analytics Academy to help you learn everything you need to know.
Adventure Sports Holidays
Adventure Sports Holidays is a free advertising platform for adventure holidays, extreme experiences, action sport courses and accommodation. Since launching in 2013 the site has grown to be a one-stop shop for all things adventure travel.
Travellers rely on Adventure Sports Holidays to plan and book adventure holidays. They use the site to find exciting things to do in destinations and to learn where is best for different activities.
The site attracts 75,000 new visitors every month and has over 900 companies advertising their adventures without paying a penny.
Once you have registered you are able to list any day trips, tuition, vacations and accommodation that you offer. You can add an unlimited number of listings completely free of charge.
Any enquiries made on Adventure Sports Holidays are emailed to you to take the booking directly. Adventure Sports Holidays does not charge any fees or take commission on bookings.
Adventure Sports Holidays does offer affordable paid plans that start from just £149 per year. These provide better listings (more images, videos, company logo etc) and more prominence on the site. You can compare the paid plans and free plans in more detail here.
Google Business
Google Business is a free business listing service. It allows you to provide your business name, location, services and contact information and appear on the sidebar of Google. Anyone searching for your business will find you without needing to scroll through other search results.
Your business will also appear on Google Maps meaning you gain exposure in your local area on the world’s most widely used mobile app. Customers can also send messages to the email address you provided and click to call you.
You are able to show Google reviews of your company giving your business social credibility and improving the chance of a booking.
DaVinci Resolve
Everyone knows that video is a powerful way to get your message across. And in the adventure travel and action sport industry good videos sell. Of course it can cost a fortune to get them professional made, however you probably already have footage that just needs editing…
Up step Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve which is free to download. It has a vast amount of features for high end video editing. Including node-based special effects, colour correction features and professional audio tools. About the only thing it doesn’t offer is green screen capabilities but you can get that free elsewhere with the likes of Runway.
On the downside, it’s a complex piece of software and is intimidating for first timers. But using it you can create professional quality edits of existing footage to promote your business. They also offer the even more powerful Resolve Studio for a one off fee of $295 including all future upgrades for free.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing tool. It is very useful for managing contact lists and creating email marketing campaigns.
Their free plan lets you have up to 2000 contacts and send 10,000 emails a month. Using Mailchimp’s customer relationship management tool you are able to create contact profiles and see how people interact with your emails.
Using this data you can better plan future emails to target particular customers with specific emails to ensure your click through rate is as high as possible.
Mailchimp provides one of the best free email marketing plans on the market but once your subscriber count has outgrown the free plan it is quite expensive. We would suggest looking at alternative software such as the more cost effective GetResponse or Mailjet.
Final recommendations on adventure travel marketing
Running a business in a constantly evolving adventure holiday industry can be difficult at the best of times. You need to stay up to date with current trends and change your strategy to ensure your company is reaching its potential.
The most important aspect of marketing is knowing your target audience. When you receive bookings don’t be afraid to ask where the customer found your business, or why they chose to book with you over your competitor. This is all information which you can use going forward.
There are other free adventure travel marketing tools out there but this list will give you a great platform to kickstart your digital marketing.
We hope this article has inspired you to take a look at how you currently market your business and what you can do to improve. Remember to sign up to Adventure Sports Holidays so you can advertise your business for free today!
