Tour guides often double as photographers, but many businesses are still selling those photos to their guests. Did you know that your business can realize some significant benefits by simply providing those photos for free?
That’s because people pay for tours and activities to have a great time, and having a photo memory is part of that experience. Why would you want to make your customers pay to remember their experience? You wouldn’t get that in any other industry.
By giving away free photos not only will your business have a valuable differentiator compared to all your competitors who make customers pay for photos, you also have a genuine reason to re-engage your guests in the future - reminding them of their experience.
With that in mind, in this blog we discuss why providing free photos to your activity and your customers is so important, some of the top ways in which your business can benefit from doing so, as well as looking at some of the most efficient and cost-effective ways for tour guides to take and distribute photos to your guests.
Why providing free photos to your guests is important
When customers visit your tour or activity business, they are paying for the experience. That means not only are they paying to enjoy the moment, they are paying to have amazing memories that will last a lifetime.
Customers don't want to feel like they are being held hostage for those memories when your business asks them to pay for photos. Memories aren’t products. Your customer wants to feel like your brand is there to help them create a wonderful memory - not monetize it.
That’s why giving away free photos can help your business realize huge benefits. Here are just a few of the top benefits that tour and activity businesses can realize from an effective photo marketing strategy:
- Improving the quality and quantity of online reviews
Reviews are incredibly important to your business. In fact, nearly nine out of ten (89 percent) of consumers make the effort to read reviews before buying products, according to research from Trustpilot.
By improving the customer experience through the delivery of free photos, your tour or activity business will, in turn, improve the quality and quantity of online reviews for your brand. Customers will also post those photos on their reviews, giving future customers more incentive to book with your company when they see the amazing experience that others have had.
- Identify your brand’s top advocates
The better the experience you provide and the better you can remind your customers of the experience that they have had with your business, the more likely you will be able to build a pool of advocates who share your brand with their network of family and friends.
By using photo marketing, you can identify your strongest brand advocates and engage with them at the right point in time so they share their experience with your business to their peers. This improves your company’s word-of-mouth marketing strategy.
- Re-market to previous customers through memories
Repeat bookings are important in the hospitality industry. Sharing photo memories represents the perfect opportunity to re-engage your past customers and increase the likelihood that they will re-book an experience with your business.
By using photos to remind your past customers of the amazing time they had with your brand, you’ll be able to generate more repeat business.
- Gain referral leads through work-of-mouth marketing
The power of social media is huge - and social media is relatively photo driven. People want to see photos of their friends and family having fun, and the experiences that they have had. When someone sees a photo memory posted on social media, they often want to experience it for themselves.
This is where you have an opportunity to gain referral leads! By providing your customers with free photos and giving them the tools they need to easily share those photos on their social media channels, you’re increasing the likelihood that you’ll receive new bookings through referrals.
What’s the most efficient way for tour guides to take, and distribute, photos?
Now you know the benefits of providing your guests with photos, what’s the most efficient, cost-effective and highest-quality way for your tour guides to take photos and distribute them to your customers?
It’s still not uncommon for guests to hand over their phone to the tour guide for a photo opportunity. But this often leads to below-standard photos that not only leave customers with a bad memory of their once-in-a-lifetime experience, but photos that rarely get shared on social media by the customer.
So, this is where it gets tricky. You need to find a solution that encourages your guides to proactively take photos of your guests, and allows the photos to be easily shared with your guests after their experience has ended.
You can turn to expensive photography equipment and share these photos over social media or via photo sharing websites, but this all relies on fragmented systems that aren’t connected - wasting your business time and money.
What you need is an automated solution that allows you to easily take and share photos with all of your customers.
That’s where Fotaflo can help. We've designed an innovative photo and video marketing platform that simplifies and automates the distribution of photos and videos to all of your customers.
By using our platform to provide your guests with amazing memories of their experience and then using those memories to re-engage guests and build loyal brand advocates, your brand will improve its customer experience, gain new referral leads, improve the quality and quantity of your online reviews, and increase your repeat bookings.
Want to learn how it works? Book a Fotaflo demo today.
