Are you looking to dramatically increase your guests’s perceived value of your service and differentiate your tour or activity business from its competitors? Your photo marketing strategy is crucial. Here’s how you can realize significant benefits that improve profitability and enhance the guest experience, simply by offering photos as a service - rather than using guest smartphones to take photos.
The most important thing to understand when it comes to a successful photo as a service program is that photo marketing must be done with ‘intent’.
This means that your photo marketing strategy goes well beyond just snapping a photo on your customers’ smartphone halfway through their experience. Your customers want to remember their experience, share those memories with their friends and family, and potentially even brag about it a little.
That’s why photos should be taken with intent. The intent of capturing the amazing emotions that your customers had while taking part in your experience. When you move away from randomly taking photos on your customers’ smartphones, and instead towards photos as a service, your tour or activity business can better achieve that.
For more information on intent, please click on the video to hear Allan Graves, Founder of San Francisco Love Tours, talk to Fotaflo about the power of intent when it comes to photo marketing for tour and activity operators.
In this blog, we’re going to dive into exactly what photo as a service is, how it helps tour and activity operators to deliver customer photos with intent, and the top five benefits that your business will realize when you transition to this better way of sharing customer photos.
What is the photo as a service model?
Offering photos as a service is a way for tour and activity operators to move away from inefficient and ineffective ways of offering photos to customers, and instead transitioning to a seamless photo sharing experience.
It’s a move away from the traditional methods that tour and activity operators use to distribute customer photos, whether that be taking photos on the customers’ smartphone or taking photos on a camera and then supplying customers with a USB stick.
Instead, tour and activity operators use a seamless photo marketing platform (such as Fotaflo) to simplify and automate the distribution of photos and videos to their customers.
Rather than simply taking photos on a customers’ smartphone, using a photo marketing platform allows operators to make photo sharing part of the experience. Customers get their own private link to their photo album, where they can seamlessly access and share photos of their experience whenever they want.
By offering photo marketing as a service, tour and activity operators are able to deliver photos to customers with intent.
The benefits of offering photos as a service for your and activity operators...
#1 - You’ll significantly improve the guest experience
Customers come to your brand for two reasons. Firstly, they want an amazing experience. Secondly, they want photos of that experience that enable them to relive their memories and share their experience with their friends and family.
Photos are an important aspect of the entire experience, but they shouldn’t get in the way of the actual activity itself. That’s why offering photos as a service will significantly increase the experience that guests have with your brand.
When you seamlessly offer photos to your customers with intent and without having to handle customer smartphones, guests will have an increased perception of the value of your brand - giving you a competitive edge.
Here are some top ways in which photos as a service will enhance your guest experience:
- Guides can seamlessly take photos using a photo marketing platform, instead of having to handle each customers’ smartphone.
- Guests won’t be distracted taking their own photos and can leave their phones in their car knowing they’ll get a great photo.
- The tour will be safer when guides take photos.
- Guides are able to capture better photos of customers smiling in the right place.
- It gives guides the opportunity to build stronger relationships with their guests.
#2 - You can drive referral bookings to your business
With a photo marketing solution, your tour or activity business is able to better drive referral bookings to your business, and, in turn, increase your profitability. For example, Fotaflo helps brands do this by giving tour and activity operators the opportunity to provide each of their customers with a private URL to a photo album, where they can view and share all of the photos from their experience.
Photos on this page are also permanently branded with your company logo, so guests will never forget the experience.... Or your business.
Customers can share this page with their friends and family through their social media channels, email, text and even review sites. The result? More people are driven to your brand and you’ll gain more bookings as a result.
The best thing is that customers typically share their experience years after it actually happened. With the photo album page staying live for as long as you want it to, your business can gain referrals months and years after the original customer tour is over.
#3 - You’ll have what you need to build an effective remarketing program
Past customers are a tour or activity operator's most valuable revenue stream. Not only can you encourage them to rebook with your brand in the future, you can also use them to drive referral bookings for your business.
This is why it’s important you have a robust remarketing strategy in place. With a photo marketing platform in place, you can remarket to past customers to encourage them to take actions with their photo albums - whether that be simply reminding them of their experience so they rebook with you or encouraging them to share photos on their social media pages.
By sending your past customers reminders to view their photos, birthday messages, anniversary reminder and other emails, you can build remarketing campaigns that have world-class open and click rates that enhance your brand awareness and deliver new bookings.
#4 - You can identify your top brand advocates
We’ve just discussed how valuable your past customers are, but what if there was a way you can identify and engage your top advocates - the people who share your brand message, endorse your experience and encourage their peers to book with you.
When you offer photos as a service you can do just that. By using the data you collect from the personalized photo album web page, you’ll be able to identify the past customers who have become advocates of your brand.
You can use those insights to automatically email and text top performing brand advocates, encouraging them to share even more of your brand across their social media channels - driving referral bookings to your business.
#5 - You can improve the quality, and quantity, of your online reviews.
When a photo as a service model is implemented, tour and activity operators are in a position to significantly improve both the quality and quantity of their online reviews. An important element of improving your brand reputation.
Along with a personalized photo album webpage, guides can send a short video to customers to ask them to leave a review of their experience. This personalized touch generally leads to more, and higher quality reviews.
By making it easy for customers to leave a review of your brand, you’ll be far more likely to get reviews from your customers.
Interested in learning more about offering photos as a service, and how a photo marketing platform like Fotaflo can help? Get a free demo of our innovative photo marketing solution today, and learn how we can simplify and automate the distribution of your customer photos.
