So much of tourism marketing relies on location. When do people travel to your destination? How often are they in the area? What are their proximities when they're not visiting? The more messages you can customize based on real-time physical locations, the better your chances of reaching users with relevant messages.
That's why we decided to open the doors to geotargeting-so tourism organizations can segment push notifications based on geography.
Here's how it works:
- Drop a pin at any location and select a radius around it.
- Customize a push notification message that's relevant to people either within or outside of this region.
- Any users who are in your predefined radius and have notifications enabled will receive your notification.
For example, you might choose to alert users who are already within city limits about an upcoming event. At the same time, users located outside the region could receive last-minute ticket specials.
Two different locations. Two different messages. Same amazing feature. By customizing push notifications based on current location, you can:
- Increase in-destination visitor spend with local partners
- Encourage new and repeat visits
- Provide incentives for previous visitors to keep push notifications enabled year-round
- Give local businesses more opportunities for targeted promotions
- More accurately estimate visitor numbers and scale promotions accordingly
Sound exciting? If you're eager to begin exploring creative location-based push notifications, here are 13 ideas to get you started:
- Send a restaurant reminder shortly before happy hour begins to any users who happen to be within a five-mile radius.
- Extract special events from your community calendar and send push notifications to users who are close by.
- Encourage users to take your mobile app to a nearby attraction for an exclusive discount.
- Offer a free, signed book to the first 25 people to show up to a local book reading.
- Two weeks before a big festival, send push notifications to people outside the area to drum up interest.
- Is gorgeous weather in the weekend forecast? Let outsiders know!
- When it's off-season, help partner properties fill empty rooms by pushing out last-minute deals to anyone outside the area.
- Share day-trip itineraries with previous visitors located within a two-hour drive.
- Next time there's a contest for a weekend getaway, use geotargeting to spread the word with non-present tourists.
- Create your own contest by asking users in the area to share photos on Facebook.
- Promote a same-day sporting event to users located within a 20-mile radius.
- Farmers market season? Share the day's favorite finds with people in the region.
- Send a push notification to users who are physically attending an event to encourage social shares.
With geotargeted push notifications, everyone wins. Partners have more opportunities for tailored promotions. Users stay updated on activities and offers they can enjoy right away. And tourism organizations reap the returns that result from increased awareness and engagement.