Tour Operator Growth Podcast

3 Tour Page Fixes That Drive More Bookings

Nikki DeSantis & Greg Rosenhan Episode 17

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0:00 | 40:24

Your tour pages are the 15-second preview that decides whether a visitor becomes a booking or bounces. In this episode, Nikki and Greg are joined by returning guest Brandon Lake to kick off the Booking Stage of the Resmark Growth Engine, starting with the product page itself.

We break down why most tour operator sites convert at just 1–3%, the trust markers and copy that need to live above the fold, and how to write tour descriptions that speak to your ideal customer instead of yourself. Plus real numbers from real clients — including a 37% conversion lift in a single month and a 150% increase from tour page optimization alone.

In this episode:

  • Why 98 out of 100 visitors walk out of your "theater" — and how to keep more of them
  • How to write tour descriptions that match your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
  • The relevance, reassurance, and performance framework for fast conversion wins

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Chapters: 
0:00 Intro & Kicking Off the Booking Stage
1:14 Why People Land on Tour Pages and Don't Book
1:21 The Theater Analogy: What Conversion Rate Really Means
4:35 The 5 Questions Every Visitor Is Asking
6:45 How to Optimize Tour Pages for Conversion
8:34 Imagery That Resonates With Your Ideal Customer
10:10 Converted Skeptics & Named Guides
12:15 Trust Markers & Cancellation Policies
13:23 Writing Tour Descriptions for Your Ideal Customer
14:54 The Data-Driven ICP Process at ResmarkWeb
18:08 Speak to Them, Not About You (Features vs. Outcomes)
22:08 Qualifying and Disqualifying Visitors
23:24 The "Know Before You Go" Section
24:42 What Belongs Above the Fold
29:27 The Power of a Key Differentiator
31:06 Real Client Results: 150% Conversion Lift
32:35 The 3 Final Fixes: Relevance, Reassurance, Performance
39:43 Wrap-Up & What's Next in Part 2

SPEAKER_00

Welcome back to another episode of the Tour Operator Growth Podcast. We're excited for this episode. We have a returning guest, Brandon, and we're kicking off a brand new stage in the Resmer Growth Engine. Up to this point, we talked about the dreaming stage and the planning stage, and now we are diving into the booking stage. We're going to be breaking the booking stage out in two parts, and that's because there's a lot to unpack. Today is part one, and we're focusing on product pages and your tour descriptions. Quick note before we jump in. If you've been listening to the podcast and you're starting to see some gaps in your own business, that's exactly why we created this. We work with tour operators every single day on website, SEO, booking flow, paid ads, conversion, really the entire system. And this growth engine framework is what we use for our own clients to help them scale in a consistent way. So if you are enjoying and want to apply this to your own business and have us help you, please reach out. We'd love to, we'd love to have the chance to just jump on a discovery call with you and walk through if we could help you. But for now, let's jump in, guys. Brandon, to start us off, why are people landing on tour pages and just not booking?

SPEAKER_01

It's a good question, Nikki. I before I answer that, can I just back up for a minute and talk about conversion rate? Because we so I operate two different tour companies. We look at this all the time, right? And it's so often a phrase that we throw around in the industry, conversion rate, but we don't really think about what it means or what a little change to conversion rate can actually mean for our revenue. So I'm gonna give you a little analogy that I like to use to kind of think about this, okay? I want you to imagine that you've created an amazing experience. This experience, you are so excited about it. You want to invite everybody to come and have the experience. And the what the way it's gonna go down is like this: you have a theater, and you're going to invite people to come, sit in the theater, and you're gonna give them an opportunity to watch a preview of the experience. It's gonna be 15 seconds. Within those 15 seconds, all the people in the theater are going to decide whether they are going to proceed with the experience and pay you $100 or whether they are going to leave. Okay. So you work hard, you do all your marketing, you do everything right, you fill the theater. Let's say there's 100 people that come in. They're all in their seats, they're ready to watch it, and the theater, and the preview starts, and within 15 seconds, 98 people have stood up and walked out of the theater. What are you thinking as the operator? Like, what? My experience was amazing. Why did you all leave, right? But I want you to think about this for a minute because that scenario is happening every day on your website. It's not just a metaphor that way, right? This is your tour pages. It's your home page, it's your checkout process, all of it. And there are little things that we can talk about, and we'll talk about a lot of these today, that will make a huge difference in that. Um if you ran that scenario, Nikki, for a whole year, the difference of 98 people walking out every single day versus you just keeping one more person in the theater every day adds up to potentially tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And we'll talk about that. So hopefully that frames it a little bit. You can kind of think about something visual when we talk about conversion rate today. So, back to your question: why are people landing on tour pages and not booking? So there are a handful of reasons that we're gonna jump into here. Tour operator sites typically convert at a little bit lower rate than even the broader travel industry. When I'm talking travel industry, I'm talking hotels, cruise lines, flights, you know, all of that kind of stuff. We're we're looking at conversion rates in like the 1 to 3% range. Okay. And sometimes a little bit lower than that, even if a site has a lot more informational type pages on it. Um so the product page you're talking about is the preview. Like this is the experience, right? We land on it and we make a decision really quickly as to whether or not we're going to move forward. And there are a bunch of things that people are looking for during that process. Um, and I'll just mention maybe five key things that I like to think about when you look at a tour page. Okay. Um the first one is does this match where I came from? So we don't just get to a tour page because we type in a URL, right? I don't have all the URLs of every tour page memorized. So I'm gonna have something else that I've seen before I get there. What is it? It could be an organic listing in Google. It might be an ad. It might be an email. Maybe I saw this, the answer was in AI, right? And so I've I've got some preconceived idea in my head about what I'm about to see on the other side of this link I'm about to click. And the first thing is immediately, does it match what I just saw, what I just came from? Whatever the imagery was, whatever the wording was, whatever that is, it got something into my brain that made me emotionally connected enough to click it. And so when I land there, that connection is really, really important, right? The next piece is can I do this? So especially in the tour and activity space, we are doing this all the time, like qualifying ourselves, right? Like, is this for me? Whether it's physically for you, whether it is, you know, you feel like you're the right age to do this thing, um, whether you're like the other people that are doing this thing, whether you're gonna fit with group that who's doing this thing, we wanna see that. Um and then, of course, price, right? And sometimes we can kind of get that wrong, like the the price, people will interpret or they'll see the price. It will kind of hit their brain before they see the value. So getting that order is really right. So those are those are a few things that cause people to hit a product page and not book. And we'll talk about lots more as we go through this.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, thanks for explaining that, Brendan. Um, when people come on the website, obviously they have a lot of questions. They're coming from different paths. They might be coming, like you mentioned, from outside sources. They might be coming from pages from your website to that product page. And there's a lot of questions that they're trying to answer. So, what's what kind of things can can Tor operators do realistically to optimize these tour pages to increase that conversion rate like you talked about at the beginning?

SPEAKER_01

Um yeah, there's a bunch of things that are really critical to this. So think about those handful of things that we just talked about, right? Um does this does this match where I came from? So making sure that the language or the imagery of wherever they just came from, this is true, Greg. You mentioned like, okay, they came from another page on your site. Sometimes they're clicking on like uh a little teaser listing about the tour, right? It's got a picture, it's got the tour name, um, it has some descriptive text about it. Make sure that those things match. Sometimes we go to click on a tour and it's like boom, and the and then the image on the next page is completely different than the one that was in the teaser. And that disconnect is like, whoops, I just landed on the wrong page. That seems really like obvious when you say it, but we don't always pay attention to those things on a website. I've not, I've like missed that a lot on our own website where you're like, ooh, I love this picture on this page, and then click, oh, I like this picture over here, you know, and it's like the the visitor is making decisions in milliseconds. And so that mismatch can really make a difference. Um so that's one thing. The other, the other piece is thinking about what you actually have in your images. So if you think about your ideal client, we'll talk more about ideal client here in a little bit of like how do we figure that out? But if you think about the people you want on your trip, does your imagery, does your text, your copy resonate with them? Are you showing, can they see themselves in your imagery? Like, do the people in those pictures look like them, right? Where they're like, ah, she's like me. He's like I am. You know, that family's like my family, whatever it might be. Um, that seems like a small thing too, but it's really critical. Sometimes I've seen tour operators go out and they'll like be like, whoa, I grabbed all my friends and I used them as models because they were easy. But guess what? Your friends might not be your ideal customer, right? They might be like the wrong age, the wrong everything, and now you're missing the point. You know, we actually have a video on our site for a struggling product. And that video is taken of a bunch of people that are not our. It's actually another supplier that we sell for. And they took these like mid-20-year-olds out on this tour, and and they're like kind of hardcore and like going after it. And that is not our audience, right? Like our audience is older, they're generally parents with children, not uh, they're not all families, but they're older married couples, sometimes retired people, whatever. Like, this is not resonating with them, and we have sold very little of it. So, like that makes a huge difference. Um and then there's just a couple of other things that I think make a difference. If you can get reviews, what I like to call converted skeptics. So, like, find someone who had the same doubts as your ideal customer and then became converted, right? Like, oh, I didn't think I could do this, but I did, you know, and and this company made it possible for me. That's a converted skeptic. And it will resonate in people's psychology in a way that just somebody who says, this was the best trip ever, is not going to resonate as much. So that's another key. Um, having named guides in your reviews, or if you're like, if you got a couple of key guides that always guide a certain tour, put their face, their name, like that personal connection makes a really big difference versus just a generic, like, oh, this is a tour and it has pretty pictures, you know. Um people want to connect with people, and especially in this industry, and that makes a big difference. Do you think that's still important to do?

SPEAKER_02

Just real quick, Brandon. Do you think that's still important to do if you have like different guides every single year and they're not consistent?

SPEAKER_01

I think, yeah, it's a real challenge when you do have that scenario. And that's a lot of companies, right? If you're not just like a, you know, a company that has certain specific guides that have been guiding this for years and they're just sticking around. Um that can be a little bit more challenging. But I think showing an example of what those guides look like is fine. No, I mean, people aren't necessarily going to see that and go, you know, where's Kim? Like, she was the one I saw a picture of. They don't necessarily remember that, but what they do, what that does happen is psychologically, they see that picture and go, oh, this looks like a person I would want to have as my guide. You know, and it's a representation of who those guys are. So I wouldn't worry about that too much, that they're like taking inventory and writing notes of uh who they expect to see on this tour, you know. But showing an example guide can be a good thing. Um and then a couple other things that I think really make a difference are like what I like to refer to as trust markers. So these are easy things, but sometimes we just totally overlook them. Like get your reviews and your review count right there. And there's key places to put these that we'll talk about, but like make sure that's on the page. Um and other things that could give people pause are like cancellation policies. So wherever they see that price, make sure they see like what the policy is to back out. If you've got a flexible one, like a 24 hours in advance type policy that a lot of tour companies do for particularly for day trips, um, make that front and center because it that just reduces some anxiety, right? People are like, uh, if I book my own my money, how do I get it back? Right. And and don't make them dig for that. Like just put it right there. And then they can go, hey, you can pay for this now, you can back out later. And most people don't, right? They book because they want to do the tour. They're not booking because they're planning to cancel, but that will stop them from booking if it's not, if it's not clear that they can back out.

SPEAKER_00

You they made it to that page. Reassure them as much as you can. Um, we're talking a lot about, you know, make sure making sure that the messaging, the imagery, everything is consistent, things are in the right places. Let's chat a little bit about the actual descriptions of the tours. Are they important? Of course, we know that they are, but why is it important to have really ICP? So you're talking to your ideal customer in every one of those tour descriptions and kind of what is best steps or practices for somebody to start implementing, we'll call it ICP copy on their tour descriptions.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. This is a hard one for like if you're um if you're own a tour operate, you know, if you own a tour operation or if you're doing the marketing for it, our tendency is to insert ourselves, right? Like, I'm gonna write this like I would like like the way it would sell to me. But guess what? If you're the one running this tour operation or you're the one doing the marketing, like you're probably not identical to your client base. For years I did this, right? I'm like, I love that. You know, and I'm kind of I'm a super big outdoors person. I've I do all our trips. I was a guide for our trip. Like, I am not our typical audience. I, you know, I'm very comfortable with all these things. I love doing it. I don't think twice about any of the questions that most of our customers have. And so I'm sitting here writing coffee to myself and I'm like, yeah, that nails it, you know. That's not going to resonate with ours. So we uh we've actually taken a different approach at Resmark Web that has changed everything. And it's actually changed everything for our business as well. So I'll just give you a quick overview of this. We could talk for a whole hour about this, but we have a kind of a data-driven process because if we put our own brains in it, we'll screw it up, like I said. So we actually will go in, we'll pull like 500 to 1,000 reviews, your guest reviews. I'm talking Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Facebook, wherever they come from. We pull all of those in. We go in and grab 12 months of your Google Analytics data. If it's there, we'll actually grab thousands of chat conversations. These are like pre-booking, especially the pre-booking ones. We'll grab some post-booking ones as well, because there's some good data there. But the pre-booking ones are full of information about concerns and questions and oh, I mean, it's a gold mine, right? For all of this stuff. And then we'll actually do, we have a very specific 18-question interview that we walk through with the founder or business owner. And I actually had someone from our team interview me so they could we could get all of this data, right? And then we process it. We have a very specific process that we go through to dive into this and we extract certain things from it. Like, what are the key barriers to purchase that are being expressed by this audience? What are the key purchase drivers that are really pushing these people over the edge to just make that purchase? Um, who are they from a demographic perspective? What are their ages? What is their gender? What is the um, what do they do? You know, all of those things we can actually extract from this. And it is amazing what comes out on the other side. So, Nikki, you're saying, how do we get to this, right? Like, how do we really do I we say ICP, we use that phrase a lot in our in our business. Ideal customer profile, right? Meaning I have isolated who my ideal customer is. I figured out what's in their heart and in their mind, and I'm speaking to it. Not like I want to be spoken to, but like they want to be spoken to. In fact, I'm even using some of their language, like from review statement, like the way they would say it. So when they hit a page, the tour name is named a certain way that's gonna resonate. The first line of text especially is gonna resonate. The things that they truly care about and want to see are gonna be wrapped all around my price and my buttons that are like my call to action buttons. And all of that is gonna be there. And it is crazy the difference that that one change can make, right? In in our copy, especially, but also images, video, like once we have that understanding, we can change those things. And now we've got something that is gonna be it's gonna resonate far more and be far more compelling, and it's gonna increase conversion rate.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I when I think of copy and what we're doing with copy right now, it's really awesome. But it could seem daunting right now, like, well, how do I do the ICP? How do I do this? How do I change everything? One thing I think that can be changed really quickly as well, if you're doing this, which the ICP process, not as difficult as it seems, we can help you with that as well. But one thing I see all the time that I don't think speaks to people as often is we. You'll read the content and it's we do this, we make sure you have a great experience, we you know, blah, blah, blah. Put yourself in in the shoes of the actual person that is going to do your tour and talk to them. So instead of like, we're gonna make sure it's great, it's you're gonna have a great time. You, you, you, you, or making sure just make sure that you're speaking to them and less about your company and less about what you're gonna do. I think it resonates with people a lot better when you're talking to them instead of just about yourself.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, 100%. And sometimes we refer to that as sort of like features versus benefits, you know, in marketing speak, right? And and I like to think of it as kind of like features versus outcomes, you know, like what's really going to resonate with them is the outcome. They need to know, but don't disregard features. Like people need to know how long is the trip? Um, you know, what class is the Whitewater? What is the minimum age? That those are that's information details, sometimes features, right? Um, I need that stuff. But what are you gonna say in the copy that's gonna speak to them to be like, that's what you're gonna be talking about in 10 years around the Thanksgiving dinner table? You know, like, and and they're and they're seeing that. That is the outcome. That's what they ultimately want. They want this experience that's gonna bring, you know, either them closer to other people or their family or their spouse or whoever they're traveling with. They part of what they want is that shared experience, right? Um, that they're gonna see certain outcomes from that. Whatever it and experiences are all across the board. So there is not one outcome that's a fit for every product by any means, right? Every product has different outcomes. And and that's something that that you can do with this data-driven approach too, is you can kind of dive in on a per product or per tour basis and see what those outcomes are. This is not not, I mean, you'll see some general themes for an overall business, and we find those when we do that. But then the key is like dig into the individual products because that's where the magic really happens. You know, it's you got to get it right and get it matched to the ideal customer byproduct.

SPEAKER_00

And when usually when people are usually writing reviews or, you know, we could always match what they're writing based off of. So what tour did they go on? Are they talking about that specific tour in the review? Like we could use that as part of, you know, creating the copy for that specific description, for that specific persona in that, you know, customer profile.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, 100%. And I think it's important too that like, you know, we don't try to sell to everyone. Sometimes we want to do that, right? Like, I just want everybody should do this. And and that's really not true. Like, if you ever think about some of the bad reviews that you've gotten as a tour operator, we've all got them, you know, um, whether they were put on Google or not. Hopefully they weren't, but but like we've had people complain and stuff. And you can probably pinpoint, like, yeah, that kind of person, I don't want that kind of person back in the future, right? So part of our job is not just make this resonate. With everybody, it's help people decide is this for me? Right? Is it not for me? Um, and those can be really, really important. Like, you know, you want your tour descriptions and the and the copy to be like specific enough that this feels real to them. It's not so generic and high level that they can't visualize themselves there. You know, we've added a couple things to our tour pages that I think really help with this. Like one is this we have this graphic of a person fully dressed. It's not a real person, it's like a drawing of a person. And and whether they're going horseback riding or they're going mountain biking or they're going rafting or hiking, whatever it is, you can see this person from head to toe with little descriptors pointing to the how, you know, what they've brought with them and how they're dressed, so that a person can look at it and in an instant say, I could be like that. I could, I could dress like that and go and do this thing, you know, and and it's and it needs to happen very quickly like that. I want to read a ton of copy, just see this thing, go, yes, that's me. I could do that. So I'm qualifying myself. But at the same time, sometimes we want to disqualify people. So how do we do that? Right. Like we're adding a new or rebuilding um our Western River website right now through Resmark Web. And one section that I'm really excited about on our tour pages is a section that we phrase know before you go. And in this section, we're we're talking about some of the realities of a trip. This is a, and this is like a high value, high, high expense type trip for multiple days that you don't want to get the wrong person out there, right? Because then not only are they, it's not being miserable for a couple of hours or feeling like you don't fit for you know two to four hours on it's like, you know, two to seven days that you're gonna be out there having this experience and and you want people to be absolutely loving it. And so we'll we'll get real about what it what it means, you know, to be in the Grand Canyon for that period of time and what some of the realities of the trip are. And and it just it helps, I think that transparency and on first the right people can help sell the trip. They're like, yeah, I want to have this experience. I realize it's I'm gonna be out there and nature's unpredictable and it could be hot and the water's cold and and all of these things, you know. That helps even sell to the right people. But for the wrong people, ideally they'd say, no, not for me. And I'm 100% great with that because they're not our ideal customer.

SPEAKER_00

You don't want them to have a bad experience, you don't want to have a bad review. So I'll go when when. Um so when we're doing um a lot of these core principles across all of our clients, we as a team are realizing, okay, what needs to go where, especially on like the product pages specifically. We've tried and tested, looked at the data. Obviously, tour descriptions are going to be very specific to that client specifically. But let's talk a little bit about Brandon. What are some core elements that always need to go above the fold? Or what are some, where should the trust signals go? Let's talk about things that we've found from our clients and can use that across, you know, other clients.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. This is so important, Nikki. Like this question, we've got to get it right because it is where the theater preview is happening, right? Like that, whatever loads, when you say above the fold, what we're talking about, with the phrase we use in website development a lot, right? And and uh we're talking about what loads in your view on the screen, whether that's mobile, what loads on your phone screen without you scrolling down, and what loads on your desktop screen without you scrolling down. Okay. So what needs to be in that space? Number one, your tour name needs to be there. Obviously, the tour name is actually really critical. And I was surprised to see what a difference um it made. We made some changes to our tour names um by doing all this research. And not only were they a little better for SEO, but I think they're a big part of some pretty significant conversion rate increases that we saw. Um, so we compared our new website to old website. And in the month, this was the month of March of last, well, the I guess the month before last now, it was a 37% increase, which is pretty significant. Now, you look at that, like it actually in one month yielded over a hundred thousand dollar difference. So, like that's a big deal to have that kind of conversion rate increase. So, tour name, I think was part of it. So that it that's number one. Um, you're gonna want to have some kind of what we call maybe a hero image or a video or something that is that emotional connector that ideally, again, matches where they came from, if they came from another page on the site. Um, but something visual that is representing that tour. And ideally, the guests can see themselves in it. So perhaps not just a straight up scenic picture of the place, right? Maybe something that's got a little bit of that scenery and feel, but also shows the type of person that does this so they can make that correlation. The other things that you want on there are trust markers. So trust markers, we're talking about star ratings, review count, awards featured in, you know, some publication that people might recognize, whatever that might be that you have that says, hey, you can trust us, we're credible because of this or these things, right? Um that's really, really important. And honestly, people should see that like probably right even before they see the price. So when you're thinking about like ordering these things, you've got the product name, you've got some trust markers right there with it, you've got that hero image. Um, and then the price is kind of coming in into view, right? It's all going to be above the fold. But those pieces are really critical. If you can also get in the answer to like, can I do this? If you can figure out how to weave that in, either from a, you know, whether that's a testimonial, the right picture, something like that that is answering, because that is the first question people have in their head, like, can I do this thing? Is this for me? They've got to find that match, right? That's critical. And then the last thing, which I would say might, I mean, it's as important as anything else I've just mentioned, but if this is not in view, then I think we're missing a big opportunity, which is your call to action. You need to have some button or something there that is saying, book now, check availability, add to cart, whatever it is. We test these two. Like we test different words, because different words on that button will make a difference. So, and they're different for different companies, but we love to test those for companies and kind of see what is what is the phrase that makes sense for your product. Um so there's a handful of buttons in there. Those are like key heavy hitters.

SPEAKER_02

Can I add one thing to that list? Yeah. I would say if if your tour or your product, whatever it is, has like a key differentiator, trying to show that clearly. Like you talked about your product name. I know on Moab Adventure Center, you have a river rafting product that is a full-day Moab Rafting Adventure with barbecue lunch. That is the tour name now. And for me, that's a huge differentiator. Having been on river rafting trips with various companies, not everyone offers a barbecue lunch. Still a good lunch. You eat sandwich or whatever on the beach, it's nice. But now when you're seeing, oh well, maybe the price is a little bit more, or maybe they're comparing apples to apples. I don't know. It it's something that's gonna stand out even more of like, oh, I get a barbecue lunch here, whereas this one I just get, you know, a sandwich on the on the beach. So it might be that thing that pushes them over the edge to choose you over someone else as well.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, 100% agree. And the tour name is a great place to put that. You know, we did that, like you mentioned there, and it's it's what's gonna stand out, you know. It's people are because keep in mind, like, these people aren't just landing on your site. They've been to perhaps three to five other websites where they're just making quick product comparisons and they're bouncing around and going back and forth to wherever they came from to check these things out before they make a decision. Like we move, think about yourself doing this, you know, like you move around pretty quick. And so something that's gonna stay in their head, like the tour name, um, that's gonna give a comparison. It's like, wait a minute, that's different. I did not see that on any other site. So love that, Greg.

SPEAKER_00

Sometimes you don't know until you look at the data that you need to change some of these things. Um, we did some conversion optimizations for uh, well, many clients we do conversion optimizations for, but this client specifically, we did we launched their website, looked at the data, analyzed it, and then made some changes very specific to what we thought was going to increase conversion rate. So their conversion rate increased by 150%. Their purchases went from 20 to 44 in in one month, and the revenue increased by 176%. And that is just by tour page conversion optimization. So we're changing specific things that Brandon was discussing, whether we added in those trust signals or we moved things up on the page and we're doing these tour things as we're looking at the data. Maybe we changed the language on the call to action rather than check availability. We changed it to book now. And of course, when we're going to be testing things like this, we don't want to change it all at once because then we don't know what's working, what's not working. But after we're, you know, making these changes, we're looking at it and then we're able to see these kind of results, just we don't need more traffic. We just need to increase that conversion rate. And it obviously was really successful for um several of our clients just recently. Um, we were looking at the the CRO conversion rate optimization.

SPEAKER_02

So as we wrap up here, Brandon, um, just kind of put a bow on this. If you had to give a tour operator one thing to fix on their tour page this week, what would be the number one thing that you would have them do?

SPEAKER_01

Great question, Greg. Let's give people a final takeaway here. Um I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna give you a couple things in well, three things in order, okay? Because some of you might say, I already do that. So I don't need to do that. And then you don't have anything to take away from this. So um one thing, I'm gonna give you some really easy ones, okay? Um, and they're gonna be in the categories of relevance, reassurance, and performance. Okay. I'm gonna think about those three words as we go through this. So number one is relevance. If you can change something about your tour page that answers that, can I do this question? Whether that's your picture, whether that's your product name, a little tag that says top tour for families, like something that is gonna go, aha, I'm in the right place and I can do this because other people like me have done it, right? Um, think about if you have the data like we've been talking about this whole time, fantastic. Then you know what that guest profile looks like, you know what their age range is, you know what a converted skeptic is going to look like, right? Something that's going to reassure the visitor in the first five seconds that this trip is for them. And and if you again, you can do that with ICP type research, that's an easy one to answer and get right. So that would be number one, just relevance. Make it relevant to that person. Number two, if you're saying, yeah, I did that already, I've done that. And I feel like it's really nailing it. I've had it there for a long time. Great. The second piece would be reassurance. And I don't know if I actually included this in my earlier bullets, but um wherever you're putting oh no, we did talk about this. Okay. So the second one is reassurance. Wherever you have your price listed, make sure that you have your cancellation policy. In even if you have a longer written-out one, longer down the page or something. Um I'll just use the most common one in the travel industry. If it's full refund within, you know, canceling within 24 hours. That's a simple little one line of text that's not going to take up very much room. Put that on the page. Um and have your wherever that is, wherever your call to action and all those things that we just talked about are located, if you can get that, we didn't really mention this before, but if you can get that to be sticky on the page, like frozen. So when the page scrolls, whether you're on mobile and that button is just floating there at the bottom, it's it's always in view. Or and you're on desktop and that little sidebar is staying there. That alone, having all of these things we've talked about, like always in view while you're evaluating content over here, that is really, really powerful. Okay. So relevance if you can get it, the reassurance that's like, and it's frozen and positioned there together with all the other key things. If you're like, yeah, I've done that. My page is super relevant. I'm reassuring people. Where would I go next? The last one would be performance. Um, and we didn't talk about this very much throughout the whole podcast, so I'll mention it here. Um your page speed is an absolutely critical factor. Like it is crazy, especially in the travel space. What happens if you even get like a 0.1 second improvement on your load time? Like every 0.1 second, there are some stats out there that will say that's worth 10% more conversions. Um, that much in the travel space. Like that's pretty crazy, you know. But we're sometimes we think in seconds, like your page is taking five seconds to get there. Oh my goodness, if you could shave off three of those seconds, you know, you know, just automatic boost in conversion rate, particularly on mobile, um, which is another thing we didn't touch on a whole lot. But I would say for almost all of us, most of your visitors are coming to your site on mobile. So all of these principles we've been talking about today, put them in a mobile first framework. Like really think about what that experience looks like. We're sometimes when we're working, we're like on our desktop computer, because it's more efficient to do work there, right? I'm not gonna answer all my business emails on my phone and do everything there, right? Like I'm gonna be on this. So when I look at my website, a lot of times I'm looking at it on not on my phone. Well, I browse my website on my phone, right? But go check out what that experience is really like. Um, and what is it like for someone with a slightly slower connection on their phone, um maybe because of where they're located or whatever. Um, those things can make a really big impact. So relevance, reassurance, and performance. If you can look at those things and sort of check those off in that order, I think you can find really big impact. And if you're thinking about those things going, uh, I don't, that sounds like great in principle, but I don't even know where to start. Like, reach out to Resmark Web. Like the team is fantastic. I we utilize them for our own businesses. And it's awesome. And we have a full like marketing team and people that are focused on SEO and conversion rate. Like we do that, but we still utilize them because having another person to bounce things off of and give us insights and keep us on track with like monthly reports and help us see what we're doing and monthly initiatives is kind of coaching us through the process of improvement, that makes a huge difference. And that's what we're talking about here is incremental improvements, just a little bit at a time. Do this one thing, test it, improve it. Do another thing, test it, optimize that, do another, do a third thing, optimize that, and you'll find that over time, every little incremental improvement boosts your conversion rate. And that even a half a percent, a percent, maybe even up to, we see as much as 30% plus with some clients when you implement all of these things. That could be the difference between $50,000 a year, $100,000 plus a year, um, $100,000 plus a month is what we saw with those changes. So like this is not a little thing we're talking about. Sometimes we think, I need more traffic, I need more tra you know, how do I get more traffic? How do I rank higher? That's important, but it's not important until you fix the conversion problem. Like, then go get more traffic. Nail the conversion, then go get more people to come and sit in your theater because that's when you're gonna get more people raising their hand saying, I want to buy a ticket.

SPEAKER_00

That was a lot. That was a lot in 40 minutes. So thank you, Brandon. And that was so much that we have to break this into part two. So we're gonna pick this right back up where we're leaving off, but we're gonna talk to talk about once somebody really clicks a book now, then what happens? All right, as always, if you're getting value from this podcast, share it with another tour operator, send it to a friend, leave a review. It really helps us keep going. And as Brandon said, if you'd like to see what Resmart can do for your own tour business, please book a call. We always keep the call uh links in the description. So feel free to click it and book a call. And we'll see you on the next episode.