How to Partner with Other Travel Industry Businesses

Today we wanted to discuss how to partner with other travel-based businesses. The post this week won’t be super long and in-depth like some of our other posts, but we promise that you will find great value within. This is a hot topic that has been greatly overlooked by many business owners. Partnering with other businesses should always be part of your marketing strategy and lead generation funnel. 

What is Lead Generation?

Before we get into the different types of partnerships you could establish with your business, let’s quickly talk about lead generation. We want to start off with lead generation because partnerships are a great tool to increase your lead generation. Lead Generation is the process of attracting new prospects to your business and increasing their interest and trust through a nurturing process, all with the end goal of converting them into a customer. Some ways we generate leads for our business are through blog posts, live events, and social media. Lead generation is an important part of every business and partnering with other businesses is a great way to do it.

Something to note – it should always come second to your ability to convert sales. You should be able to close sales before focusing on generating more leads. 

What Impact can Partnerships have on my Business?

Partnerships are a great way to increase the growth of your business, especially with regard to increasing traffic, user engagement, sales of products, and ideally in the end helping you scale your business. Partnerships increase your network and your reach. Allowing you to get your message out to a large audience. Key partnerships (Partnerships with industry leaders) can get you in front of your ideal clients allowing you to show off your skills and how your services can help.

Partnering is Low-Cost Marketing

Partnering with other businesses is often a very low-cost marketing strategy compared to paid advertising, social media, or even SEO.  Paying for Google or Facebook ads, and hiring PR firms is often very expensive. Whereas partnerships are low-cost a low cost more direct way of getting yourself in front of potential customers. It can even generate traffic for years to come.

Partnering can also mean that you don’t have to do it all. A good example of this is Wild Women Expeditions. Their whole business model is just a marketing machine and they have lead generation on lockdown. They don’t actually deliver any of their trips. They use on the ground local suppliers to deliver their programmes. That was how their business was able to scale and offer destinations all around the world.  This model is starting to take over the adventure industry. 

Different Types of Partnerships

Partnerships can be a great way to grow your business, but it’s important to choose the right partners. Here are three different types of partnerships, and what you need to know about each.

Affiliate Partnerships

This has to be our favourite kind of partnership. Affiliate partnerships are where other people help you sell your trips and earn a commission when they make sales for you. We use affiliates ourselves! and one of those affiliates is YouLi. Although we would recommend YouLi to anyone running multiday trips regardless of the affiliate revenue, it’s always nice to get a kickback when recommending a great piece of software. One of the best parts about YouLi is they have a built-in affiliate system. Making it easier for companies to reach out to influencers and allow them to sell their trips. 

Here is an example: A client of ours Arctic Dog Adventures Co, is using YouLi to promote her trips. Once all of her multi-day trips were listed we set up her affiliate program. We invited one or two affiliates that we knew the audience was good for ADAC trips. This has allowed them to pass some of the marketing efforts off to other people who are incentivized to fill the trip. 

You can get started today with our $20 Affiliate Program template pack! Check out this YouLi Masterclass, where Katie explains how this affiliate template can help you get started with affiliate marketing within your business.

Backlinks and Guest Posting

This is a lot more casual and extremely low cost and gives you exposure to a new audience. For example, writing a blog post for a company or another company that they would post on their site. In this blog, you may likely have a link to your website and your services. The downside of this is it’s time-consuming writing content for people but the outreach and cost (other than time) are practically $0.

What is a Backlink?

A backlink is one of the most important tools in an adventure business owner’s toolbox. Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website. They are a major factor in how Google ranks your website. The higher your website rank, the more people will find you online. Simple! 

Co-branded or Joint Ventures 

This is a true partnership. Both parties bring their expertise and promote the trip to BOTH of their audiences. You see this a lot with yoga teachers and travel companies for example. As the travel company, you know the area and accommodation but you need the yoga teacher to actually make it a yoga retreat. This is great for local companies who are well established and have been local for a long time and they want to go international. 

A Good Place to Start

If you are interested in any of these partnerships our Business Of Adventure Facebook group is a great place to start. It’s an ideal place to network and we have a wide variety of people as members. All you need to do is post in the group and explain what you are looking for and give them somewhere to provide their information (as per our Affiliate Program template pack).

Something to Think About

What impact can a partnership have on your business? Can it help you scale up, extend your network, and generate revenue? We believe the possibilities are endless. We hope you are able to add B2B partnerships to your 2022 marketing strategy and if you have any questions please reach out.

Useful Resource

We hope you find this blog post beneficial but if you want a visual look and to listen to Katie discuss how she sets up affiliate marketing for her clients and her business herself we recommend you take a look at her live session below. 

Join the Conversation

As travel restrictions are beginning to lift there is a lot of excitement around that. People are ready to get out and explore again. Now is the time to be connecting with other people, create co-branded adventures and secure those backlinks. It will not only help towards upscaling but boost your network. 

We would love for you to join our Business of Adventure Facebook group. This is a collaborative space for business owners or freelancers in the adventure travel and tourism space. The focus here is to share best practices and tips about online presence and digital marketing (front end) and online systems (backend) so you can establish a rock-solid foundation for your adventure business. If this is something you could benefit from, please join!