VIP Marketing Method: Mastering Pervasive Marketing for Tour Operators

Understanding the VIP Marketing Method™

Before we dive into pervasiveness, let’s quickly recap our VIP Marketing Method™. This unique framework is optimized specifically for tour and activity business owners, built around the core philosophy that success in your tour business comes from staying focused on your ideal target guest.

The VIP Marketing Method™ consists of three core elements:

1. Valuable: Providing genuine value to your ideal target guests across every stage of their traveler journey.
2. Intimate: Building trust, rapport, and loyalty with prospective guests, humanizing your brand, and creating person-to-person touch points throughout your marketing.
3. Pervasive: Creating a persistent omnichannel presence across the many places where your ideal target guests are already spending their time and attention.

Each of these elements is powerful on its own, but when you get them all going simultaneously, that’s when the magic happens. By being simultaneously valuable, intimate, and pervasive with your tour and activity business marketing, you’ll get that flywheel going, leading to more leads, more sales, and more profit.

The Power of Pervasiveness

Being pervasive isn’t about bombarding your leads and prospects with constant sales pitches from all directions. It’s about creating a consistent, valuable presence that builds trust and helps you stay top-of-mind.

Pervasiveness works hand-in-hand with intimacy. Over time, we’re building that know, like, and trust factor, and we can do that more readily and quickly by having more touch points. This isn’t about short-term results or transactions; this is about building a relationship.

This approach aligns with the modern traveler’s journey, which is less about strict funnels and more about multiple touchpoints across various platforms. By being omnipresent, you ensure that no matter what journey a customer takes to ultimately buy from you, you’re there showing up with consistent value and brand messaging.

The Psychology Behind Pervasive Marketing

Pervasive marketing taps into several cognitive biases that impact how people perceive and interact with your brand:

1. The Red Car Effect: Once people become aware of something, they tend to notice it everywhere. In marketing, this means that once your brand is on someone’s radar, they’re more likely to notice your content across different platforms.
2. The Mere Exposure Effect: Repeated exposure to a stimulus increases people’s preference for it. In marketing, consistent exposure to your brand increases familiarity and liking.
3. The Context Effect: This bias leads people to believe they understand the whole of something if they understand part of it. By providing valuable content consistently, you’re allowing your audience to build a fuller picture of your brand, expertise, and authority over time.
4. The Skim Effect: In our information-rich world, people often don’t consume content fully. However, they try to remember the source. By being consistently present, you increase the chances of being remembered as a valuable source of information.
5. The Bandwagon Effect: People tend to do what they perceive others are doing. By creating a strong presence across many channels, you can create the perception that everyone is engaging with your brand.

Implementing Pervasive Marketing: From Beginner to Advanced

Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of how you, your marketing team, or your marketing agencies can implement this pervasiveness. It all comes back to that foundation of our seed content.

Beginner Level

At the beginner level, take your seed blog post and create two additional pieces of content from it:

1. An email that you can send out to your list of leads.
2. A long-form video.

This is a great place to start when repurposing your content, especially because these aren’t big changes. It’s entirely appropriate here to use ChatGPT or other generative AI to help you move from a blog post format to an email that you can send out. Don’t forget to pepper in some of that intimacy.

Intermediate Level

At the intermediate level, repurpose each piece of seed content into 15 total pieces of content.

Advanced Level

At the advanced level, you can create 50 or more pieces of content from a single seed post.

The key difference between these levels isn’t so much the type of content you’re creating or repurposing, but rather the volume and variety. As you or your team becomes more comfortable with this kind of repurposing, we’re really looking to scale up your impact, scale up your reach, and ultimately find efficiencies in doing this on a regular basis.

12 Sample Ways to Repurpose Your Seed Content

1. Social Media Carousel Posts: Break down the key takeaways into different slides and put them over images.
2. Short-form Videos: Create 60-second videos highlighting the key points of your seed content.
3. Title Graphics: Create eye-catching graphics or inspirational videos or photos featuring just your blog post title.
4. Label Posts or Graphics: Extract keywords or tips and overlay them on top of relevant images.
5. List Posts: Break down that seed content into a shareable list format and overlay that on an image, if appropriate.
6. Quote Posts: Pull impactful quotes from your content.
7. Stat or FYI Posts: Highlight an interesting statistic or fact about that particular destination or about your business.
8. Discussion Thread Posts: Use key points from your seed content to start a conversation or engage people on social platforms.
9. Infographics: Visualize some of your seed content’s main points.
10. Podcast Episodes or Audio Formats: Discuss your written seed content in an audio format.
11. Webinar or Workshop Content: Use your seed post as a basis for an educational session.
12. Lead Magnets: Create downloadable resources based on your seed content.

Best Practices for Pervasive Marketing

1. Don’t worry about redundancy. It’s very natural to feel like you’re going to be irritating people, or people are going to be seeing the same content over and over again. Keep in mind this is an illusion. Nobody is going to be seeing all these pieces of content.
2. Give your ideal target guest multiple formats of your content. Some folks prefer reading, others prefer watching videos, and some might prefer images or listening to something.
3. Let your ideal target guests choose how they want to interact with your brand. Being present on multiple platforms allows you to reach people with the tools they use every day.
4. Always adapt your content to some of the nuances of each platform. An experienced marketer will know that when we take short-form video content from an Instagram reel and post it over on Facebook or TikTok or YouTube, there are some subtle differences that might impact the performance.

Remember, the goal of being pervasive in the VIP Marketing Method™ isn’t just to be everywhere, but to be valuable everywhere that you are. By following this framework, you can create a powerful, consistent presence that resonates with your ideal guests and drives real results for your tour business.