10 Free Marketing Tools For Tour Operators

Small business owners in the travel industry have their plates full managing all aspects of their operations on any given day. But with the help of your technology stack, you can streamline administrative, sales, marketing, and payment processes within the business.

Focusing on your marketing stack in particular – what’s on your list of favorite free marketing tools to use? We say free as there are free as well as paid tools to help small businesses automate, schedule, design, curate, analyze, distribute, and optimize their marketing efforts.

If you are looking to discover new tools to help you in this department, keep reading for ideas. Most are free alternatives to the paid versions, which means you can scale up if you need to. It also means that access to certain features may be limited, although you can judge whether to upgrade based on the volume of your work.

Free Marketing Tools For Tour Operators

In alphabetical order, our list includes:

1. Active Campaign's free tools

Use for: various

Separate from its core products, Active Campaign offers several useful and fun free marketing tools for use in your travel business.

There is a handy subject line generator for springing ideas on email or blog post headlines. Or you can download webinar templates to guide you on the process of marketing and following up after your webinar.

There’s also a social media calendar template, as well as content templates to manage your team.

2. Buffer

Use for: social media scheduling

Being able to schedule social media posts to publish ahead of time can streamline the process. Instead of having to sit down and regularly devise your next post, you can curate and compose everything in one seating, then schedule these to go live across your profiles according to planned calendar dates.

As far as free plans go, Buffer has one of the more extensively featured options. Their forever free plan allows you to connect three social media profiles, schedule 10 posts, and give one user access.

3. Canva

Use for: design work on stills

Canva is one of the powerful free marketing tools to help you create images for blog posts, social media, your logo, posters, presentations, and any image you need really.

You don’t have to be a designer or have design experience to use it – beginners can easily pick it up. There are several built-in templates and optimized sizes to make it simple for you to produce eye-catching imagery for your travel marketing materials.

4. Feedly

Use for: content curation

Wondering what content you can share on social media? Or perhaps you want to stay up to date on the latest Travel industry news to get a better outlook for your business? Feedly is an AI-driven news aggregator application that sources news feeds from online sources based on your keywords or domain inputs.

With all the information collated onto a dashboard, you can select what to read and share on your own channels.

5. Google Analytics

Use for: measuring and analyzing website traffic and success

The behemoth that is Google collects enormous amounts of data on your website traffic. When you sign up for a Google Analytics account, you get access to this data.

From it, you can pull reports on where your traffic is coming from (organic search, website referrals, social media), as well as how long they stay on your pages. You can also find out which pages they exit the website from, or whether they go onto explore your site further.

Insights such as these can help you to experiment with and optimize pages to encourage visitors to take specific actions or stay longer.

6. Hubspot CRM and Marketing

Use for: managing your contacts and marketing

Accessing only the free marketing tools and CRM from Hubspot, you can perform several key marketing activities.

This includes monitoring website activity, segmenting email lists, automating email sending, monitoring sales pipelines, and communicating with your team and travel clients among other actions.

7. InShot

Use for: video editing on your mobile

Video is invaluable for marketing and can be an inexpensive option despite what you think. Using just your mobile, a tripod, decent lighting, and a beautiful setting, you can capture amazing footage for your tours or travel product.

Of course, you’re likely to need to do a bit of light editing, in which case InShot can be just the tool when tackling this on mobile. It provides simple editing effects, video splitting abilities, and you can lay music or add voice effects over the content.

8. Lumen5

Use for: creating videos from your existing content

As a free user on Lumen5, you can create up to 5 videos a month. How it works is by using AI to convert your existing text content into video. It sources images, music, and video clips from its extensive library to create a video that fits your storyboard and desired layout.

Note that on the free version you will have to put up with the Lumen5 watermark on your finished clip. Upgrading will remove it.

9. Mailchimp

Use for: email marketing and marketing automation

Using MailChimp you can build, segment, and grow your contact list by prompting actions from email, landing pages, Facebook and Instagram adverts, social posting, and pop up forms.

From there, you can automate marketing messages to send to your travel clients at the right time in their journey with your brand.

10. Neil Patel SEO Analyzer

Use for: website SEO analysis

Neil Patel’s SEO Analyzer provides a free comprehensive SEO analysis report for your website. In the report, you will receive details of any major SEO issues on your site, which can affect its visibility on search engines. If you are banking on organic traffic to your website, then it is important to have the SEO right.

If, after you have generated the report, you wish to get more detailed insights on things such as keyword suggestions for your blog, content ideas, or competitor analysis, you will have to upgrade.

Final Thoughts

We recently mentioned in a previous blog, just how important marketing is for your business, through uncertain times as well as when things are going well. With the help of the free marketing tools we've outlined above, you can make it easier to amplify campaigns that help your travel business to succeed.