RIVER CRUISE MARKETING KIT
Marketing kit of digital assets used for targeting potential river cruise clients
River Cruise Marketing Made Easy
The River Cruise Marketing Kit makes it easier than ever for you to target potential clients and grow your own travel business!
The content in your River Cruise Marketing Kit will resonate with both new and seasoned river cruisers, especially those who have tried their hand at ocean cruising, all-inclusive resorts, and independent European travel.
If you’re headed to the ASTA River Cruise Expo, you’ll hit the ground running with ready-to-use marketing materials – our kit already has everything ready-to-go for quick deployment anywhere online or in print.
With the River Cruise Marketing Kit, you can focus more energy on what matters most – converting those leads into new river cruise bookings!
What you will receive in the marketing kit
01
CONTENT
The river cruise marketing kit is everything you need to help maximize leads and convert more sales for your travel business.
LEAD MAGNETS
We have written and designed 15 lead magnets.
Use them individually or joined together magazine style.
Each lead magnet can be customized with your business name and branding in less than 10 minutes.
These lead magnets are perfect for growing an email list of “river cruise curious” new leads.
Click below to see the titles of each lead magnet and HERE to see what they look like.
This article can be used in many different ways; as a lead magnet, an article/blog on your website, and/or a script for a short podcast episode or video.
Lead magnet – to grow your email list
1. Create an opt-in form on your email marketing platform
2. Put this content onto a hidden page on your website (not searchable by search engines). You can use it as a PDF or an article. There is no need to add keywords or tags to your images as it won’t be searchable on search engines.
3. Ensure that everyone who fills in your opt-in form gets redirected to your hidden page
4. Add all new email subscribers to your river cruise email sequence
Article – to post on your website
1. Using the blog element on your website, paste down the content and add images
2. Add keywords and tag your images for SEO
3. Add a link to your lead magnet at the bottom of the blog/article
EMAIL SEQUENCE
Writing can be really hard! Writing marketing copy, even harder!
Copy and paste these 7 educational emails into your platform for a fantastic river cruise campaign. We suggest every one who signs up for your lead magnet gets this. Take a sneak peek HERE.
Welcome Emails
TYPE | PURPOSE/TOPIC | |
EMAIL 1 | Welcome | Welcome after downloading lead magnet |
EMAIL 2 | Welcome | Waking up sleepy email list |
For many travel advisors, writing an email sequence (or even one email) can be very challenging and frustrating. Outsourcing is expensive.
This email sequence is perfect for marketing the concept of river cruising. Copy and paste it into your email marketing platform. Schedule each email one week apart. Ensure that you have a welcome email at the top. At the bottom of each email add a call to action by including a button that goes directly to your calendar, and/or your contact information.
There are seven emails in this sequence:
TYPE | PURPOSE/TOPIC | |
EMAIL 1 | Education | Is river cruising right for you? |
EMAIL 2 | Education | How to choose the right river and itinerary for your travel style |
EMAIL 3 | Education | 8 fascinating facts you didn’t know about river cruising |
EMAIL 4 | Education | 5 occasions to celebrate with a river cruise |
EMAIL 5 | Education | Cities that offer itinerary extensions before/after your river cruise |
EMAIL 6 | Education | What to expect on a typical day of river cruising |
EMAIL 7 | Education | 12 differences between ocean cruising and river cruising |
An Email Marketing Platform Glossary for three Email Marketing Platforms: Convertkit , Flodesk & Mailerlite
If you’re new to the world of email marketing you an easily get lost in the new language.
To make your life easier we have put together a quick read reference.
PITCH DECKS FOR CLOSING MORE GROUP SALES
If booking more groups is part of your plan, a joint venture pitch deck is a must. What is it? A customizable mini-booklet that explains how a person, group or business can collaborate with you to take a group of their community on a river cruise.
Included in the booklet:
1. What’s in it for them
2. What’s in it for their community
3. What type of trips they can take
4. Ways to personalize the trip for their community
5. A schedule of planning and promotion leading up to the trip
It gives a potential partner a full overview of what it would be like to work with you. After your first phone call with them, send this over to get the process rolling. From here you’ll collect your planning fee, sign your work agreement and off you go!
Most travel advisors are open to the idea (excited by it) of growing their travel business by booking groups. Groups can consist of family members, friends, business clients, co-workers, strangers with common interests, even fans! Once you have identified a group leader who is happy to promote the itinerary and experience to their audience, you’ll jump on a call with them. And then what? This pitch deck is the perfect follow up tool to help you close the sale. You can customize it and then turn it into a PDF to send it as an email. Now, when you tell a potential group leader on the phone “I’ll send you an email to follow up”… that can happen in a matter of minutes.
Bonus Content
MARKETING CHECKLIST – WHAT TO DO AND IN WHAT ORDER
Arriving home after a FAM trip, conference, expo or even just getting off a supplier webinar can leave you full of excitement and ready to go. But knowing what exactly to do can be overwhelming.
In this checklist, we have laid out a comprehensive list of tactics for marketing river cruises using this kit and what you already know.
Of course as your marketing skills increase and your product knowledge grows, this checklist will become even more robust and sophisticated. For now, it’s a great place to start when you next sit down at your desk.
HOW TO GROW YOUR EMAIL LIST (mini-MASTERCLASS WITH SANDRA)
Now that you have a full library of lead magnets, two welcome emails and the first 8 weeks of your welcome sequence, you’re probably wondering how you’re going to actually pull it all together. What goes where? How do you set it up?
This mini-course will explain how all of the assets fit together so that you can either start implementing yourself or delegate it to someone else.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Your Facebook cover photo is one of the first things people will see when they visit your Facebook Page or Facebook Group, and that’s precisely why it’s so important to make the best first impression possible.
You’ll want your cover photo to convey the following:
– Who you are
– What you do
– Who you do it for
If you don’t grab their attention and give them a compelling reason to stay, your audience will keep scrolling.
These templates check all the boxes in both aesthetics and strategy.
Finding images for river cruise destinations can be challenging because the ports are often very small and less traveled. We have used Unsplash to pull together a collection of images for you to download and use. Please review the Unsplash terms of use. In addition to supplier image galleries we hope that a small collection will help you with your marketing.
Have you ever wondered how marketers create cool graphics of phones and computers and put their content in it? That’s called a mock up. You’ll need one mock up for each of the lead magnets you now have. We have created them all for you. They take no more than 2 minutes to customize the branding if you choose to.
Pinterest is the second biggest search engine on the internet. It is the perfect tool to drive travelers from Pinterest directly to your website. We have a 3 part magazine with everything you need plus step-by-step instructions. Once you have set up your business account on Pinterest, you will need to have a PIN for each lead magnet/article. Don’t worry, we’ve already created a PIN for each one just for you. For your convenience, we have created a PIN for each one.
In this section of the kit you will find all 15 perfectly designed and sized PINS.
02
Community
Ask questions, brainstorm ideas, and keep in touch with expo attendees via the Travel Advisor Hub app. It’s the perfect place for travel advisors to continue the conversation and support each other as they grow their businesses and until they meet again at the next River Cruise Expo in 2024.
03
Coaching
Join travel marketing expert and business coach Sandra McLemore on Thursday Apr 6, 2023 where she’ll answer any questions that you have about marketing and sales for your river cruise business. You’ll have an opportunity to submit your question in advance and download the replay.
WHAT IS THE INVESTMENT ?
Travel Marketing & Media proudly donates a generous portion of marketing kit sales to ASTA
Please contact us if you were at the ASTA river cruise expo in Budapest before purchasing: hello@cottammclemore.com
FAQ
Not at all. You can market any of the river cruise lines.
The marketing assets in the River Cruise Marketing Kit are not specific to any cruise line. We intentionally created it that way. Your audience wants to learn about destinations, things they can do there, and the river cruise experience.
Yes, we have offered two monthly payments.
You will need a free account with Canva and an email marketing platform.
If you do not have an email marketing platform, we recommend FloDesk, ConvertKit or Mailerlite as those are the ones that we actively use. FloDesk is the most popular choice by travel advisors.
Do not worry if you are unsure how to use the kit – we have videos to help you and a Live Q&A/demonstration scheduled which will also be recorded.
Great question! It took five people in our team to research, write, and design the kit. And a random fact… over 340 hours of our time! Sandra worked on every part of the kit herself and did most of the writing and all of the strategy.
Immediately! You will get a link that takes you straight there. On April 6 we will have a Q&A / demonstration for anyone who has questions on how to use any part of the kit.
We suggest saving any PDF or Word documents in Google Drive or Dropbox.
Yes. Before giving any of your business resources to an outside team member we strongly recommend having a contract in place that protects all assets and makes clear that content cannot be used for other clients, reproduced in any way or sold.
No. The login for your dashboard is for one user only. We have multi-user pricing. Reach out and let us know how many advisors you have.
This kit covers only the Danube River. We are working on other rivers and regions later this year as well as niched kits for other specializations in travel (romance, family, cultural immersion, destination weddings, food, ocean cruising and more).
Kits are all sold separately.
You can email us. We’d be happy to help.
Travel Marketing & Media Gift Cards cannot be used to purchase the Marketing Kit. However, other Gift Cards offered may be used. No gift cards can be combined at check-out.
