Barcelona Guide Bureau: Tour Operator Success Story
“The best online marketing strategy we’ve done”
The Problem
Barcelona Guide Bureau have been welcoming people to one of the world’s most visited cities since 1990, when they were founded by a close-knit group of freelance guides.
Since then, they’ve helped over 7 million visitors experience Barcelona in their own unique way, and the BGB team has grown steadily to over 70 people.But despite their success they still needed digital marketing help to continue their growth, and attract more clients to their range of bespoke private tours.
“We don’t have repeat customers... it’s very difficult if they don’t know about us. So 10x Tourism is helping us find these customers and then letting them know how we work.”
BGB Marketing Manager Clara Callís was impressed by 10x Tourism’s approach to marketing our own services, and understood the importance of quality content for attracting new clients from around the world:
“I love the way they write content. That’s also something I do in our company, so I know how difficult it is… we need people who can write professionally in English.”
We set out to build on Barcelona Guide Bureau’s established reputation with a customized Get More Booking sales funnel to help them reach a larger audience while highlighting the team’s second-to-none insider knowledge of the city.
The Solution
As one of the world’s most popular destinations, competition for tours and experiences in Barcelona is fierce. And in crowded markets, the quality of your content is key to establishing your brand online and attracting discerning visitors year-round.
With that in mind the 10x Tourism team designed and promoted a free pocket guide to city breaks in Barcelona on the BGB website, offering insider tips, hidden gems and even ‘what not to do’s, all delivered via an educational email series to new subscribers.
We combined that with some in-depth, ‘pillar’ content supported by a Facebook Ads campaign to drive targeted traffic to the site, spotlighting Barcelona Guide Bureau’s seasoned expertise, multilingual tour guides, luxury transport and customized private tours.
“They wrote 3 long blog posts, which were really nice. From there we did Facebook Ads and the 6-email course... they helped us do that as well, making it more automatic.”
As more and more visitors were drawn to the website, we were able to qualify many of these leads using a conversational inquiry form – helping potential future clients indicate useful preferences like group size, dates and budget.
This process enabled BGB’s sales advisors to respond with more specific advice and recommendations to inquirers, while other visitors who weren’t yet ready to make an inquiry were nurtured and informed about their options through the email series.
In its first two months alone, over 500 new subscribers signed up to BGB’s educational email courses, leading to 86 additional tour inquiries.
And in the first 6 months of working with 10x Tourism, Barcelona Guide Bureau’s new Get More Bookings sales funnel generated 73 additional bookings – an excellent return on their investment.
As Clara points out, the sales funnel benefits BGB beyond the extra site visitors and leads generated. It also impacts the quality of those leads, and how they’re able to respond to them:
“One customer can now buy more than one product… we’re also managing to get customers with higher income… we can then customise the tours for them.”
Building on the sales funnel’s initial success, we also helped BGB to design and launch their first multi-day product.
Previously they had only offered day tours, so there was an untapped opportunity to package some of these together and provide multi-day experiences for visitors to Barcelona. We consulted with BGB on which of their popular tours to combine and how, and made it easy for them to offer these as a new, additional product.
Since launching it, they’re now able to sell multiple products to the same client – greatly increasing their average order value and providing even more return on their investment.
And by using 10x Tourism’s partner CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, Clara’s team are even able to monitor the process individual inquirers take towards a booking – including the emails they open and any replies they send, plus the exact content they view and how often.
“We can get to the customers earlier. People are contacting us before they’ve got their flight or their hotel, and that rarely happens.”
Want to find out how a customizable Get More Bookings sales funnel can help grow YOUR travel business?
Click below to schedule your FREE Strategy Session with us at 10x Tourism, and we’ll walk you through how you can apply our proven process
