We understand that publishers have different needs when it comes to creating, publishing and marketing their tours which is why we’re periodically publishing case studies highlighting what worked for them.
TellBetter Tours: Building your own white-labelled app vs. publishing with VoiceMap
For award-winning ad man Tom Darbyshire, white-labelling an audio tour app seemed like the perfect way to find an audience for his New York City walking tours. “It sounds cool to have your own app,” he says, “but I didn’t anticipate the headaches”. Marketing was turning into a fulltime job. Tom also found his own app’s GPS playback unreliable. At the beginning of 2022, he decided to try moving one of his tours over to VoiceMap, where he publishes as TellBetter Tours. GPS playback worked well. Tom says he became “a GPS convert”. He moved the rest of his tours across, and when he crunched the numbers at the end of 2022, he realised VoiceMap was responsible for 83% of annual sales.
Annie Sargent: Using self-guided tours to monetise your podcast or blog’s fanbase
Annie Sargent’s travel podcast has provided her with the perfect audience for a series of VoiceMap audio tours in Paris. In 2022, her sales were up by six times on 2021, and half of her listeners buy more than one of her five self-guided tours.
Lynn Momboisse: Solving distribution challenges to sell more tours
Lynn Momboisse is one of VoiceMap’s best-selling publishers. Sales of her walking and driving tours (18 and counting) in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Lake Tahoe, Sacramento and other parts of California have been steadily on the rise since her first tour, Carmel-by-the-Sea: Fairy Tale Houses Walking Tour, went live in mid-2019. Lynn earned five times more from tour sales in 2020 than in 2019, and her earnings quadrupled from 2020 to 2021. This trend broadly follows growth across VoiceMap’s platform, which is expected to continue.
Johnson County Library: Dividing Lines: A History of Segregation in Kansas City
The Dividing Lines tour explores how segregation shaped Kansas City and its urban landscape over the course of a 90-minute drive through its centre. It was produced for the Johnson County Library by Christopher Cook and Nathaniel Bozarth, filmmakers and podcasters who used interview recordings as well as quotes from Tanner Colby’s book Some of My Best Friends are Black to add to an in-person bus tour that was already offered by library staff.