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To acquire new customers you need content, for your website, brochures, social media's, e-mail marketing campaigns etc. But what kind of content helps you get more customers ?
Good travel marketing content will inspire, influence, convince and always leads to a next action that brings a customer closer to a booking, sharing a review or a tighter relationship.
Underneath's article will explain; how to create persuasive and compelling content that resonates with your target audience and will drive sales, conversions, and brand awareness.
First you want to have the fundamentals right; you need a digital marketing strategy, with your website as the enter of your plan. A hub where stories begin and customer relationships are forged.
Create content that stands out
Embracing the "Purple Cow" concept, content must stand out, offering unique and compelling reasons for travelers to choose your brand. Adding the uniqueness of a destination or experience only you as an expert can know.
Because the amount of content is still growing rapidly, from 1 a 2 brochures a year with a few advertisements to a living website, continuous advertising on different platforms and frequent social media posting.
You not only need more content, but the quality of your content has to constantly increase to stay relevant and valuable for your audience. The more content there is, the better your content has to be to be noticed. There is so much content now out there, that a lot content that cost money to create becomes invisible an not seen and results in no return.
If there is so much content out there your content became just like the other cows, your content like cows becomes ordinary and hardly noticed, therefor Seth Goding said: you need to create a purple cow, if you want people to still notice you.
Creating targeted travel marketing content, that makes your reader coming back
To make high quality, valuable travel marketing content you need to make sure that the content you create: either text, photos and videos are in line with your strategy, strengthen your brand, helps the reader trust your company more, get them closer to a future booking and makes your audience come back for more content.
This is so extremely difficult that it's almost only possible to try this for a well carved niche you created. If you have created your niche make first content around topics you already know are resonating with your audience, but are also giving you sales.
A great way to do is creating a segment in Google Analytics of your persona and then check what kind content they like in the behavior section.
Now you what kind of content your audience is searching for its time to create some content.
The Golden Circle of Simon Sinek
A concept I like to work with to write inspiring and valuable travel marketing content is the golden circle from Simon Sinek:
Don't make content, that focuses on the what (description of the feature) but focus on the why (the benefits). Because this will resonate with the part of the brain that influences behavior.
Simon can explain this much better then I do, so i recommend you to watch this video.
If we look at our best selling travel experience and we apply the golden circle concept on it, we can ask the questions that will lead to the most valuable content we can write for travelers.
Why are your persona's buying your experiences ? Why do they choose for your company ? Why do they choose for the city the experience is in ? The country ? But also why do you love selling this product and how does it relate to what your company stands for and believes in ? The answers to those questions are much more compelling then only describing what you offer.
The trick and this is the difficult part, is to translate the answers in an easy to understandable piece of content.
Read more about the Golden Circle of Simon Sinek
What kind of content should I search and make ?
Travel content is mostly about great visuals. We all have heard that a image says 1000 words. And some say a video covers 1 million words. Images and video make you communicate much faster and better with your audience text. Humans learned to process images for thousands of years, think about cave drawings, our brains are wired to quickly extract a message from an image.
Understanding that every single detail of a photo communicates something and should be in line with your message is important but mostly overlooked. The gender of the person in the photo, is the person smiling, what are the dominant colors every detail does something with our brain and influences to focus and learn more or to let it go.
Your personas smiling in the camera while experiencing your best travel experience, while emphasizing why the experience is great for the persona you are writing for. Dare to choose for who you write, for who your product is best: solo adventure travelers, wildlife loving family travelers, be sure to make your text specially written for them.
Avoid trying to please to many people, general content is working less good these days, because there is so much content available. Its really hard to stand out in the crowd, when every small or big company in theory has the ability to appear on the phone of every consumer in the world.
The narrower your niche and the better you understand why they like your experience, your destination, the higher the change you will resonate on their decision making level. Narrowing you niche not only means less competitors, but because of the world wide web your content will be easier to find by your audience because they will actively search for content they love. Placement techniques in for example google adds and Facebook make it also easier to deliver your content to exact right niche because you can target on what people love to see.
Besides targeting to a niche, to get attention, you need to create a "wow this is for me" feeling within seconds. People are making decisions faster than ever before, they scroll through feeds and then act on an impulse that triggers them.
The best way to get that attention is to show photos and videos of peers experiencing your best products while the content focuses on why these people love this experiences, use feelings and emotion in the expression of the person in the photo or video to make the content extra powerful and to give people the impulse to act upon.
For B2B marketing its a good idea to develop in depth guides on how to sell your experiences and destinations to the right people, in combination with showcasing your expertise and unique insights.
Make sure you have a nice combination of great photos, very short videos (upto 30 sec) short videos, upto 2 minutes, and deep dive videos that can be longer.
Getting bookings with your travel marketing content
Even if you have explained why your audience should love your experiences, and you crafted your content in such a way to get attention, getting bookings with your content, still isn't easy, you not only need to inspire, but also need to build trust and then convince your audience to take further action and get in touch with you.
For me it starts with understanding that travelers don't just book, they go through a whole process often called the customers journey, this google article quickly explains that a customer journey in the travel industry ranges from days to months (or even longer) and that from the moment a traveler starts searching till a booking is made they might have viewed hundreds of webpages, articles, videos and posts on social media platforms, magazines, your website, etc.
The customer journey for a multi day travel product is often pretty long, people saved money for it and thus want it be a really good experience. Therefor they take time to not only to decide on which experiences will fulfil their holiday desires, but also to be confident enough which company has their trust to curate and create their holiday experience.
Inspire, Help, Proof & Sell
To get more bookings you need to guide your audience step by step towards a preference for your destination, your experiences and your company. For that they need to know the destination is amazing, but also right for the needs of the traveler in terms of accessibility, things to do, safety etc. They also need trust in your company and feel comfortable to book with you without any great risks.
Guiding a traveler through this process we call the customer journey. The journey starts with a traveler that runs into inspirational content that arouses curiosity and makes the consumer want to know more.
Not only do you need to inspire travelers, you also need to help them with their travel planning. They might have tons of questions that need to be answered before they can comfortably choose your destination, company and product as the best option for their upcoming holiday.
If all their questions are answered they want to see proof to back up their decision your company can give them a great holiday. Proof can be given by showing photos of other customers in social media doing the same type of activities. Or other travelers sharing on review platforms like Tripadvisor how great your travel company is.
And then travelers are ready to book with you.
In short travelers are looking for inspiration and want to be helped to discover new things. They need to feel confident they are at the right website / destination / company that can deliver what they want before they buy.
I call this framework: Inspire, Help, Proof & Sell, which looks a bit on the AIDA (Attract, Interests, Desire and Action) which is about to grab the reader’s attention, generate interest, create desire, and prompt action
Each page on your website needs to have the four elements Inspire, Help, Proof & Sell somewhere on the page. And because a journey always starts with inspiration, this means that the first peace of content on your page should inspire.
Not only should each page inspire, help, proof or sell, you also need to be very clear on how you define each block on your page: each block should : Inspire, Help, Proof or Sell, sometimes it can two things in one, some videos can do even 4 things in one. That is why a video is so power full, a video can cover a message in the fastest possible way. However to let people watch a video, you need a very good still and first 2-3 seconds.
The same counts for social media and other content, with each piece of content you want to either, inspire, help, proof or sell or a combination of those four.
A good example of a homepage that embodies the Inspire, Help, Proof, and Sell elements is that of Mountain Lodge Telluride's website. It wows visitors with stunning imagery with video and a compelling tagline "ESCAPE TO EXTRAORDINARY" offers helpful information on the lodge and activities, proofs with the help of testimonials and have a straightforward booking feature.
95% of human decisions are taken are taken unconscious and very much based on feelings, with the help of triggering the right feelings you can guide the consumers of your content to the next step in their journey. If the traveler is inspired the next step might be, who else delivers this experiences, how do i decided who provides the best experiences, how do i get to this place, how long will it take, who else is doing this etc.
Make highly relevant content
The content you serve to customers should be relevant, personalized and actionable and should assist your visitors towards a sale.
While making content you should always make the next action simple, learn more, get more tips, book, think about what the person who reads the content needs as a next step.
To make relevant follow up content, its important is that you ask, why does a traveler come to consume this piece of content and what does it expect the content to do / help him or her with.
Make sure your teaser content, doesn't shout to much and make over promises you can't follow up with your next piece of content, stay believable, authentic.
What kind of content has value for Travelers ?
Make sure you have content that travelers need while they are selecting which country to travel to, all the way to why they should choose your company and how you make sure they will have the best holiday ever.
Always stick to you angle, try to let each piece of content be a proof of your Unique Selling Points and the brand you stand for. If you can create a sense of belonging to your company, for example we are sustainble, care about the planet and its culture and nature and show people the beauty of the planet and ways to help them protect it.
Example of companies who try to do this are G adventures and Intrepid
A good way of staying authentic is to show experiences of previous customers enjoying your services, and travelers already share a lot of these experiences themselves. I'm hesitant with working with beauty influencers who show their nicest dresses, though this could work in some luxury segment i prefer to keep it as real as possible.
Only create content for your chosen persona's
Sometimes you are feeling not very creative and you don't know what to create, then its better to wait for a day instead of creating content that is not laser focused and helpful for the travelers you defined in your strategy.
To make your brand message work, consistency is a must. You have to be disciplined to stay in line with your strategy, that's why its impossible to work without one. You need to have a strategy to consistently tell your message to your target audience.
Good travel marketing content cost a lot of effort and money, but if you keep your content up to date and recycle what you have made in forms of content, the value of a good piece of content can last years or even longer.
Involve your customers & travelers
One of the most trusted pieces of content come from travelers themselves. So called user generated content. Actively connect with customers and travelers in your destination and spot what they post. Store and curate there content so you can repurpose it for your own marketing messages. But be sure to always ask for consent.
Turning you content in stories
Once you have created a decent set of content you can go to the next level; telling stories. Telling stories is one of the best ways to get people connected to your destination. Stories work better because, humans remember stories better, they link them to their own life. People use stories to make sense from loose facts and events and to justify the decisicions they make. Through a story its easier to connect to someone on an emotional level, and past experiences and the new told story can bring people into action. Because stories are easier to remember they have a higher change to be retold or shared. Though you can tell a story in many different ways in it's essence a story comes down to a hero figure, who has a desire for something, needs to struggle / battle to overcome obstacles and then reaches its goal.
Underneath video shows how you can use stories for the benefit of your company; by using values, making the customer the hero, your team the mentor and help the customer to become a hero not only with the company as a mentor but also with a gift; the product.
Read more about creating stories in our storytelling blog
The above tips for content apply for all types of content, blogs, videos, social media posts etc.
Contact Value Through Passion, to help you creation a digital marketing strategy and content plan for your travel company.
