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The Importance of Storytelling in Travel Marketing
Stories are amazingly powerful, we all have certain ideas about how New York, Las Vegas, Paris, Beijing or Egypt would look like, even though we have never been there. Those stories are made by a lot of different people and the perceptions we have about these iconic destinations might not even be true.
A destinations and companies can also use stories to set themselves apart from others but also to connect travelers on a deeper level to communities or a company. New Zeeland for example is using storytelling techniques to connect travelers to the native Māori.
Stories engage audiences emotionally, creating lasting connections and inspiring action. People remember stories best because they relate them to personal experiences, giving facts and events a meaningful emotional connection. Additionally, stories are easier to share because they are memorable. By vividly bringing destinations and experiences to life, storytelling allows potential travelers to envision their journeys, sparking curiosity and engagement. What makes the stories of Las Vegas and New York so powerful is that they have been told and reshared over and over and media and the public play a big part in telling them.
Value through Passion's mission is to empower travel businesses to craft compelling narratives that embody their passion and drive, creating lasting connections with their audience.
This blog explores how travel brands can craft narratives that resonate with their target audience, turning interest into action.
What is a story
At its core, a story involves a hero with a desire, facing struggles or obstacles, and ultimately reaching a goal. The hero can be characters from the destination but also the travelers, local guides, or even yourself. These characters should face challenges, make discoveries, and experience growth throughout their journeys. Stories can be experiences of past travelers, the history of the destination, your own personal experiences.
We like stories to be driven by passion, what drove the characters of your destination to success or change. What is the story behind a local artisan, or a family run homestay, how did people make impact on their community.
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.
An Open Story World
Unlike a linear story in a book, an open story world allows travelers to discover pieces of information in any order, each contributing to the bigger narrative. Define small stories and experiences where travelers can be part of the story world you created. Think about recurring events and festivals. Create a well-defined main story and consider making different themes driving this narrative. Link characters, stories, events, and settings you know most about, and add subthemes and storylines with the content assets you have or plan to create.
Building a Compelling Story World
To make the most of your stories, create a story world that serves as an overarching theme connecting individual narratives. This interconnected narrative universe should enrich your brand. Ensure your story world aligns with your strategy, using your values as morals, your vision as the guiding goal, and your top products and experiences as the heart of your storytelling. Integrate your destination's unique places, communities, people, animals, myths, and local stories into this world.
Key Elements of a Story World
To create a story world, here are key elements to consider:
- Experiences: Which experiences will hold you story word together, this is what you start with, and start to build your story world around.
- Themes: Identify central themes that resonate with your brand’s vision and values. These themes should reflect the core experiences and destinations you offer. But also your strategy, can the values of your company be used as the moral of your stories ?
- Characters: Identify characters that your audience can relate to, people or animals that make the destination or key experiences so special. Also think about your customers, team and partners to be part of the characters.
- Settings: Identify the unique settings where your stories should take place. Think about landscapes, villages other places like national parks, churches, etc
- Items: Identify important items that should be covered in your stories, think about local products, traditional clothes and tools or other things that are very typical for the destination.
Setting Up a Story World with Themes
To create engaging story themes that impact hearts and minds, start by thinking about the overall stories you want to tell about your company or destination. Clearly define the goals, target audience, characters, settings and items. From here, identify smaller stories based on the characters, settings, items and morals you defined in your destination or company and link your theme into the overarching story world.
Creating a Story
A story has a beginning; the set up of what let to the to situation. A middle; a conflict, problem, issue, challenge etc that needs to be solved and an end that has a resolution for the problem. In a destination this can be the change of a landscape, people that came and go, how an environment inspired characters to become heroes or mentors. To get your audience suck into a story, you create what is called a hook, a tension / situation your audience can relate too and attracts them into the story. You can keep the audience tuned, by being, fun, interesting and entertaining. Besides being entertaining a story should creating curiosity and you also like to add in some surprises to keep your audience alert. Is it possible to add some rewards when travelers reveal more of story ? Think for example of treasure hunt games.
Your story doesn't have to be linear, nor does it have to end completely, you can can play with this creative, especially if the customer is a character in the story, they might finish the story in their own way, taking home the memories and learned lessons of the challenge they overcame, or they might have been a part of resolution for a problem and other travelers take over to finish it the work. Think for example about re-generative tourism, where travelers help solving problems during their travels. If you have your story idea clear you further work it out.
Defining your story characters
When you are working out your story define roles for your characters, like hero, mentor, a villain, a character that might bring news or a warning, someone who is testing and or challenging the hero. Zoom in on the hero and or mentor describe the goals and drives of these characters, their needs, problems or conflicts they have to solve and their characteristics. How does the character come out stronger ?
If characters of your story are real living people like your partners, team members, your customers etc, try to involve them creating the story with you instead that you are making the story about them, this makes your storytelling much more interesting.
Set the Settings
How will the story evolve in the destination and through the experiences of your company and how can traveler unravel the stories of their liking further in the real world.
The above Instagram post fits great under Washington state overarching story world the state of wanderlust. It could have also be linked to a theme of water, with beaches, lakes and waterfalls, that could be connected with hiking, but also with leisure, the role of water in ancient native American settlements or stories or while migrating, how did the settlers find and use water falls etc.
Once you have created some individual stories and you have properly set them up with characters, settings, items, morals etc, you can interlink them and create storylines that you can offer to the audience.
In the above graph created by Daniel Trabucchi, Stefano Magistretti you see how the settings, items and characters of marvel movies are connected with each other. Each movie building on top of another. If you can build your content pieces just like that, you can unravel your message and story world, content piece, by content piece.
The connections are made with events you let happen, a struggle to overcome a problem, a search for something beautiful or love, a moment to enjoy, etc. For adding morals to your story you can look at the values your travel company stands for. The why and motivations of your characters can come from your vision, north stars and goals. But always in a way that it resonates with your audience, that they can recognize themselves in the story and that it entertains so that their attention sticks to the story and they feel something, that could bring them into action.
Connecting the stories to Experiences
The stories you create or extracted, should ultimately lead to experiences that are offered by businesses in a destination. Try to connect the several experiences with an overarching narrative, and link a finished experience to a new one. Characters can form the perfect glue between experiences. A person lived for example in different location, knows other persons, maybe farmed a certain food that is processed in a restaurant.
Immersive experiences
Special experiences are immersive, those that have engagement and interaction with the traveler. They can really suck the visitor into your story theme. Observing the theme through seeing a play, demonstrations or performance, exploring yourself, going out in nature with an audio guide, or wonder through church, add gaming elements, by letting travelers actively participate in the experience as for example with treasure hunting, or role playing.
Especially games and playing while experiences enhance learning, which can be a big driver for parents, but also business leisure, think about team building and of course all other people who want to know or learn more about something.
To make an immersive experience you need to provide travelers something to do, motivate them to do it with a clear goal / outcome, a reason for doing them, a connection story and and interactive environment online of offline to take actions. Its nice if there are some surprise elements in the experience. Make sure instructions are clear and easy to understand. A company creating immersive experiences with audio in the UK is Splash & Ripple.
To encourage people to check out the real experience, you need to make sure your stories and content are created in such a way, that they feel unique and special enough to check them out.
To create a full story experience you want to inspire participants to do a next experience, you need to guide them and or give next options. Think about outdoor info panels with QR codes or mobile ap instructions, that tell where another point is to unravel more about the story. A reward system where you can get something if you did several or all experiences can be an extra motivation for travelers.
But the stories itself should also be engaging and interesting if a person doesn't go. The story inspires, and the "real" experience is the cherry on the cake that gives even more value or understanding.
To make a comprehensive story of your destination you want to link the experiences to themes and the main narrative. Download an simple example of connecting a story with experiences and destinations with the help of the story of Joan of Arc in France to have an idea how you could do this.
Creating Content of your stories
When you are making content pieces, each part of content is a small story on its own but always contributing to the bigger storyline, theme and story world in which you have woven your vision, values, USP's top destinations and experiences and your key messages.
In each piece of content you can reveal more details about events, the setting (place), the characters contributing to more understanding and with that more appreciation. It's a nice way to bring your travel niche or destination alive. By for example focusing an in-depth backstory about the origin and meaning of a dance by zooming in on the clothes, history, moves etc, can significantly increase the admiration for the performance making the real experience more enjoyable.
You can do this by posting small pieces of the stories on social media explain in more detail in blogs and link the blogs together based on shared characters, settings, items etc.
A nice way to back up your own perspective of the story is to use the perspective of your audience and customers, share their content in such a way that it enriches your story world. To get more content from travelers you can add sharing as part of an experience or game they can participate in.
A powerful way of telling your stories is through visual story telling.
Selling your experiences
The main ingredients of your stories will be the experiences in your destination that you deliver and which travelers can buy at your website. Thus you ultimately want your audience to go your website and come to your destination, while your other channels like socials and email are more supportive in revealing the full story. While each story should be entertaining on their own, there role is much more to make people aware of you bigger story, company and destinations and should lead to a next step to get more information / content to get the traveler more involved and ultimately so interested they want to become part of it or observing it.
Getting people actively involved into the experiences and being part of the story you need to motivate them. Some can be motivated because they just love to explore more about a topic, learn and some like to play a kind of game and want some extra motivation by collecting, cards, treasures etc.
People might also like to connect to each other to share about what they know or learn more, think about wines, food, myths arts etc that play a role in a destination. Or give back and contribute to a solution of a problem.
Keeping them engaged they need to feel in control, challenged (up to a level they like), have fun, being able to share with others.
An interesting opportunity is to link experiences to mice activities, companies that are looking to organize events or teambuilding trips. For them its incredible valuable to link stories from a destination to their own values and vision to motivate and align participants to their goals and mission.
Integrating Storytelling into Your Content Strategy
Once you have created your stories you need to bring them alive and integrate them into your content strategy. You have various options to do that.
- Blog Posts: Write blogs that about your stories.
- Social Media: Share bite-sized stories, behind-the-scenes glimpses, and day-in-the-life posts that draw your audience into your narrative.
- Videos: Create shorter and longer video content that showcases the stories.
- Email Campaigns: Use email to tell ongoing stories, new stories or stories that fit a certain moment in the season.
Not all experiences might be doable through the whole year, and the stories you want to tell might be very related to the season of the year. To have consistent posts on your socials that support your story world, you want to set up a proper calendar use some tent poles like festivals or holidays as most important events of the year and plan what kind of stories supports them and when and where you need to publish these.
You can do this in your Digital Marketing Plan and further refine it in your Social Media Plan, but be flexible, adopt when needed.
Another powerful way to distribute your stories is through existing media channels, journalist love stories too ! Help them to experience and create stories about your destination and experiences. And don't forget independent bloggers, influencers and maybe even famous artists or sports men.
Engaging Your Audience with Personal and Authentic Stories
Authenticity is key in storytelling. Encourage your audience to share their own stories and experiences, and feature these user-generated content pieces in your marketing. This not only adds credibility but also makes your audience feel valued and heard. Personal stories, testimonials, and reviews can provide powerful social proof and inspire others to follow in the footsteps of past travelers.
Measuring the Impact of Storytelling
To gauge the effectiveness of your storytelling efforts, track metrics such as:
- Engagement Rates: Monitor likes, shares, comments, and other forms of engagement on your storytelling content.
- Conversion Rates: Measure how many viewers of your storytelling content take the desired action, such as booking a trip or subscribing to your newsletter.
- Audience Feedback: Collect feedback from your audience through comments, surveys, and direct interactions to understand the impact of your stories.
By regularly analyzing these metrics and adapting your storytelling approach based on the data, you can refine your strategy and continue to captivate your audience.
Need help with building a story world, creating narratives or story creation that is on brand. Contact Us
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