Tips for Marketing Content Creation for Travel Organisations

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.

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.  

Please note that travel content for a B2B marketing is very different. Here you shouldn't convince a traveler why your destination is worth visiting, but explain in detail how a company can make money and happy customers by sending travelers to your destination or company.

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:

Golden Circle of Simon Sinek
Golden Circle of 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.

A very good example, though not from the travel industry is Apples Marketing Slogan for it Ipod - 1000 songs in your pocket. There is no mention of features, the name of the product : an mp3 player, just very compressed a revolutionary technique that transforms the ability of having a bulky cd with one album replaced by your favorite 1000 songs in your pocket.

How to apply the golden circle for your travel marketing content:

  1. Take the travel experiences you make the most money with
  2. Fill in the following answers
  3. Why are your persona's buying this experience ?
  4. Why do they choose for the city, region and country the experience is in ?
  5. Why do they choose for your company ? - Unique Selling Points - should come from your strategy
  6. Why do you love selling this experience
  7. How does the experience relate to what your company stands for (purpose)

The first 2 questions, you can answer with market research, knowing your customers by asking them for feedback, talk with your team especially guides and sales / marketing people and read your online reviews.

An interesting other possibility to learn about your audience is a Google interview.

Lets assume my company is good in snorkeling experiences for families and i want to apply Simon Sinek's, golden circle.

With the help of Google, i could answer the question why families love snorkeling, by searching for: "Reasons to do snorkeling with kids"

Besides some answers that google provides, it also gives us other questions our audience might ask. Copy paste reasons that think fit for your audience in a google doc and go to the next question.

Why do family with kids come to my region ?, here i took Bali as an example.


Google provides me with some answers and other questions my audience might ask. Collect the best answers and put them in your google doc.

The other questions are about your company and you should find that answer in your strategy.

If you answered all the above questions, reconfirm one more time: does my audience now have enough information to book my travel product with confidence.

Now we know what we need to communicate we need to find and create the right content materials to support or message.

What kind of content should I search and make ?

What kind of content type should you work with ? That depends on what platform the content will be place and what the goal is. We all have heard that a image says 1000 words. Thus with images you can communicate faster than with 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.

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

The customer 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.

And during that process they al

And even if all their questions are answered they want some proof to back up their decisions, photos of peer in social media doing the same, peers saying on review platforms like Tripadvisor how great your travel company is.

And only then travelers are ready to book with you.

Summarized 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 and then buy from a travel company that earned their trust and provides the best available deal, that makes them happy.

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 great example of a home page with the element Inspire, Help, Proof & Sell is the homepage of Telluride

Inspire

Here you wow your target audience, confirm they are on the right website and that you understand them and can offer them what they need.
Big beautiful picture + tag line

Help

What is there to do for travelers - events

Proof

Reference of a magazine that said this is the best small town:

We are not saying it, a magazine !! .

Sell

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.

Have you created your content pieces, it time to distribute, where you want the main content to be published on your own assets like your website and newsletters, spinoffs with teasers and parts of the content should be distributed on social media channels to make people aware of the content you have created.

To bring it all together its important you set your strategy, organize what content you need and plan when to create, publish and distribute your travel marketing content.

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 works better because, humans remember stories better, people use stories to make sense from loose facts and events. 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.

Setting up a story world with themes

To create engaging stories that impact harts and minds, you start with the overall story you want to tell and see how the smaller stories you have in your destination or company together make an overarching story world. A story has a beginning; the set up of what lets to the to situation. A middle; a conflict, problem, issue, challenge etc that needs to be solved and an end a resolution. You can can play with this creative, especially if the customer is a character in the story, the might finish it, taking home the memories and lesson of the challenge they overcame, or might has just been a part of the resolution and other travelers take over to finish it. Think about re-generative tourism, help building something during your travels etc. If you have your story idea clear you further work it out.

You create a main theme your story plays in and sets the boundaries and rules of what you want to share, teach and tell. To create your story world your think from your unique selling points and top products, what do travelers love about your experiences and destination and combine that with the statements from your strategic direction; your purpose, vision and values what is important to be told, what traditions shaped the destination or company and which characters like iconic people and businesses, settings like places, architecture styles and neighborhoods, items, like food can help you to tell your full story. Once defined you can add several subthemes in the story world and under there you can add storylines which you can create with you different set of content.

Working out story themes

For the main theme as well as the subthemes its good to define your canon, most important parts of your story world that needs to be told. Which destination and communities is the traveler going to explore, what kind people and animals will they interact with, what kind of myths and or local stories are contributing to the niche your working in and the vision and values of your company. Your values can be the moral themes of your stories that connect to your audience, linking your company and experience as the best possible way to enjoy a destination.

For each theme you describe the settings with the landscapes, villages etc, characters, items and from the content you gathered you are going to see what kind of storylines you can uncover. Try to let your customers, team and partners be part of the characters. Think about a traveler who always wanted to do a trekking peak, there is courage needed, but also support from your team to make that happen. Introduce your team and partners, let them welcome the customer into the story world and share the outcomes a traveler can take back home. Note a character can also be an animal or a deceased king, or other person that is party of the story you want to tell.

Defining your story characters

Try to have well defined roles for your characters, like hero, mentor, 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.

Also think how the story evolves in the destination and through your experiences and how the traveler can 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 further fall under a theme of water, in which you can think of a storyline with waterfalls, that could be connected with hiking, but also with leisure, the role of waterfalls in ancient native American stories, did settlers use waterfalls etc.

If you defined some storylines with characters, settings & items (maybe even in a database) it is much easier to see the connectors in each piece of content.

Connected network of the Marvel Movies

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.

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.

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.

Deliver the story

The main part of your story should be the experiences, themselves and the background stories living on your website. You ultimately want your audience to go your website and come to your destination, while the other channels like socials and  and email are more supportive in revealing the full story. To accomplish a logical sequence that reveals more and more about your story world, you want to set up some tent poles and plan what kind of stories when and where to publish. You can do this in your Digital Marketing Plan and further refine it in your Social Media Plan, but be flexible, adopt when needed.

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.

Category :
Act

Don't miss these stories: