Better Travel Marketing

Who could not like travel marketing? Travel is on the minds of hundreds of millions of people.  And as the post-pandemic recovery continues, and the travel sector finally recovers too, you’ve got some time here to position your travel business well online and significantly grow sales.

Online travel marketing is big business, but it’s competitive. Demands for content quality, engagement, trust and visibility are very high. Yet, strategy will win in any market. It’s not a high friction thing, but one where you’re sharing your passion as a travel business owner to your audience. They can see that and thus competition becomes less of an issue.  Gain an engaged following and deliver continuous streaming positive thoughts and support for their dream.

Feeding hungry travelers with the images and words they crave is a fun project.

And a lot of people who love travel also conduct marketing for travel businesses. Yet love may not be enough. Competition is intense and even many savvy, worthy hotels, tour companies, restaurants, car rental firms, and travel agents get left behind. What those companies often lack is a powerful online travel marketing strategy.

Of course, travel marketing is a big topic.  Yet we can simplify in this post the key items you’ll need to create a great SEO, Social Media connection, and a prolific content marketing campaign.

Why You Want to Commit to Better Marketing

Travel will become the world’s largest industry because people are more evolved, confident, open to new experiences and they’re bored too. Automation and AI are altering work and freeing up time.  Work can be done as people travel.  Travel is rejuvenation and serves to save a lot of careers, personal health and marriages. And travel is how modern societies will grow GDP and maintain employment levels. It’s the industry of the future — not virtual but real in person experiences — that business pros like you design.

According to Allied Market Research, the global online travel market size reached $354 billion in 2020, and is forecast to reach $1.83 trillion by 2031. That’s an astonishing rate of growth. Travel companies which are competent in digital marketing should see a similar rate of growth. There are plenty of channels to tap into.

The opportunity for travel agencies, airlines, hotels, tour operators, entertainment events, venues, restaurants, and more businesses is therefore outrageous. Yet the industry as you’re aware is already ultra competitive. This may be your most significant business problem, that and finding some weaknesses in top competitors to exploit. Don’t worry we’ll build that solution.

Your Real Travel Marketing Challenges to Resolve: Audience Reach, Significance, Comfort/Trust, and Loyalty

Here are Your Likely Marketing Challenges:

• capturing and allocating enough funding to marketing
• competing with travel monopolies and getting cost effective exposure
• understanding your niche customer
• reaching your niche travel consumer and capitalizing on opportunities to get seen and not elminated by big competitors
• presenting your product/service in a compelling way that creates engagement and places yours within the customers lifestyle
• creating digital content, doing outreach and PR, to build lasting Google rankings
• engaging with travelers effectively on social media
• leveraging multichannel for awareness and better impact on your niche audience
• maintaining comfortable and desired contact with customers for repeat sales
• giving customers tools so they can help promote your business
• capturing their positive travel stories as proof of your product quality

Fast, Credible Paths to Capture Travel Consumers

As travelers resume their travel in 2022, post-pandemic, they’ll be searching on Google and Bing and other digital media. They’ll be eager, impatient, but they want the exact travel experience (and services) they’re interested in.

Knowing the digital content they need is essential. The content gets attention, creates relevance, generates significance and builds intent to buy. What insights do you need before you prepare your content for Google, Bing, Facebook and Twitter?

• get up to date on your target customers, how they’re shopping, where they’re going and why they’re travelling
• re-evaluate your unique value proposition and how it matches with that traveler demand, adjust if necessary
• focus on short term, immediate exposure and lead generation sources
• build new assets and activities to grow mid term to long term sustainable lead generation
• focus on content strategy, SEO, social media together to build visibility and impact
• improve your brand image and grow your significance to prospects and customers
• build messaging, platforms, websites, and pages on popular travel sites to allow your customers to promote your company, provide feedback publicly and give you positive reviews
• review all your analytics and look into better analytics solutions

Is Travel Content Still Relevant?

Digital content conveys the storylines, value proposition, and builds significance with customers.  Even when you advertise, it is this content that engages and creates a customer.

You’ll need a lot of well written and edited, well optimized, and engaging text, graphic and video content. Typically, for SEO, that content revolves around specific topics and keywords that your target customers use. That will require extensive keyword research so you’re committing to the right ones. There’s general high volume travel keywords and ultra-niche keywords and you might need both of them.

I optimized a hotel SEO client for very high quality keyword phrases that had high volume such as “hotel + city name.” But also we needed to rank for other services they offered. I enjoy boosting a company’s complete business, not just a specific product or service.

And that content must get prospects excited and engaged in your service, while impressing them that you’re a solid brand they can trust. When they get comfortable, you begin becoming the most significant provider for them. Through continuous marketing you’ll build loyalty and ongoing repeat sales. Let’s not forget that many of them will become important supporters and brand ambassadors offering reviews, stories, backlinks and big reach into social media platforms.

 

They’ll be sharing your enriched content online.

If Expedia, Google, Yahoo, Hotels.com, tripadvisor.com, orbitz.com and others are becoming too expensive for their common leads, your own travel marketing program might create better quality leads.

The Power of Promotional Themes

Coming up with good promotional themes can help enrich content, give it better focus, and increase sales conversions.

It’s hard to argue the success of hotels.com with their Captain Obvious campaigns.  The fun and humor in them helped extend reach and create shares on social media. The campaigns made their search engine rankings even more clickable and produced more backlinks — vital for high search engine rankings.

Create some promotional ideas that help your content stand out, make your ads more interesting, and help you become the most significant provider. You can subtly position some of your benefits/features against competitors weaknesses for even better relevance to customers. Most significant travel service is the most preferred.

Good promo creatives contained within your optimized SEO content and social posts will have even more powerful effect.

Of course, you want to know I’ll generate the very best results on Google and Bing, and really engage prospects on social media. But the intense flavor or excitement comes in the images, words and messages. Having good ideas helps a lot. People don’t link to a dull travel assets nor share them on social media.

Give your content marketers, SEO, and social media strategist something good to work with.

Creative Big Ideas for Travel Campaigns

Successful campaigns come back to the big idea that excites customers and gets them engaged with your product/service. Ad agencies are all about the big idea they’re going splash all over TV, radio and Youtube. Sure, you’re a small travel company/hotel chain but you still need a big idea, one that feeds into your company story.

And that company story tells them why you’re the right provider. The big idea creates an emotional, relatable, but very interesting message.

An imaginative idea in the right places at the right time, makes you relevant. And then to be significant, you have to personalize that engagement/service and build preference via key benefits.

The big idea makes your brand/product/service visible and compelling right now. And it feeds into longer term value too. Your creative idea is something that really impacts them emotionally. It’s not just a destination or an activity or an image. The idea is the thing that makes it the most important matter in their life. Their interest, attention and desire are peaked and they can’t think of anything else.

That’s achieved by reaching them and putting forth a cluster of benefits they can’t resist or find elsewhere. Your creative advertising and marketing visionaries will help you find that big idea that brings everything together. Only they really understand that realm of emotion, people, senses, feelings, hope and desire. So we’ll let them get to it.

After they deliver the creative focus, and perhaps the digital assets, we can shape them into blogs, social posts, downloadable, and promotions and other digital assets. With great assets, we have extra value to exchange with journalists, travel bloggers, tourists, travel businesses and others.

PPC, blogs, email and social media campaigns will help us get them delivered to the right people.

Videos can be the focus of great creative ideas — simple or elaborate. And with the reach of Youtube to millions of travelers, they might be essential to all travel marketing campaigns.

La Valencia Hotel, San Diego

La Valencia is a grand hotel located just north of San Diego in picturesque La Jolla, CA.  It’s iconic architecture will inspire endless creative ideas. As part of the La Jolla village skyline, with its amazing California Spanish styling, set against the impressive backdrop of La Jolla park and the Pacific ocean, it draws millions of visitors. It’s one of the most sought after venues for weddings. So there’s plenty of creative ideas possible for fun Youtube videos and engaging content pieces.

Videos such as these help to enrich content with a multimedia thus keeping prospects on your site longer, and make your site very linkable and sharable on social media.

I like this simple video about the La Valencia Hotel by the Roaming Boomers. This credible, inexpensive video can be a centerpiece of a campaign. It’s tasteful, taps into a great demographic audience, is quick and celebrates the history of this amazing La Jolla Hotel right on the La Jolla Cove.

La Valencia Hotel is the perfect California travel experience right right within the quaint village of La Jolla, which happens to be one of my favorite places on Planet Earth. La Jolla is perhaps the most elegant and relevant towns for upscale travelers perusing hotels on the Southern California coast.  It provides endless creative ideas for a big idea promotional campaign.

There are many relevant hotels in La Jolla, but few are as significant as La Valencia. Good content can support that significance.

La Valencia’s Mediterranean-inspired graphic theme, with interviews with guests (relatable to audience and proof of experience), art posters, music videos, food menus, and more comprises both exquisite content and focus for social media campaigns.

Whatever creative promotional theme ideas you come up with for travel marketing theme, they give tremendous weight to your content marketing and assist with more clickthroughs from Google.

From intrigue to relevance to most significant, travel consumers are looking for the perfect, meaningful experience for them.

Combine SEO, blogs, stories, graphics, photos, videos, and even live social media events and you have a powerful, memorable and lasting travel marketing campaign.

Advanced SEO is a Serious Talent

Read up on advanced SEO and Advanced SEO strategy to understand the value and the level of work an SEO company should be generating. The travel and hotel business is competitive, and whoever has mastered strategy is positioned for the most significant successes.

Check out AI Marketer’s advanced SEO Services and see the essentials of a great SEO Company. From Google search results to customer loyalty, you’re getting a solution that feeds your customer acquisition process.

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