It is fantastic to generate quality and rich content for your travel website or blog, but this alone cannot bring you the kind of results that you want for your travel business. Having a quality marketing strategy is the backbone that will put a purpose behind your content. Despite all you have seen and read about how crucial quality content is for SEO, this will bring you the results you desire, as well as raise your brand awareness in the marketplace, if you deploy it alongside a custom marketing strategy.
Content Marketing Is Crucial
In the latest survey by Smart Insights on digital marketing trends for 2015, content marketing ranked as the top priority (see the chart).
In 2015, one should not expect to maintain the currency and competitiveness of their travel SEO strategy by just generating original content. Having good content is important, everybody knows that by now. How you generate, post, and distribute it in the long term -- as well as being intentional with your marketing strategy -- are the factors that will set you apart from the crowd.
Critical points that every content marketing strategy should adhere to are the following:
- Do your research well, connecting your topics to long-tail keywords that indicate low competition as well as high search volume
- Your content, travel articles, infographics, press releases, videos, etc. should be engaging so that it can fit in among top-ranked tourism industry media
- In order to be able to attract new targeted visitors, raise your brand awareness and promote links back to your travel site naturally, syndicate your content and ensure that it is widely distributed
What content strategy have you designed for your travel business? Do you just increase content since people say that it is good to do so? Do you simply come up with a new package for your hotel business just for the sake of having one? When it comes to content creation, let your strategy be very clear. Let your goals and objectives be measurable and easy to evaluate.
Successful Campaign Requires Social Advertising
In 2014, Snapchat introduced its first ad, Instagram introduced video ads, there were more Twitter cards, auto-play video ads appeared on Facebook for the first time… All these and others contributed to the explosion of the social advertising trend.
In addition, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn IPOs have over the past few years generated more pressure for social networks to increase advertising revenue from the various brands and local businesses that are presented through the sites. In fact, early 2014 saw the release of a survey by Social@Ogilvy, revealing the slump from 16% to 6% of the organic reach of the content that is posted on the brand pages on Facebook. This happened within only two years.
It is only a few years ago that social media experts succeeded in having brands and marketers use the social networks to properly do the marketing of their businesses by generating fun and engaging content rather than using sales-driven promotional content that often felt one-sided. We can therefore comfortably say that content isn’t the issue anymore.
Today, the basic question is is how to ensure that your content reaches the biggest number of targeted users.
Your content may be fantastic, yes, but its exposure and visibility on social media could be sparse if it is not shared by others consistently.
Twitter says that up to 500 million tweets go through their systems every day. Wit this kind of data, tweets about your brand could easily be lost in the massive sea of pointless Twitter dribble. So, the next time you are thinking of investing your marketing dollars into social media, you better be advised to have social advertising as one of your key options.
Benefits of Social Advertising
- Apart from helping you build a list of new followers cost-effectively, social advertising also drives referral traffic to your site
- With social advertising, you are able to target your clients using their specific preferences and interests
- Social advertising is capable of opening new doors for you that can help your business reach out to new customers and raise your brand awareness in the marketplace
All social media networks, be it Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, or any other, offer you a myriad of opportunities for advertising your brand. What you need to do now is come up with a strategy on how to identify the most appropriate social network to post your hotel’s ads based on the type of people you want to target.
The digital marketing industry is evolving and transforming quite rapidly. It is therefore the responsibility of the stakeholders in the travel industry to ensure that their strategies and practices are good enough to ensure that they stay proactive so as to remain ahead of competition. For any travel business, investing in digital marketing is one of the most crucial long-term strategies that is also the highest margin channel for reaching their target demographic on social media.
In order to boost your content marketing, including writing, posting, and distribution, please contact Tourism Review team here.
Appreciate your post, crisp and clear information. Travel & tourism is one of the fastest growing business vertical, opening new opportunities for growing companies / businesses.