Travel Agents Embracing Content Marketing

Are you recognized as the leading Travel Expert for your niche? If not, you might take a marketing lesson from the greatest of all time who said:

“I figured that if I said it enough, I would convince the world that I really was the greatest.” ~ Muhammad Ali

So what’s your plan to tell the world you’re the leading travel expert in your chosen niche? If you say “I’m going to use the Internet” that’s a good start. But, how do you let the world know you’re the expert without a huge advertising budget?

Small and mid-sized businesses in all industries are faced with the same question of how to compete with large corporations and their seemingly unlimited advertising budgets. Many are addressing the challenge by embracing Content Marketing. This can be loosely defined as a strategy of crafting long-form articles about the many facets of your chosen travel niche and posting them online on a regular basis.

Short-form marketing such as display advertising or posting on social media tends to focus more on destination, price and package components rather than your skills and knowledge. So naturally this type of advertising focused on price and components tends to generate a lot of inquiries, but also a lot of churn due to less qualified leads. Short-form promotion generally produces “rented” benefits. In other words, there is little residual effect. If you stop spending the money for advertising or quit posting on Social Media the leads and traffic referrals to your website also stop.

Long-form marketing provides the opportunity to “sell the experience” because the format inherently allows you to fully describe the package you are promoting. The real benefit of long-form marketing is that you are positioning yourself as an expert by showcasing the knowledge and the value you provide. While long-form marketing may generate fewer inquiries, they tend to be more qualified leads.

The benefits of Content Marketing take time to realize, but have a cumulative residual effect as the search engines continue to deliver targeted clients to your website making it a worthwhile effort.    “The name of the game in Content Marketing is increasing your online footprint as large as possible by posting articles on your website and as a guest author on other websites and promoting those articles via social media.”

So here’s a Friday Five Method to Content Marketing for Travel Agents:

1. The goal of Content Marketing is to increase your online footprint as large as possible with many web pages featuring your informative, well written articles. Commit to crafting two to four articles per month about your travel niche and post them to your website. The more articles you post, the better. Stay on topic only posting about your chosen travel specialty. Articles should be approximately 600 to 1,000 words long. Resist the temptation to make your articles longer because you will burnout and quit.

 
– Freely use descriptive adjectives (Amazing, Fabulous, Gorgeous, Incredible, etc.) to describe the travel experiences you are promoting. – Use a few of your own pictures to help tell the story you are trying to communicate.- As you write your articles keep in mind you are “selling the experience” to potential clients so make sure to add your inside knowledge, observations and most importantly your opinion thereby reinforcing that you are THE expert.

2. SEO – A critical component to a successful Content Marketing effort is getting those web pages to appear high in the search engine results. With this in mind, knowing some basic SEO is critical. – Use Google to find what keyword phrases people are using to search for information about your travel niche. You can do this by typing in a few words into the Google search box and noticing the phrases Google suggests with its auto-complete. These suggestions (known as keyword phrases) are based upon what others have used to search for similar information. – Craft each article based upon a specific keyword phrase you found on Google that you think someone might do a search looking for the type of information in your article provides. – Include your targeted keyword phrase in the title of your article and three or four times within the body. For more about: SEO for Travel Agents
3. Use Social Media to generate interest about your article with a small snippet and a link to your website to Read More. Although opinions differ on this, my method is to use Social Media as a traffic generator to your website where your marketing efforts can be monetized through lead generation or someone subscribing to your email newsletter.
4.  Take advantage of Guest Author opportunities on other websites to increase your online footprint even larger. Look for guest author opportunities that the website will list your professional bio, contact information, headshot image and links to your website and social media sites along with your article. – An additional benefit of Guest Author posting is that it provides your website with inbound links. The number of high-quality websites that link to your website is one of the most important signals the search engines use for ranking. This can have a huge impact on where your site appears in the search results. For an example of a complete Author Bio page and also a shameless plug for our website take a look at: www.ReviewResorts.com.

Industry Call to Action

If only 5% of the Travel Agents committed to Content Marketing, the flood of new websites and pages on the Internet would command attention of both the general public and suppliers.

Therefore, I would like to call on consortiums, host agencies and industry thought leaders to join me in encouraging Travel Agents to embrace content marketing. Let’s start the discussion. If you have ideas, please feel free to reach out to me: george@reviewresorts.com.

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About the Author

George Oberle is a founder and editor of travel marketing platform www.ReviewResorts.com. He owned and operated two mid-size travel agencies over a 20 year period. He was a webmaster and SEO specialist at a large regional travel agency for five years. In 2011 he created and coordinated the Travel Blog Project which guided 230 travel agents through a 100-day online marketing effort encompassing blogging, social media and search engine optimization for websites. George also started a group called Travel Content Marketers on LinkedIn which all travel professionals are invited to join.