Top Digital Marketing Insights For Travel Agents in 2018
Branding Insights
As a travel agent, you should see your business as a brand persona. If you were the customer, would you want to be friends with that brand? Is your brand strong enough to evoke love emotions amongst your customers? Does the messaging of your brand sound believable to you? Does it entertain and inform potential customers?
A dialogue with the customer
In the age of internet and social media, consumers are not just waiting to get the “once-in-a-while” newsletter. They want to have a dialogue with their travel brands. In the course of doing this, experts warn that you should never oversell or hawk deals as this belittles your brand. In other words, you should not overdo your pitch or over-pimp your brand. Rather, customize your brand messaging with creative content so that your travel customers would want to become part of your travel agency.Angle for valuable supplier content
Travel agents depend on travel suppliers for more than 60% of their revenues. To increase your agency’s overall profitability, you will need to position your agency to acquire the hosted positions in the travel industry forums so that you can leverage the supplier content on your website.The most successful travel agents are those that attract travel content from big travel suppliers such as;
Social Media
Social media is a free channel for getting your travel agency’s messaging out. Most social media channels offer both paid and organic reach to your customers.Tip: It is better to build your channels organically before you consider using the paid services.
Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and YouTube are the most popular social channels with travel customers. Learn how to handle and utilize each of these channels’ unique features.
Facebook – Using lots of images with sky blue background has been known to work very well on Facebook. To get more engagement, try posting between 11AM and Midday in your target market’s time zone.
Instagram – The best social media channel to use when you want your content to go viral is Instagram. People have found it very easy to share beautiful travel photos with their friends on other channels such as Twitter and Facebook.
YouTube and Video – Video is increasingly becoming important in digital marketing. According to a Forrester Research, about 60% of all online content today is made of video.
For your travel agency digital marketing, you are well advised to combine both text and video to maximize your reach.
It is important to also note that search engines such as Google rank content that has been shared on social media better than the one that is only shared on your travel agency’s website.
Twitter – It most likely that the content you share with your followers on Twitter will not stay on twitter alone. The average Twitter user also has a Facebook and an Instagram account. So if you want your content to be shared on multiple channels, put it on Twitter.
Tip: Get your social media influence index on a site like Klout. This helps you improve on the content you share online.
Audience Engagement on Social Media and Website
Travellers use apps such as FourSquare to get answers about their preferred travel destination. You are therefore well advised to use short questions on your website to make them more discoverable on such apps.What kind of Content Get Shared?
To make the social media work for you, you will need to make content that people can share on your behalf. People share what they think is informative or “cool”.As a travel agent, strive to make your content either informative or funny. Your informative content might be travel tips or one that inspires potential travelers to dream of travel while your funny content might be a video about funny experience you or your other customers had during their trip.
Most importantly,
ALWAYS MAKE YOUR CONTENT EASY TO SHARE!
