The travel and tourism industry has one thing in their favor that many other industries don’t—they don’t have to stretch or even try very hard to find fascinating topics to plan their content around.

From fascinating destinations to bucket list items, content marketers for the travel industry have some pretty cool stuff to write about.

And the intriguing topics that make travel so fascinating—the trips, the stories, the exotic restaurants—are what the best marketers focus their content on, never on the brand itself.

When potential customers are seeking out agencies, hotels, guides, etc. they don’t want brands throwing themselves in their faces with traditional outbound tactics. They want to find this information themselves, they want peer reviews and they want to come across travel guides and resources organically.

A travel brand therefore needs to be very searchable. There needs to be strategically placed content on a variety of popular travel sites and blogs that target all of the pain points and questions someone going on a vacation would experience.

When someone or something recommends/links to a brand, the traveler will first check out the recommended brand’s website. A resource center is a must to house all of a brand’s guides, tips and check-lists that will make the traveler’s journey much easier.

After all, vacations are about creating amazing memories but let’s not pretend that the planning and the prepping aren’t stressful. A good marketer takes some of the stress out of this part of the process with all the right content.

Know Your Traveler’s Journey

To achieve the most effective content marketing strategy, marketers should map out the journey that a target customer (the traveler) would typically go through. After this is mapped out, think of all the different types of content and research that a traveler would do during these phases.

This is niche-specific but it usually looks something like this:

• Seeks out a destination

Researches to find out where he wants to go

Reads blogs and reviews of destination experiences (more specific review reading will happen later on, right now it’s just to find destinations)

Zeroes in on a region like South-East Asia or Pacific Northwest

• Researches a few destinations

Now he has narrowed his search down to a region, the traveler will get more specific in his research.

He starts looking at weather, activities, etc.

• Picks a destination and researches specific lodging, food, activities, etc.

Destination has been chosen and it’s time to do in-depth research on the location.

• Reads reviews from peers

Once a place of lodging or a restaurant looks good, the traveler will confirm this and read peer reviews of lodging, restaurants, activities, etc.

Will start the booking process

• If going out of country, will research travel documents and the vaccination required

The most boring but thorough research will take place in this step of the journey

• Packs his bags
• Makes arrangements to be dropped off at the airport
• Deals with stressors in transit to destination

RCI is my go-to example of a travel brand understanding their traveler’s journey and executing content marketing in an exemplary fashion. They are the largest time share company in the world and have a content marketing strategy to match their grandeur.

They’ve created an app that allows travelers to explore any aspects of their destination from photos to places to visit.

Just go to their website and you’ll see what I’m talking about. They have a whole section dedicated to awesome travel resources (remember how important I said having a resource center on your site is?) from car rentals to the ability to request free information to be sent in print to your home.

Examples of Content for Your Traveler

Obviously the travel industry has a ton of niches. From senior citizen cruise lines to adventurous back packers, the content you create is going to be very specific to your target travelers. Here are some examples of content that travel companies create to help travelers through their planning journey:

• A vaccination and travel document check-list complete with links to government and other websites where a traveler can get the latest information from. Instructions on how to obtain a visa, how long the process would take and the lists of places they can go to for their vaccines.

• An eBook that contains information all travel destinations, accompanied by photos, activities and consumer reviews so that users can pick what feels right to them.

• Information about (human) travel guides for backpacking adventures. Include the Twitter handles of these guides so that the travelers can interact with them.

• A Pinterest board that engages past travelers so that users can see photos of actual experiences.

• Curate peer reviews for your visitors’ reference.

• Provide up-to-date information about dining, night life, festivals, etc. in each of your destinations accompanied by consumer reviews. You can also create location-specific blogs on your website to make it easier for your visitors to find the information they want.

• Write a guide on activities to do in any type of weather.

• Email your customers recommendations on shuttle and bus services to take for their journey to the airport.

• Tweet and email them when they are in transit to check if they need anything.

• A check-list of what to carry with them. Include the obvious like a pair of socks or a hair brush but also include destination-specific suggestions such as a bug spray or rain gear for a tropical island-bound traveler.

Choose Your Social Channels Wisely

The travel industry can succeed on all digital channels. From short excursion clips on YouTube to bucket list item boards on Pinterest, there are a lot of creative strategies that can work.

Thing is, you need to factor in time and man power. If you can’t dedicate a lot of time to all of social media, pick channels you think would draw and retain most customers and stick with those. Don’t ever allow your brand to have a “half assed” presence on a social media channel. This will make consumers wary of your brand.

Jet Blue’s Twitter presence is one to learn from. They actively monitor their Twitter feed and respond to all customer tweets. Even the ones from unhappy customers.

The More Difficult Part- Customer Retention

So far, pretty easy, right?

Well, it gets a little harder now. Aside from creating vacation-specific content, part of your strategy needs to engage people and include some form of content that they’d like to consume even when they’re not traveling.

A blog on random exotic locations or stories of people crossing items off their bucket lists can do the trick. Notice how these two examples tie into travel but can still hold people’s interest even when they have no immediate plans of traveling.

Use email marketing wisely. You want to keep your customers on the radar without over emailing them. Maybe schedule email drips that go out every two weeks and let them know of any travel sales or contests for free trips happening at your end.

Identify Who is Influencing Your Target Buyers

A recommendation from a family member, blogger, friend or a random person they met at a party is the number one thing determining which destination a person chooses and what he does when he gets there.

Prioritizing increasing word-of-mouth recommendations about your brand should be a huge part of your strategy. We’ve established that you need to create useful content and resources for travelers. But part two of this whole content marketing strategy game, and just as important, is working with people who can create content about you.

Many, many tourism brands are seeing success with blogger outreach. Think of the types of blogs your target customers would check out or even follow.

Hilton brings in bloggers to stay at their hotels and write about their luxurious experience for their followers. One specific example is when they wanted to promote a giveaway. They invited bloggers to live the experience—a trip to Orlando—and write about it, which also further advertised the giveaway.

Southwest Airlines worked with bloggers to promote affordable prices to Vegas by sending a handful of bloggers there. Here is a sample of a post that one of their bloggers wrote.

Put together a plan in which you engage people who are influencing consumer decisions and reach out to them using the long tailed approach. This means you reach out to bloggers with a high as well as a medium influence.

Incorporating mid-tail into your strategy ensures you’re reaching a wide variety of users.

Many travel brands give away free vacations to influential bloggers and maybe a free excursion or a night in a hotel to the mid-level bloggers.

A relationship with the influencers should always be reciprocal so look at their audience engagement, traffic data, social following and quality of content before you decide on an appropriate offer to get them to work with you.

Behold the Power of User-Generated Content

Empower your happy customers. They will recommend you both on and offline. Remember when I said the number one influencer in a travel decision is a peer recommendation?

Well, get those who have traveled with you in the past to recommend your services!

Obviously the easiest way to do this is to offer your customers an awesome experience. Which you’re already doing through your fabulous hospitality, great content and active engagement with your customers.

Create social media contests where users create posts or Pinterest boards that include something related to your brand whether it’s a write-up about their experience or a pin of a photo.

Hipmunk is a flight and hotel deal site that taps into user-generated content in an exemplary way.

Hipmunk is leveraging Pinterest in a contest that is going on right now to win a bucket list trip. People who want to win have to follow Hipmunk on Pinterest, create a board with the name “Hipmunk” in it and pin one of their images with their own bucket list destinations onto the board.

Host a writing contest where existing customers write about their experiences with your services. Have people vote on the best one which will encourage active sharing of the posts. Brilliant.

Incentivize existing customers to bring in new customers, giving them discounts on their next trip with you. This would certainly get me to participate!

Make sure you’re monitoring your social media channels so you can publically acknowledge a customer’s shout out of your brand via Twitter (and other social media platforms). Everyone loves to feel special.

Time to Wrap it Up

I’m sure by now your head is ready to explode. But you probably also see the value of understanding your customers to create amazing content that they need. And you get how important it is to get others to create content about their experiences with your brand.

The only other piece of advice I can offer is to invest in tools that make your life easier. Check out this list of tools to see if any of them can save you any time with your content marketing efforts.

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