If there’s one thing that we can always count on, it’s the ever-changing nature of the online travel marketing world. It changes just as much as the physical traveling world!
This is especially true when it comes to social media travel marketing, and the impact of social media on tourism - both when it comes to consumer demands, booking behaviors and the success of travel businesses such as travel agencies.
Of course, there are many aspects of online travel marketing, however arguably alongside Search Engine Optimisation and traditional Paid Search Advertising, social media is one of the most influential forms of travel marketing right now - and has been for many years. With around 97% of millenials posting content of their travel experiences on social platforms and the influence of community recommendation sites and forums, the internet is a vast, visual and word-of-mouth hive of inspirational and incentivising content for travellers and travel agencies alike.
When it comes to travel and tourism marketing, there's no better way to ensure your success as a travel agency than nailing the basics and lifting your online presence.
Considering the sustained importance of social media, customer preferences for personalised services and the competitiveness of tourism marketing as a whole, it’s obvious as to why it’s so important that your travel agency dedicates time to revamping, or improving your online travel marketing to capitalise on demand and stand out from the crowd!
So here are some of the most beneficial ways that you as travel agents can market yourselves and your services online and take up as much space as possible. Get ready to launch into viral success!
Want to get to the 'good stuff' straight away? Scroll to the bottom of this article to find a helpful guide on travel posts for social media engagement! And check out this handy article to learn exactly how Bedsonline can help boost your success as travel agents!
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Travel Marketing: What To Consider When Planning
The travel shopper is powered by intent-driven factors, termed ‘micro-moments’ in the marketing industry. It’s critical to understand how to market for these intentions and to be present when your customer needs you most.
These moments are defined in the travel industry as:
- Dreaming moments: I want to get away
- Planning moments: I want it to be perfect
- Booking moments: I want to book it now
- Experiencing moments: I can’t wait to explore
When you are planning your approach to travel marketing, what channels will be most beneficial for your target audiences and how to structure your success, consider each stage of these ‘micro moments’, and ask yourself these questions:
- How can you ensure your travel marketing strategy makes customers dream about that destination?
- How can you accommodate different types of traveler, and how can you showcase your ability to map out their perfect trip?
- Why should they book with you and not your competitors?
- What additional experiences can you offer, or help them plan for, to make the most of their trip?
Being able to market your brand around these key moments will shape your strategy into one that is relevant, clearly defined, and relevant to customer preferences. Of course, there's no one-size fits all approach that guarantees instant success, but understanding the customer journey and the key moments when travelers are thinking about their trips is critical.
You can learn more about the key stages of a customer journey with our quick guide - offering an overview of the complex customer-travel advisor relationship which may help you define your strategy.
Plus, marketing to meet these key customer needs is something that Insights, our powerful search and recommendation tool, lets you do effortlessly as it offers personalized recommendations including destinations, hotels and experiences that are most relevant your specific market!
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Jump Aboard The TikTok Bandwagon
With 1 billion active users worldwide, TikTok is the perfect platform for opening up new destinations like windows, letting would-be travellers step into another world. It also means travel agents can tap into that reliable marketing strategy: FOMO (fear of missing out).
If you’re not using this social app already to gain visibility amongst the travellers of tomorrow – Gen Z specifically – it’s worth considering how TikTok can be used for those important micro-moments.
As a visual platform, alongside firm performers like Instagram, TikTok aligns itself perfectly with dreaming moments. You can put your destinations in front of potential customers and make them green around the gills that they’ve got nothing booked with you.
It’s all about providing valuable but exciting content that differentiates you from other travel agents.
Here are types of video content that perform well on TikTok:
- User Video Challenges – Delta Airlines launched a TikTok campaign that asked users to post content of their favourite vacations using the hashtag #FavouriteTripChallenge. This amassed 19.5 million views in just 36 hours!
- Influencer Contests – Garnering huge success with an influencer campaign, Hotwire asked creators to post why they were excited about a post-pandemic getaway and encouraged followers to do the same. Incentivised by a monetary prize for the best video, this campaign drove an incredible level of success.
- Virtual Destination ‘Tours’ - Offering users a chance to explore trending destinations without having to leave their homes is a great way to remind potential customers of all the amazing experiences they could have with your agency.
- Sponsored Content – Spark Ads are regular in-feed videos which brands can push as sponsored content to reach a wide audience. Branded content is known to be 22 times more engaging than regular advertisement content, so it’s worth investing in.
But it’s important that you’re highlighting on-trend destinations, right?
Which brings us to our next tip...
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Fill Your Travel Social Marketing Content with Trending Destinations
Keeping competitive is one of the main challenges in the travel industry – and if you’re not staying competitive, then it’s easy to lose customers to those agencies who can offer deals in the latest trending locations.
If only there was a tool that allowed you to keep up with the latest travel trends, we hear you cry!
Well, you’re in luck.
Insights is an award-winning search and recommendation tool designed specifically for travel agents, packed with real-time global insights and data for the most accurate and up-to-date travel trends and opportunities.
How is market-specific data related to social media marketing for travel agencies?
Well, when they’re combined with a powerful algorithm that collates data into trending destinations for your specific market, we’d say that’s a pretty powerful tool to have under your belt.
This is exactly what Insights offers with its trending destinations, influenced by:
- Real-time market data
- Historical booking data
- Historical search data
- Awareness of seasonality
As soon as you log in to Insights, you’ll see your ‘top’ destinations, ranked by their opportunity and growth value for you and your specific market. As we mentioned, these destinations are categorised by global data bespoke to your own market, which means that you can recommend and showcase destinations which will be in-demand within your key market.
Having tailored recommendations at your fingertips ensures that you’re promoting and recommending destinations which are the most relevant to your customer needs and which present the most valuable opportunities for you as an agency, to scale your growth.
This information can also be used to inform your online marketing strategies, allowing you to populate your social media content with the destinations that are most likely to get engagement and keep you ahead of competitors.
After all, more ‘hot’ destinations equals more bookings!
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Virtual Reality Experiences
As far back as 2016, newspapers such as The Financial Times were using VR to showcase cities, while some travel agencies were doing the same to sell high-quality packages. VR tours and experiences achieve something unique for travel marketing:
They ‘replicate (or give a taste of) an experience so palpable that you can’t wait to enjoy it in the real world’, as suggested by Head of marketing at Kemosabe, John Speers.
In other words, they create ‘digital experiences’ which exist as gateways for customers, making them hungry for the real thing.
Vancouver-based ToursByLocals have launched more than 150 virtual tours since the pandemic with incredible success; Qantas Airlines released a VR app for destinations like Sydney and the Great Barrier Reef; and many other travel providers have utilised VR experiences to keep them ‘top of mind’.
Work on your understanding of the audiences that book with you most, and how these demographics might have changed during the pandemic. Escaping into nature has become a key factor for many travellers, as well as those wanting the more adventurous or ‘big-ticket’ experiences – and VR can whet customers’ appetite, getting them excited to book with you.
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Personalise Your Marketing Materials Every Time
As part of a wider strategy, personalised travel agency marketing materials not only help to cement new customer relations but re-engage high value, repeat customers and also those who have lapsed.
Considerate travel marketing can accommodate the booking moment of your customer’s journey, offering a tailored path of communication that says your travel agency is the best for their needs, sidelining your competitors in the process.
This is especially important when 92% of marketers suggest that customers expect a personalised experience, and 76% of customers say it’s frustrating when personalised service isn’t offered as standard.
But personalising your marketing materials takes time, so how can this be done in a succinct and intuitive way? Well, that’s also where Insights comes in (again).
Insights’ unique Custom Flyer Tool makes sharing bespoke promotional materials with clients even easier. Once you’ve refined your search based on customer requirements, up to 8 hotels can be collated into a user-friendly flyer which can be personalised with a disclaimer for customers on an individual basis!
Plus, as you can share any travel marketing materials through a variety of methods including WhatsApp, Email, Downloadable files, even a personalised QR code, Insights gets your promo material directly onto customers’ screens, making sure that you stay connected and convenient for your clients.
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Work With An Expert Travel Partner
Of course, aside from the booking-boosting tools that we offer as a travel partner, one of the other main benefits of working with us at Bedsonline is that we continually promote and showcase our portfolio across our main distribution networks. We negotiate valuable rates and experiences from some of the best hotel providers and travel experience providers in the world, and run marketing campaigns to help you boost your business.
We also offer an expansive global portfolio of hotels and travel products including care hire and transfers, which means that everything your customers could want is at your fingertips.
So, not only can you curate a travel marketing strategy which is tailored to your unique KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), business goals and requirements, but you can make the most of timely, seasonal campaigns to offer your customers the best prices on their must-visit destinations and stays!
This means that during the most in-demand periods throughout the global travel year, you will be supported with amazing deals for your customers, to incentivise and inspire them to book.
Log in now to access our global portfolio and see our latest campaigns!
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Create A Social Media Community
Now, more companies than ever before are taking advantage of social technology’s ability to support collaboration and to build communities through which customers, brands and influencers can share news and experiences about travel with one another.
Therefore, it’s pivotal that as a travel advisor you consider how your social media strategy is forming, or how you can build these communities of travellers, destinations, influencers, and yourself as the provider.
- How can you bring your travel products even closer to your potential customers? Through immersive VR tours or a high-quality video showcasing its best features, for example.
- Are you working with influencers? How can you use them to create a community where customers are encouraged to share?
- Are you encouraging users to share their experiences with you? User Generated Content is one of the most impactful content on social media specifically, and generates positive word of mouth marketing for your business!
Social media is embedded with the desire for people to share their stories, and it’s the travel agents that get social media to do the talking for them that succeed in this current moment.
Not only this, but social sharing - content designed to inspire engagement from users and viewers - has had a notable influence on the 'democratisation' of online reviews; where customers can honestly review products and experiences to one another. Interestingly, over 59% of US travellers recently suggested that online review sites like TripAdivsor were a vital source of information when planning a trip.
So using User Generated Content to garner engagement from customers, and create a 'hive' of social sharing around your agency could create some well-received buzz!
Not sure on how to structure or approach your social media travel marketing strategy, or which travel posts perform well?
Download our guide on travel posts for social media engagement for inspiration!
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Optimise Your Website for Conversions
Your website is the cornerstone of your online marketing efforts. After all, it’s where you’re going to be driving all your customers, and there’s no sense in curating a perfect social media campaign which drives high volumes of interested traffic to your site, if the actual user experience on site is below par.
Mobile-indexing and site speed are the most important ranking factors across industries – and this is something your competitors will be more than aware of.
Consider this when looking at your site:
- How does it function on mobile? - More than 60% online searches are made on mobiles!
- Does it capture the essence of your brand?
- Does it give users succinct information that’s useful?
- Are there enough visible call-to-actions to turn visitors into converting customers?
- Is it user-friendly?
Ensuring your website is optimised for user experience makes it easier for your customer to plan their dream trip from your portfolio and book with ease – it's critical to many of those micro-moments we discussed earlier!
Of course, one of the most successful approaches to online marketing for travel agencies is ensuring you’re keeping ‘top of mind’ for your audience. And doing this is best involves keeping ahead of the competition, and in line with ever-changing travel trends.
Starting with Insights as your base tool gives you a foundation that is rooted in real-time market and direct booking behaviors within your market. From there, you can tackle your online and social media marketing strategy. It’s a win-win!