The Quick Content Marketing Kit for Travel Brands Looking to Stand Out

From Marriott’s Travel Brilliantly, Four Seasons Magazine, AirBnB’s City Guides to Virgin America’s Flyer Feed, leading travel brands are turning to content marketing to provide value to their audiences and drive business results. They recognize that content can heavily influence purchase decisions, even in the travel industry where the sales funnel is extremely long.

According to Google, travelers visit 22 different sites over 9.5 sessions before deciding on a booking. A similar phenomenon, observed by MSN Travel, found that 68 percent of travelers embarking on a 4-hour trip will spend 42 hours pouring over travel-related content online before their trip.

Clearly, content has become indispensable for travel brands across the globe.

Here are things travel brands can do to create dynamic content experiences that spark a dream:

Optimize Your Content for Engagement

In terms of boosting general awareness and re-engaging clients, posts within the travel vertical can average more than 10,000 shares a month. However, it’s also a highly competitive vertical, so marketers need to maximize their production efforts by mirroring content that has gained high social traction.

After pulling the 100 most-shared articles over a one-year period, analyzing the word and image count across 11 different topic areas, including travel, here are five ways we found you can optimize your upcoming travel content:

1. Present your content in an easily-digestible format like a list
2. Focus your content on summer holidays/events
3. Optimize for mobile, particularly if your target market is Millennials
4. Don’t be afraid to produce long-form content when appropriate
5. Don’t forget images (see our images and headlines best practices )

Personalize the Content Experience

In this digital atmosphere saturated with content, brands are competing for attention, and only the most outstanding, creative, and novel content can cut through the noise. That’s why leading travel content marketers know that personalized content experiences illicit the most success.

Tourism Ireland positioned themselves as a hot holiday destination by identifying audience members who were passionate about hiking through the Outbrain algorithms personal filtering options, sending them content about backpacking activities in Ireland.

Commitment to consistently creating a plentiful amount of fresh content for those who have a broader but clear interest in visiting Ireland has allowed them to become a tourist destination in the minds of hundreds of thousands of website visitors.

Capture them in the Interest Moment

It has become harder than ever to win the attention of consumers who are blocking, skipping and ignoring ads, knowing how to reach them at the right moment with the right content is of utmost importance.

Ultimately, it’s about providing value beyond an ad message because attention is the new currency.

As it relates to travel content, we’ve found that when a user is trying to discover content that interests them by online browsing, viewing videos, or reading the news, that this is a crucial moment for brands to capture the attention of target audiences with the right content.

Rather than being overly promotional with messages like, “Our hotel is the best,” try telling destination-specific stories. Show off the neighborhood around your hotel instead — its people, culture, dining and retail options, as well as fun activities.

Don’t just write with your brand in mind; make the consumer the heart of your content.

Align your Calendar for Mobile Consumption

Travel brands leading in content marketing listen to their audience, find out what they want, and give it to them. They know exactly what kind of content their readers enjoy, what questions they are asking, and what platforms they seek information from, optimizing their content for better engagement with their target audience.

Finding out when their audience is online and consuming content is key for a successful conversion. In fact, Outbrain’s own consumption data reports that consumers go on a frenzy of reading and watching travel beginning in April. More interestingly, that consumption peaks on mobile at 7am and 11pm across the millions of recommendations being made every day on Outbrain’s network of publishers.

So, plan your content calendars accordingly.

Retarget Brand Website Visitors

Content marketing is a patient game, especially in the travel industry. Conversions don’t usually happen overnight, and they’re not the only metric to measure success, so don’t rush it. Put in the hours, capturing and sustaining consumer interest first.

Then, set the foundation for repeated traffic by using one of the most effective digital marketing tactics of the past decade, retargeting. Visiting a brand’s website is probably the strongest indicator of a consumer’s interest in a product or service, so don’t miss out on opportunities to drive action.

Consider using Outbrain’s Custom Audiences feature, which enables marketers to re-engage their website visitors with valuable content, recommended across the Outbrain network of premium publishers, in order to keep the conversation going.

To recap, content marketing in the travel industry is on the rise.

It’s not too late to jump on the bandwagon and if you want to break through the noise, you’ll have to: optimize your content for engagement, personalize the experience, capture audience attention in their moment of interest, align your calendar with mobile content consumption patterns, and be sure to retarget users who have already visited your website for successful conversions.