How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy for Travel Industry

About 70% of consumers prefer to know about a company via content. Similarly, 72% of marketers think branded content is more effective than advertising. 

These stats prove that focusing on content marketing strategy is the need of an hour for travel or any other industry. Most travel operators already know that content is the best way to drive high-value traffic to travel websites and generate quality leads and sales. 

As content marketing offers a tremendous opportunity for travel businesses to boost their results, you can boost your online reputation and build a community to grow your brand. 

So, how can you start with a content marketing strategy?

In this comprehensive article, we’ll provide you with all the details on how to build a content marketing strategy for the travel industry. From content planning to content optimization and repurposing, these 10 strategic tricks should help you leverage your content marketing approach. 

Besides, you can also clear your doubts related to content marketing with our informative FAQs section. 

Let’s get underway!

10 Best Ways to Build a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing strategy is very important if you want more travelers to notice your travel brand. It is the way to build a meaningful relationship with your customers and offer them valuable and inspiring travel content. In short, it helps to drive more travel customers toward your business.

You should be aware of a few things before creating a content strategy for your travel business. For instance, your content planning should answer the following questions:

• Who will read your travel content?
• How does it help your audiences to solve their problems?
• What type of content format do you focus on?
• What makes you unique from others?
• What other channels will you publish your content?
• How will you plan and manage the whole content creation and publication process?

Firstly, you should identify your target audience before creating a content strategy. For example, if you run a travel company, your content should benefit the needs of travel enthusiasts all around. It should help them solve their problems related to traveling and trekking. 

Travelers can be confused about itineraries of the travel destination, what to pack on their journey, and how to deal with altitude sickness or other health issues during the trip. If you can plan content addressing all these factors, you can attract more travelers to your business. 

Likewise, you should plan the content formats you use while building proper content strategies. While creating travel content, you should focus more on video content. This helps travelers to get detailed insights into the place and the whole journey in a proper way. 

Also, make sure that you include unique information on content that urges travelers to come to you whenever they need something. You should also make strategies to share your content on different social networking channels for wider reach. 

Last but not least, don’t forget to set a proper content creation and publication plan. You can use different content management tools to organize your content and control the full publication process. 

Now, let’s look into the 10 ways to build a solid content marketing strategy for the travel industry in-depth:

1. Know Your Audience

You need to drive your target audience to your website with your content if you want to succeed in content marketing. For that, you have to know your audience well by understanding their lifestyle, needs, concerns, and problems.

You should be clear about who your audience is so that you can create the right content for them. There are a few ways you can understand your audience better.

Collect Demographic Data:

The first thing you can do to understand your audience is collect their demographics. With web analytics, social media analytics, and email subscriber analytics, you can get the data you need on your audience’s age, gender, income, and so on.

You can use Google Analytics to view web analytics of your travel website. This Google-based tool lets you collect demographic data and also gives you insights into your audience’s key interests. With that, you can plan your content marketing strategy accordingly.

Similarly, you can get similar data via social media sites. You can get Facebook followers’ demographic via  Facebook Page Insights. You can create your travel page on Facebook and retrieve such data to plan your content marketing strategy. 

Get Customer Feedbacks:

Collecting feedback from your current customers is one of the best ways to learn more about your target audience. Customer feedback gives you insights into how they are feeling about the content you are producing, what they expect from you, and how you can address their concerns with your content. 

The right customer feedback helps you to understand your readers’ priorities. Plus, you can decide on the best places to reach your potential customers.

Create Buyer Personas:

After you collect demographic data and customer feedback, you can create buyer personas. It is also known as customer avatars that describe your ideal readers and customers so that you can target your content better. 

The best buyer persona has information about your customers’ challenges, source of information, and behavioral motivators. Once you collect all these facts, you can have a better understanding of the right kind of content your audience will engage to.

2. Plan a Proper Content Topic with Keyword Research

After you collect the information about your audience, you need to research and plan content topics. In order to strategize your content and make sure it creates value, you should delve into keyword research. 

Keyword research serves as an integral part of SEO. It is crucial to optimize your website and increase its visibility on search engines. You can take advantage of paid tools like Ahrefs or a free tool like Google Keyword Planner to do thorough keyword research and explore content ideas.

Once you find competitive keywords for your content, you have to pick the one that has a high search volume but low competition. This now becomes your target or focus keyword.

If you include the target keyword on your relevant content, you can rank your content and market it to drive more traffic to your travel website. 

Similarly, you need to explore the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. These keywords are the searches based on your focus or target keyword.

In order to explore the LSI keywords, you should enter your main keyword in the Google Search bar and go way down to the bottom to see the results. There you can track all the related searches. 

Finally, you should start writing or creating your content. While creating content for your travel website, you should think about how to reflect your brand’s personality in it. 

Some of the great content ideas for travel websites include:

Destination Specific Travel Articles:

These articles refer to content that is mainly focused on particular locations. You can also label these articles as travel guides for readers. Destination-specific articles include information like how to visit, places to stay, local bars and food, things to buy, and so on.

Lists Specific Travel Articles:

You can also create an article that includes a complete list of a particular topic related to travel. For instance, you can create content like 10 best places to visit in a particular season, things to do in a particular destination, and top 10 food items to eat in the particular place under this category.

Travel News Articles:

Under this category, you can create content based on the recent events, activities, summit news, and sports news that happened at a particular location. These travel news articles can be viral social media content, and they can drive huge traffic to your websites in a short time.

3. Publish Your Best Materials

With thousands of content being published every single day, the competition in content marketing is more intense than ever. Hence, it is crucial that you only publish your best materials to compete with your fellow competitors. 

In general, it is better to publish one exceptional post per week than publishing three or five mediocre posts in the same time period. You should keep your quality bar incredibly high and also keep exceeding your standards. 

Whenever you create content for your travel website, focus on keyword research and take time to craft the best content possible. The more beneficial your content is, the more it has the chance to promote your overall brand.

4. Create a Comprehensive Content Calendar

Lack of proper planning is a key content marketing mistake that you have to avoid at any cost. So, you should use a content calendar to schedule your entire content. It is important that you know exactly when you want to publish your planned content. 

One essential element of content planning is prioritization. If you plan your tasks well, you can identify which task requires critical attention. With that, you can protect your strategy from failing and land more opportunities for experiments that can boost your results.

Thankfully, there are many editorial tools that you can use to create a comprehensive content calendar. One such tool is Trello. 

Trello is basically a project management blogging tool that provides you with a platform to organize and manage your projects. You can create boards, add tasks, assign them to specific people, and set deadlines for the specific project, all while collaborating with unlimited team members.  

This project management tool displays real-time activity on the same board, and you can see everything that is happening on a project.

5. Focus on Content Repurposing

Content repurposing is another main form of content marketing. It is the process of using all or some elements of existing content to increase its reach. 

Repurposing your content eventually earns you great results in terms of traffic and revenue. The best thing about this content promotion strategy is that you can save valuable time on the content creation promotion. Since you will be repurposing your existing content, you can allocate more time to promote it.

You can repurpose your content in several ways. You can either utilize your posts to create email campaigns or reshare your older posts on social media platforms.

Similarly, you can create slideshows, infographics, video posts, and podcasts to make your old content more interesting for your audience.

6. Answer Questions with Your Content

As we mentioned earlier, you need to create content around what your audience wants. The content you create should be able to answer the questions that your audience is struggling with. If you can pitch your content in such a way, you can gain maximum readers and become successful in your content marketing strategy. 

One best way to find what questions your potential customers are asking is by using Answer The Public. Here, you can type a topic into the search box, and get a list of questions people have searched for on Google.

After looking at the results, you can pick the questions that seem relevant to your audience. It is better to create content based on these questions so that your users can relate to your content properly.

7. Focus on Video

Video posts on Facebook get at least 59% more engagement compared to other posts. Likewise, research done across the top 10 brand pages on Facebook point that video posts generate 12x shares compared to text and images combined.

Instagram is the platform where video content receives three times more engagement than sponsored posts. Even organic video posts get around 38% more engagement than pictures. 

These stats prove that video marketing is one of the best ways to market your travel content. If you can convert your text content to visuals and graphics, you can drive more visitors towards your travel website. As a result, you can scale the whole travel business.

Video marketing is the best way to let people know what services your travel company offers. In a way, it helps establish an emotional connection with your audience. On top of that, you can use the video content to channel your email marketing campaigns.

If your travel company has a new package, you can create content about it and also add the package video to your monthly newsletter. This way, you can let your loyal audience know about your latest offerings and make them more curious. As a result, they’re likely to visit your website for further details.

8. Don’t Forget About Social Media

Social media is the best place to promote your travel content. If you can promote your content and optimize it using different social networking channels, you are certain to be found by a large number of travel enthusiasts.  

Plan your social media strategy by creating your website’s page on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and so on. After that, you can create compelling visual content related to your travel website and share them on different social channels to earn more visitors.

For instance, you can join different travel-related groups on Facebook and promote your content to increase your website traffic. Similarly, you can look for travel-related Twitter chats and use their hashtags to share your travel content on Twitter.

You can even channel your social media share using the automated social media posting feature. A tool like Buffer helps you to achieve this.

Buffer lets you manage and organize multiple social media accounts easily. It lets you customize post times and days and then schedule posts effectively. It enables you to share content simultaneously on every social networking platform directly from its dashboard. 

Likewise, you can use Tailwind or Hootsuite to schedule posts on social media.

While you plan to market your content on social media channels, don’t forget to look for the best social media marketing platforms for travel agencies. 

9. Set Your KPIs

The effective way to make your strategy work is to make your goals specific and measurable. It means that you need to set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your content marketing plan. 

The KPIs let you know when you have achieved your marketing goals with proper stats. These stats include what you plan to achieve in terms of your SEO, traffic, revenue, sales, along with different digital marketing aspects like social marketing and email marketing.

As a travel website owner, you may want to:

• See an increment in your website traffic.
• Improve your website ranking across search engine platforms.
• Get a certain number of email subscribers.
• Get mentions, shares, and comments on your pillar content.

While planning your content marketing strategy, you should pay attention to marketing expenditure and track your expenses on different campaigns. Not to forget that your content marketing goals should always contribute to the achievement of your company goals.

10. Track Your Results and Make Changes Accordingly

Last but not least, tracking your content performance is the best way to understand what type of content is connecting with your audience. The complete analysis gives you a foundation to leverage your future content.

Your audience can give you clear signals about what attracts their interest, making it easier for you to come up with new and intriguing content.

Normally, you can measure your content performance on the basis of these four metrics:

• User behavior: It includes unique visitors, pages per session, and bounce rate
• Engagement: It includes likes, shares, comments, and mentions
• SEO results: It includes organic traffic, backlinks, and dwell time
• Company revenue: It includes a number of leads, existing leads affected, and conversion rate

By monitoring your overall progress, you can tweak your content marketing strategy at regular intervals, so it’s always up to date.

Our Verdict: Is Content Marketing Strategy Profitable?

It doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner or an expert in the travel industry; you should know the fact that content is the real king. Content is a valuable business asset that can market your whole brand 24/7 and transform your visitors into your loyal customers.

A well-planned content marketing strategy executed expertly can make a big difference to land in more sales and scale your travel business. Through market research, a futuristic vision, and the use of available resources, you can nail the best content marketing strategy to promote your travel business in the best possible way.

We hope this detailed write-up on how to build a content marketing strategy for the travel industry somewhat answers your doubts. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below. 

In the meantime, you can explore the tips to promote your travel business and boost sales to dominate the travel industry.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)