Five content marketing hacks that will help you succeed in the travel sector

Creating content for travel seems like an easy win. Most people love to travel for leisure and some enjoy doing it on business too. You have as your audience, millions of people looking for inspiring travel stories, searching for hacks to get the cheapest prices and tips to have a safe trip across cities and countries.

Only if things could come so easy? Well, as easy as it is to create content for travel, it stays as difficult (as any other sector) to get your audience to stay interested in you and your product.

But like travel, content marketing has some interesting hacks that can help make your stand out in the crowd. And here they are:

• The world can’t be your audience, so it works to choose the ones you want to write for: While a travel company can revel in the fact that there are so many people interested in knowing about travel, writing for everyone isn’t a great solution. There are various tools that help identify our audience, like Facebook audience insights (for brands with a significant social presence), surveys, product NPS scores, and customer feedback. Travel segments can be identified either by the frequency of travel, age or even destinations. I also look at socio-economic factors that influence travel trends.
• Create content to solve traveller issues and answer their questions: Traveller problems for Indians are as unique as they are similar. Our visas aren’t the best in the world, we have large sections of audiences who have diet preferences and budget travel remains a priority across segments. Compare that with markets like Korea and Singapore, where visas aren’t top of the mind concerns, but language and safety are! Google calls this ‘creating content for micro-moments’. What it simply means, is answering a question the user searches for! For example, where are the secret beaches in Goa? Or where do I spend my Holi weekend?
• Trendjacking pays: If it is happening, people want to know. So keeping your ear to the ground helps. New routes, budget announcements, mega launches, changing visa laws – there is travel news all over. But I avoid trendjacking for the heck of it. It can completely backfire, if it isn’t smart and witty. And wit isn’t an easy art!
• Content should be mobile friendly: This one seems rather obvious, since so much content is consumed on the mobile. However, it is startling, how we forget to make the most brilliant infographics not accessible across devices. From personal experience, I can safely say that the next time you spend hours correcting the graphic and getting colours and fonts accurate, you must send it to yourself on the mobile first. The incompatibility of some good designs (after you’ve spent hours on them) can break your heart! But the truth is, content is now most likely to be consumed on the mobile, than anywhere else!
• Measure and learn: If you belong to the club that believes content is an art and not a science, you could be the latest convert on the block. Content on the Internet can be measured to the last click. Apart from the obvious ones around likes or shares, you can now find answers to the most granular level. From time spent on the site, to scroll rates, traffic sources, there are numbers for your every content usage question! It helps to track this across pieces, as it lets you know interesting bits about reader behaviour (do people click in the centre of the article or right above), the average time spent on the story or even details around the best format that works with the user – a video, podcast or the written word!

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)