How Much Should You Pay For Travel PR?
Building a travel brand that is both attractive to consumers and has an impressive media profile requires both time and money.
However, the amount you should be investing in travel PR services seems to still be shrouded in mystery, with many companies paying a lot for little results.
We have therefore decided to pull back the veil in this blog, highlighting what it is worth and how much businesses should expect to pay.
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as simply saying, ‘This is exactly how much you should be paying for PR’.
That’s like asking, ‘How long is a piece of string?’
But we can definitely highlight what travel PR entails so you know what you’ll be getting for your money as well as outlining some factors that can inflate costs.
What does Travel PR consist of?
People are travelling further and more frequently than ever before so your travel business must stand out in such a competitive market.
Travel PR is something that can get your brand in front of the right people. This is done by information sharing essentially, creating narratives that are exciting, unique, and newsworthy.
It’s a long-term strategy – a consistent and ongoing presence that generates both awareness and exposure to help travel companies reach their goals.
Yet, despite its importance in success, PR is often overlooked by travel brands who don’t know the impact that it can have and what it comprises.
So, let’s break it down.
Travel PR Services
Below is a list of services that encompass travel PR.
Creative Campaigns
Bigger pieces of work (typically data-led) that are designed to gain visibility for your travel brand on top publications as well as drive ranking performance in search engines for long-term, sustainable results.
Press Releases
Even in these times of digital PR and online media, the humble press release is still an essential tool when it comes to winning media coverage for travel brands.
Reactive PR
Supporting journalists with their stories by responding to opportunities and requests with useful suggestions – whether this be itineraries, destinations, or travel tips.
Newsjacking
A strategy that relies on identifying relevant news stories that have just broken, or are about to, and quickly crafting interesting insight to be able to weave your name into the conversation.
Awards
Setting yourself apart in the industry by securing an external accolade that highlights just how great you are.
Thought Leadership
This strategy places the key people within your travel business in the spotlight with the aim of strengthening reputation and credibility and highlighting spokespeople as specialists or even as leaders in a market. This is all about showing authority in your field.
Press / Influencer Trips
This refers to initiating, organising, and managing trips for both journalists and influencers that will enable them to share their first-hand experience of your travel brand.
Digital PR link-building
A form of link building, digital PR involves applying the principles of PR to digital content by creating content with a unique angle or hook to secure links on relevant websites.
Print Coverage
What PR was before our digital era, securing mentions in newspapers and publications to raise brand awareness.
Broadcast PR
Again, awareness raising but by securing company or spokesperson coverage on TV and radio.
Lots of great stuff, basically.
Factors that could Affect the Cost
We’ve already established that there is not a cut-and-dry answer to how much you should be paying, but there are definitely some factors that can inflate the price.
1. Fee Structure
The structure in which you are charged can have a massive impact on the cost of PR.
Retainer
The classic ‘pay a lump sum’ method is a set amount of money that secures an agency’s time and a team of people for a set number of hours or days each month.
One main perk of this method is paying a recurring, fixed monthly fee with no surprises. These are often for a period of 6 or 12 months.
This makes outlining marketing budgets easy as you know exactly what you’re paying each month.
However, while you are able to avoid any unexpected fees with a monthly retainer, you do run the risk of paying a significant amount of money each month for little coverage, or even none at all.
Because you’re might not the only one comfortable with a confirmed sum of money each month. There is the risk with this type of strategy that an agency could take its foot off the pedal, with no incentive to hustle for good results.
Coverage Fee
A coverage fee, on the other hand, is where you pay a smaller amount each month and then extra depending upon results.
Of course, there is the uncertainty here of not knowing how much you could end up paying each month, but there are lots of benefits associated with this method, particularly when it comes to PR.
For example, we charge a minimum amount of money for the team to identify and respond to Reactive PR opportunities and then only charge clients more if we actually secure coverage.
And there is often a cap too. Ours is £1,000, so you could end up with really good value for money.
We’re talking about the potential of coverage in both Forbes and USA Today in one month for just £1,000. And if we ended up securing the New York Times and The Telegraph too, you wouldn’t pay anything more. Winner.
On average, we outreach six reactive opportunities per month, which works out at £41 per opportunity for us to identify it, write up a quote or itinerary, and follow up with journalists.
Pretty good value for money if you ask us…
This method can help to keep costs low as it’s essentially a ‘no win, no fee’ setup, and it also means that your agency is going to be absolutely hustling to secure that coverage.
2. Agency sector
Hiring a digital marketing agency that specialises in your industry might cost you slightly more each month, but this will be well worth the investment when it comes to results.
Why? Well, working with a generalist agency means you might have an account manager juggling your niche travel website with that of a window fitter, trainer manufacturer, and embedded electrical solutions provider.
They won’t be dialled into the news applicable to your sector all the time. Probably only when they’re working on your account, which means that you could miss out on a lot of opportunities.
However, working with a travel specialist agency means you would be working with someone who lives and breathes the industry.
We’re able to skip the whole ‘learning curve’ section of the process, because we know what is what straight away. It will also save you a lot of billable hours.
This is the reason why we always encourage working with a specialist travel marketing agency to get the most out of your PR marketing budget.
3. Agency size
Another factor that can have an impact on the cost of travel PR is the size of the agency you’re working with.
Simply put, the larger the agency, the more likely they are to work with bigger and more well-established brands, meaning that they become accustomed to larger budgets and their fees increase as a result.
This often means that small and medium-sized businesses feel that they cannot compete with larger corporations when it comes to digital marketing and digital PR because they can’t afford the costs attached to working with such agency powerhouses.
This is exactly why we started north9 way back when, because our founder Tom recognised the struggle that generalist agencies were having in offering a quality service to companies within different industries.
Since then, we’ve been able to help a huge variety of travel SMEs drive outsized results and compete with rivals way beyond their size in true David vs Goliath style.
Giving them access to big results for small prices.
What is Defined as Good Value for Money with Travel PR?
Now, we know that it’s not always about keeping costs as low as possible. Some businesses don’t mind spending money if they’re getting a positive return on their investment.
So we thought we’d touch upon how to recognise if you are, indeed, getting good value for money.
What should I define as ‘good coverage’ in Travel PR?
Good coverage? Well, that all depends on your business, your goals, and the PR services you engage in.
A campaign that brings in 100 links? That is ‘good coverage’, of course.
However, it’s not all about quantity, and there are lots of other metrics that we base our coverage on to determine whether it’s ‘good’.
Below are a couple of examples of the things we look at.
Impressions:
This is the number of people who could have been exposed to your company as a result of coverage, calculated through the average monthly page views of a publication.
Again though, it’s all about quality, not quantity here.
The Mirror has over 28,240,000 monthly unique visitors, but they’re not all going to care about your company.
But a cycling holiday provider getting a placement in Active Traveller magazine? That will expose over 26,000 people to your brand who ARE interested in what you do.
Relevance:
This is the relevancy of coverage to your company, with more relevant links typically having a greater impact on keyword ranking improvements.
For example, we have had some clients query lower DA publications. But they shouldn’t, because lower-ranked but super-relevant publications can still turn the dial when it comes to organic visibility.
We’ve seen links on a DA39 travel publication improve keyword rankings by as much as 40 positions in just 3 months.
That’s why coverage should never be analysed as quantitative data.
It’s all about quality over quantity when it comes to good coverage, so make sure that your agency is explaining the coverage you’re receiving in qualitative terms and highlighting the benefits that it will have for your brand.
No jargon. In a way that makes sense for you.
What sort of Travel PR am I best engaging with?
To get the most value for money also depends on the type of PR that you engage with.
But there is no magic answer about what you and your brand should be doing.
It actually all depends on your specific business and industry. We’ve seen a lot of travel brands be disappointed by naff results that have stemmed from agencies applying the same strategy as clients in a different travel sector or worse, a different industry altogether.
At north9, we pride ourselves on the fact that we have not succumbed to the classic ‘one size fits all’ mindset of a lot of agencies.
We’re proud that we tailor our packages to suit the specific needs of each specific client.
We’re more than happy to chat to you about what type of PR we think would work best for you so just drop us a line at hello@north9.agency.
About The Author...
Amelia leads our PR activity – gaining links to top publications through creative campaigns, press releases, PR stunts, social media, newsjacking, and more. The country that has her heart is India – diverse scenery, incredible people and the food is to die for!
