The Foundation of a Successful Travel Content Strategy

Now that almost everyone has access to a phone or a laptop, everyone is a content creator, or at least has the capacity to be one. And the introduction of AI writing tools like ChatGPT means that it’s easier than ever to churn out content without much effort at all.

Sometimes it can feel like it’s not enough to just have a really good business offering anymore. The majority of travel brands have a blog, an Instagram account, and probably a TikTok account as well. If you’re not sharing reels, writing viral tweets and posting something new on your travel blog every day, then it’s easy to feel like you’re not keeping up with competitors.

Content is everywhere, and this is a problem. It’s a problem because you need to join the race if you want to be in with a chance of winning. And when you’re in a race with hundreds of other travel brands, how are you supposed to get your content noticed?

The short answer is that you can’t. At least, you’re unlikely to get your content noticed by everyone who spends time online. The likelihood of content going viral, or even just getting in front of a large percentage of the population, is quite slim. 

It’s a nice idea, but anyone who tells you that they have a foolproof strategy for viral content is a liar.

Quantity and consistency can sometimes lead to results. So one option is that you just keep writing content and publishing it online, and hope that there’s enough value in there somewhere to reach your potential customers and catch their attention.

An alternative is that you stop caring about being popular, and start creating content that your specific target audience is actually going to love.

With the kind of strategy outlined in this article, the goal isn’t to create content that is going to be seen by everyone. The goal is to create content that your travel brand’s specific audience is going to engage with, share and feel connected to. 

The goal is not to be seen by many, but known and loved by a chosen few. And then the goal is to grow this following.

Let’s get started.

First Things First

As we said at the beginning of this article, content is everywhere. 

The world we live in is increasingly online, meaning that everyone is bombarded with adverts, news, entertainment and opinions from all angles at all times. Adding to this noise with content from your travel brand is necessary to stay competitive, but also runs the risk of your hard work getting lost in a sea of other blog and social media posts.

The content strategy for travel brands outlined in this article focuses on delivering engaging and personal content tailored to a specific target audience. It stems from the idea that, because the internet is so oversaturated with content, brands will make the biggest impact by focusing on creating content that is personalised, emotive and memorable.

This personal, connection-led approach is also particularly relevant with the rise of AI-generated content. AI can be a really helpful tool to assist with content creation, but it still doesn’t compete with content that is researched and written by a real person sharing their unique insight and recommendations.

A content strategy that prioritises specific advice for a target section of your audience is just one way to approach content creation for your travel brand. But if you’re looking for strategy that is going to help you build better relationships with your customers and establish a better reputation in your industry, this is the ideal approach for you.

As a final note before we begin, please note that when we use the word ‘content’ in this article, we’re mainly going to be talking about written content like blog posts. You can use the majority of the advice in this talk for other types of content like video and social media posts, but this particular approach is tailored to digital, written content. We’re travel SEO experts at our core, and written content is a huge part of that.

Who Are You?

The foundation of any good marketing strategy, and therefore the foundation of this approach to content, is to first define your brand. 

Your travel brand is unique. Or at least, it should be unique. So in order to properly outline who you are, you need to get as granular as possible and define exactly what it is that you offer. Then highlight why nobody else is doing what you’re doing.

A useful prompt for this aspect of the travel content strategy is to ask yourself:

Who are you, what do you offer, and why are you different from your competitors?

For example, at north9, we offer transparent, tried and tested SEO marketing services to small and medium-sized travel brands because we understand that jargon, mystery and false claims can be disastrous for small businesses.

Once you’ve summarised your travel brand in a sentence, highlight what it is that makes it different. This could be your unique offering, your approach to customer service, or the specific, unrivalled value you provide for your customers. 

At north9, our USP is that we donate 100% of our profits to charity, so when our clients work with us, they help us to make a positive difference in other people’s lives.

A final, fun exercise is to give your brand a personality. Decide what they sound like. If they were a person, what kind of energy would they bring to a party?

When we did this for north9, we decided that they were someone well-travelled, outdoorsy and sustainably-minded. They organise their friendship group holiday each year, post a lot on social media, and go bouldering in their spare time. They’ll be making people laugh at a party, but they’ll also stay behind afterwards to help clear up.

Who Are They?

After getting introspective about yourself, you next need to turn your attention to your customers. 

When you have a unique travel brand with a unique offering, you also have a unique target audience. Whether this is a specific demographic or several different groups of customers with pain points in common, everything you do with your business needs to be for them. 

Including content.

If you aren’t writing content with a particular customer in mind, then you aren’t writing content for anybody and you are wasting your time. In other words, if you try to appeal to everybody, you’ll end up appealing to nobody.

As a travel brand, your content will stand out from the huge crowd of other articles written online if it is tailored to your target audience, caters to their specific interests, mirrors their experiences and feels familiar and trustworthy.

You can’t do this if you don’t know who your target audience is. And knowing who you’re writing for is absolutely essential for creating an impactful content strategy for travel brands.

But what’s the value of writing travel content that might only appeal to one group of potential customers?

Imagine that you’re searching for recommendations for where to stay in Greece in May. You read two different articles. The first one is comprehensive, well written, has lovely photos, and offers general information on the best parts of the country to visit at the end of spring. It’s written by a villa provider in Europe, and there’s a generic call to action at the end of it.

The second article features fewer recommendations, but each one comes with a personal anecdote about the author’s time there. Their suggestions seem like exactly the kinds of things you like to do on holiday, their family or group of friends sound similar to yours, and it’s written and formatted in a way that is really easy for you to scroll through. When they recommend places to stay, you trust them.

Customer conversion often relies on being the first brand that comes to mind when your audience decides that they want to book a holiday. And one of the best ways to make an impression is to create a sense of connection, trust, and understanding with this audience.

That second article is an example of content which has been written to engage and connect with a particular reader. It won’t be relatable or useful for everyone, but the people who find it useful will feel like they’ve found a brand that really understands them and what they’re looking for when they travel. When they decide to book a holiday, that brand will stand out as the obvious choice because of the sense of connection that has been formed.

In the same way as having a brand persona can help you really summarise who you are, being able to imagine your target audience as real people can make it easier to tap into what they want and how best to reach them.

Many brands use customer persona profiles as a way of visualising and getting to know their target audience. Customer personas can sometimes be criticised for being limiting and generalised, but in the case of content writing, they can be really useful in getting a good idea of who you are writing for.

You might have a target audience that is made up of one kind of customer, or there might be a couple of different demographics that you cater for with your travel brand. To create a profile that summarises these personas, you’ll need the following information to begin with:

• Age
• Income
• Family status
• Attitudes and opinions
• Travel pain points
• Digital habits
• Favourite content format
• Favourite online platforms

You might also want to include other relevant information, such as competitors that they engage with and typical travel experiences that they book. You can also get creative with these profiles by giving each persona a name and including other information that helps to bring them to life as a reader if you want. 

Customer persona profiles won’t be relevant to all of your customers, but they can help you to better visualise who you are writing your content for. You don’t have to use the traditional profile format for this information either; as long as you’ve done the research into who your audience is and what they care about and respond to, you can present it however you want.

What are You Saying?

Now that you’ve cemented our understanding of who you’re creating content for, we’re going to take it back to your travel brand. Brand identity and ideal customer profiles are a solid foundation, and you can start building your travel content strategy from here.

You’re an expert in your sector of the travel industry and the kinds of holidays that you offer. To make an impression, you want to build a reputation as an expert in this area so that more customers find you. Every piece of content you produce needs to play a part in creating this reputation.

But you don’t want to just write about the same thing all the time. Not only will you get bored and run out of ideas, but your audience will get bored as well. And as we already know, there might be more than one type of customer in your target audience. You want to share a variety of content that will appeal to each of them in turn.

To do this, you can use a concept known as content pillars, which are often used in content or social media strategies. Content pillars are key topics or themes that are relevant to your brand and your customers, even if they don’t directly relate to your offering. When implemented, they give you a small group of broad subjects that you can create plenty of content ideas from, each relating back to your brand in some way but providing a variety of different topics and insights.

By writing about topics that relate to your brand, you’ll frame yourself as an expert. By writing about topics that interest your audience, you’ll be able to catch their attention. And by getting these interested potential customers to engage with your brand, you’ll set them on the path to converting into a real customer.

To start developing content pillars for your travel brand, think back to when you were defining your brand, and pick relevant topics that relate to this. What about the destination you target? Or the type of holiday you offer?

Now think about your audience. What are they interested in that might draw them to your brand? Travel advice? Lifestyle recommendations? Cultural insight?

To share some more specific examples, say that you’re a brand offering sustainable, slow-travel tours of South America. You’ll be able to write about destinations and things to do on the continent, but also offer general sustainable travel advice and talk about sustainable initiatives happening in your target locations. Your audience might also care about sustainable lifestyle content and sustainable travel trends and news. 

The content pillars for this brand would be:

• South America destination guides
• South America travel recommendations
• Sustainable travel advice
• Sustainable lifestyle content
• Sustainable travel news

Another example could be a luxury brand with a collection of villas along the French Riviera, with a target audience of affluent UK, European and North American travellers. Your content could cover luxury guides to the area, but also share cultural recommendations, restaurant reviews and event calendars. Your audience might also be interested in luxury fashion and lifestyle content. 

The content pillars for this brand would be:

• French Riviera destination guides
• Luxury French Riviera recommendations 
• Cultural and event guides to Riviera destinations
• Luxury fashion and lifestyle content
• General luxury travel advice

To bring the example back to north9, our content pillars are:

• SEO marketing advice
• Travel marketing advice
• Travel industry trends and ideas
• Content about alternative workplace culture
• Content about charity initiatives

Identifying your content pillars can take time, and they may be something that you refine as your brand grows. As a starting point, try and come up with five key content pillars for your brand.

Think about what your audience cares about, and what kind of insight you can offer them. Then think about how each of these topics is relevant to your offering.

Once you’ve come up with a group of content pillars, you can then start generating ideas based on these. If you are struggling to get started, try and group your existing content under the pillars for inspiration.

Here’s how we did just that for north9.

SEO marketing advice

How to Assess Backlink Quality

Travel marketing advice

Content Authorship in Travel

Travel industry trends and ideas

90% of AI Travel Itineraries are Inaccurate 

Content about alternative workplace culture

5 Things I Learned from My One-Month Workation

Content about charity initiatives

100% Impact for 2023

What Are They Saying?

All of this creative, brand-led, customer connection stuff is good. But you also need your content to get found online by the right people. Doing SEO keyword research will help with this, giving you data about the specific phrases and terms that people are using when they’re searching for a brand like yours.

We’ve got a strategy foundation, and we’ve got content pillars. The next stage of building this content strategy is with keyword research and SEO.

If you’re looking for a guide to keyword research for travel brands, we’ve got an entire article already written on the topic. So to get started with keyword research, check it out.

The idea of this research is that you end up with a collection of search phrases that relate to your travel brand in some way, whether they’re questions your target audience is asking or variations of your offering. This research will give you a good idea of what your potential customers are searching for, meaning that you can tailor and optimise your content so that it appears when these queries are entered into a search engine like Google.

You can use keyword research to directly inspire the titles of blog posts that you write, or you can use it to optimise content ideas that you’ve already come up with inspired by your content pillars. Your keyword phrases should be used for titles, but can also be integrated into the content itself.

Where Are You Going?

The final part of this travel content strategy approach is to integrate your ideas with your overall business goals.

Every piece of content you share not only needs a target audience and a target keyword phrase, it also needs a goal. When you use these goals to align your content strategy with a wider marketing strategy, or even your overall business growth strategy, you end up with content that has a widespread impact delivering multiple benefits.

Without having an intention behind your content, there’s not really any point in sharing it. But when you give each piece of content a goal, you have that intention in mind as you write it, and you have a clear way to measure whether it’s been successful.

Putting this into practice just means giving each piece of content a goal. For example, a lot of your content might be written with the intention of driving more traffic to your website. You might decide to write specific blog posts to increase interest in a specific tour package. You might also create a series of posts with the intention of getting links from other publications.

To summarise; you need to know your final destination before you set off.

It’s a useful piece of travel advice. But it also applies to content creation.

Example

You can present your content strategy in whatever format works for you. But every piece of content should have a target reader, a target keyword phrase, supporting SEO research, a content pillar, and an overall goal which can be measured.

It’s also useful to plan out your content with a schedule, so you’re regularly sharing new content with your audience. Planning content in advance also gives you the chance to create your content in bulk, making your life easier.

Here’s an example of what this could look like, using the sustainable South America tour brand we mentioned earlier. Note that we’ve also included a ‘Buyer’s Journey’ stage for each of the blog posts as well, which can be helpful in understanding what you’re trying to get the reader to do when they reach the end of your content.

Summary

To recap, here are the main steps in creating a content strategy for your travel brand that will help your content get noticed and make an impression:

1 – Who are you? What do you offer and why is it unique?

2 – Who are your customers? What do they struggle with, what do they want and where do they spend time online? What kind of content do they engage with?

3 – What key topics and ideas are relevant to your brand and your audience? How many different ideas can you create from these content pillars?

4 – What does search data tell you about what phrases and questions are being searched for? How can you integrate these phrases into your content?

5 – What are your business goals? Can you make sure that every piece of content is contributing to one of these?

Putting what we’ve learned about this strategy into practice, when writing a piece of content you should always have the following information:

1 – Does it link back to a content pillar?

2 – Does it have a specific audience member in mind?

3 – Does it contribute towards achieving a business goal? Can you measure this success?

4 – Is it supported by SEO and keyword research?

5 – Are you sharing the content somewhere that your target audience will engage with it?

The truth is that a meaningful, brand-aligned, impactful and successful content strategy is not an easy thing to create. If you want to get through to your ideal customers, be remembered and stand out in the travel industry, you need to take the time to define who you are, what your niche is, and then who you’re creating content for.

A successful, impactful content strategy for travel brands cannot be created without a solid foundation of research and ideation. Putting in the work takes time and effort, but you’ll end up with a strategy and ideas that make your life so much easier in the long run.

If you remember nothing else from this article, remember this: 

The world is oversaturated with content. The best use of your time is creating specific and valuable content for your target audience and nobody else. 

It might not go viral, but they’ll appreciate it and appreciate your brand. You’ll be remembered for your content and the way that it made them feel seen. They’ll trust you and they’ll trust your offering. And when it comes booking a holiday, you’ll be the very first travel brand that they think of.

If you’re a travel brand looking for support with your content strategy, north9 is a specialist travel marketing agency that can help. Take a look at our content service offering or get in touch to speak to our team about what you’re looking for.

About The Author...

Charlotte Armitage

Content

Charlotte’s role is managing our content services, handling client requests, providing insight into content strategy and producing high-ranking written content. When it comes to travel, she’s a big fan of UK staycations by the sea, as long as you can get there by train!