Travel PR is something that can get your brand in front of the right people. Done by information sharing essentially, and 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 misunderstood or overlooked by travel brands who don’t know the impact that it can have and what it comprises.
So, we’ve taken a list of all of our most frequently asked questions when it comes to travel PR and broken each one down into easily understandable information.
General PR
What sort of PR am I best engaging with?
That all depends on your specific business. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution at north9.
For example, we offer Reactive PR, which involves relying on relationships built within the travel industry, knowing what stories journalists have coming up and pitching clients wherever appropriate. This is great for coverage in really high-quality and well-respected publications.
We have Press Releases, which involves identifying areas of the business to create great stories that the press will love and these are great for sharing what makes your brand stand out from the competition.
Then we have Creative Campaigns. These can hugely accelerate the progress of a brand by gaining visibility on top publications as well as drive ranking performance in search engines that give you a long-term, sustainable result from the activity
It’s complicated though, so it is always best to chat through it to find out the best option for your individual scenario.
The Times/Guardian/Evening Standard offered to include me in one of their publications for £2,000+, is that better value for money?
Oh, we’ve heard this a few times.
The Evening Standard is charging £2,000 for a link. The Times are charging £3,666 for a banner.
These are the sort of publications that we aim for (and regularly get) coverage in, particularly as part of our Reactive PR strategy. This will cost you just £250, and an extra £500 if we secure the link, and you’re likely to get other links for less money than these publications are charging too.
Also, if you’re considering spending this amount of money, we think putting this into a creative campaign would be far better value.
The production fee for this starts from £2,000, and you’ll end up with a linkable asset on your website that we’ll build multiple links to and will start to rank for organic keywords as well.
Sounds like a no-brainer to us.
We’re quite specific, will this approach work for us because of our niche?
Even the smallest and more niche travel companies can reap the benefits of PR too.
Only offer trips to Tuvalu? With an airport code of FUN, we’ll certainly be able to craft some enjoyable narratives.
Whether it be in their locations, itineraries, accommodations, or traveller demographics, we work with a lot of clients that are super niche.
And we’re always up for a challenge.
Do you have a list of journalists you reach out to?
We don’t use newswires or spam 100+ journalists in one batch send-out here. Instead, we send our stories to carefully researched people that we know will love them.
Taking it one step further, we always identify who is going to cover our story long before we start creating it. That way we can mould every last part of our creative campaigns and press releases to make them the perfect fit for our key targets.
When it comes to key targets too, we have our bread and butter (the journalists writing for the publications super relevant to your target audience) but we also regularly swap this up to ensure that we’re always securing new linking domains.
That’s what makes us one of the best choices for travel PR firms in the UK.
What do you define as ‘good coverage’?
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 it is.
However, it’s not solely based on 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.
Organic Visibility: This is the impact that PR links have on applicable keyword rankings.
It is worth pointing out here that 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.
How much coverage should I expect to see?
How long is a piece of string?
We never guarantee coverage (if someone does, run), but we can give you a pretty good idea based on previous results.
From creative campaigns, we are currently seeing an average of 43 links per year across our clients, working out at over 10 high-quality links per campaign – whammy.
With Reactive PR and press releases, the amount of coverage tends to build up over time as we work on familiarising journalists with your brand. On average, we see around two and three pieces of coverage for Reactive and releases respectively within the first three months of working with a client, with this ramping up to 17 and 14 pieces within the first 12 months.
What’s the most I can expect to be charged from the coverage fee?
The most that you can ever get charged from the Reactive PR and Creative Campaign coverage fees is £1,000 and £1,500 respectively.
And, as much as we’d like to, we don’t find ourselves charging clients coverage fees every month. For example, our Reactive PR clients only receive these invoices six times each year, on average.
How much would it cost without a coverage fee?
The coverage fee is pretty much a ‘no win, no fee’ setup, but we know that this can make things a bit unpredictable.
So, for those who like to have everything set in stone, we also offer a retainer-style option. This is priced at £750, regardless of the coverage achieved.
Reactive PR
What am I paying for with the initial £250?
This covers us identifying, actioning, and reactive opportunities.
We’re lucky enough that journalists often come to us directly for stories but we don’t just sit back with our feet up. We’re always on the lookout for travel stories that our clients can jump on and take insight to journalists before they even know they need it.
This is also included in this £250.
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…
At the end of the day, you could be paying an agency £1,500 a month on a retainer just for Reactive PR and get just one piece of coverage, or none at all.
Whereas the way we have priced our Reactive PR is that you pay a minimal amount for us to respond to the opportunities, and only pay more if we secure some coverage. Of which is only priced at £500 for a 90+ DA placement and is capped at £1,000.
So, 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 as well, you wouldn’t pay anything more. Winner.
We’ll be surprised if you find better value elsewhere.
Creative Campaigns
What sort of coverage should I expect to see from a creative campaign?
Again, we cannot guarantee coverage but we can give you a pretty good idea based on previous results.
We have broken our creative campaign results into three categories to give a better idea of how we view the performance of these and to highlight the sort of coverage you can expect over the year with this approach.
‘Mega Campaigns’
These are the campaigns that both us and you will be talking about for a long time afterwards. They happen once in a blue moon, but they do happen – and they have mega results. We’re talking over 50, even 100, pieces of coverage.
‘Great Campaigns’
Even when we reach for the moon, we often land amongst the stars – which we count as the campaigns that either get 15+ high-quality backlinks or are super relevant backlinks or on new linking domains.
‘Good Campaigns’
Not all of our campaigns get lots and lots of links though. Some get just a handful, which is how the cookie sometimes crumbles, unfortunately. But this is where it is worth pointing out that it’s not all about the number – it is quality, not quantity.
With just a small amount of regional links (three to be specific), one client’s accessible properties page started ranking – and in position #3! – for the keyword ‘accessible cottages UK’ just 3 months after this campaign… That’s pretty damn good if you ask us.
Particularly when the client is a UK property provider, the links were in regional British publications and they were trying to push their accessible cottages page…
Of course, we would love for every creative campaign to be a ‘mega’ one. But that’s not realistic. So, although we always reach for the moon, we more typically land amongst the stars, with clients seeing a mixture of ‘great’ and ‘good’ campaigns across the year.
Sometimes, there are the rare occasions when the rocketship fails to ignite. Rarely, but it can happen. This is why we never recommend clients approaching Creative Campaigns as a ‘one-time thing’.
Looking at internal data for our longest-standing creative clients – those who have played the long game and worked with us for more than three years-, 18% of campaigns have been ‘mega’, 25% have been ‘great’, 31% have been ‘good’ and 26% have been ‘flops’ on average.
This means that three-quarters of our creative campaigns have either achieved a BIG amount of coverage, some super relevant links or contributed to a positive keyword ranking improvement.
Should I do just one creative campaign?
PR is often a game of ebbs and flows. This is why we don’t recommend approaching Creative Campaigns as a ‘one-time thing’.
Sometimes, the media landscape takes things out of our hands. We couldn’t predict the Queen’s passing was going to stop all unrelated coverage for 10 days.
Our approach to Creative Campaigns is that this is a rolling service that achieves fantastic results over the course of a year.
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!
