The Rise of User-Generated Content in Travel Marketing
Any serious travel company needs to produce authentic content to draw traffic, engage customers, and build its brand.
In terms of authenticity, helpfulness, and immersion, it’s a tough task for most travel companies to produce. That’s why augmenting your current content strategy with the help of your customers and visitors is wise. They’ve been to places you haven’t and can add some great views that might help you capture the purchase intent of your visitors.
Leveraging User’s Enthusiasm and Love of Travel
In fact, travel companies need to scale up and improve their content to thrive. With a focus on growth and improved engagement, you can attract customers, grow your brand and influence, and even improve your traffic from Google.
One neglected area is worth exploring — content generated with your assistance, by your customers. And a travel company’s stock in trade is customers who love their experiences and record them for later re-enjoyment. They love to linger on their travel experiences. So let them replay their joy of travel, and get the full benefit of the celebration!
For decades, user-generated content was defined as low-quality blog comments and complaints, but this is mostly because most companies restricted it to that. Google made it worse. With so much spam, business managers decided to stop customers from offering their insights, comments and uploads. Bad decision.
Because real customers offer up real, insightful accounts of journeys, benefits received, things seen and done, with helpful tips and info that travelers appreciate knowing. And as good as your travel writer or videographer is, actual travelers who have been places have a credible voice and some fantastic photos/videos. As well, adding user-generated content could be a great way to scale up your content volume and content engagement — which Google does evaluate.
Research shows travelers like UGC content. They trust it and prefer it to the hype-driven push marketing that overwhelms them. One survey found 84% of consumers trust a brand more if has UGC content, and 77% of purchase decisions are influenced by UGC. Some believe UGC is more effective than influencers and a company’s own content and that it is more authentic.
UGC is closely aligned with word-of-mouth marketing which 92% of travelers trust. Research shows UGC will benefit agencies and DKMOs in their marketing efforts. Travel marketers prefer Facebook and Instagram for this purpose, but remember that social postings can be leveraged in your web content too. If your web content is validated by UGC, it can amplify its effect significantly.
Video may be the prefered content type being leveraged, but it still doesn’t have the authenticity of actual personal comments from a real user. At the end of any marketing technique is the power of a human voice to provide glue to a customer relationship. Video alone doesn’t do that.
And when customers are offering their thoughts, insights and photos/videos, they are most susceptible to receiving your messages. The key point to be made is that UGC adds value, when it’s incorporated strategically to benefit your site’s content experience and travel package sales.
Below, Gate1travel accepts user-generated photos — scenes of fantastic locations opening eyes to new destinations.
What is User-Generated Content?
UGC could be text, images, video, polls, blog comments, forum posts, and product reviews.
If your travel brand is positive and credible, you’ll likely receive some visible input and support from happy, loyal customers — rather than no one knowing they support you. It’s all part of attracting a happy loyal following online and unleashing all that enthusiasm. In fact, don’t loyal happy customers expect such an experience on your business website?
When customers upload photos of their travel experiences, views and advice on travel destinations, it’s valuable content (which you likely can’t produce yourself). There is a legitimacy in it. And Google knows this. Google gave Reddit a big boost, even most consider Reddit a poor-quality forum composed entirely of disgrunted-user-generated content. Reddit represents an idea, that questions and answers can be valuable.
They can be, but on your travel website.
Consider that Airbnb, Expedia, Tripadvisor and most major travel sites leverage user-generated content in the name of reviews. And even negative reviews can spawn lengthy responses of “defenders” who are happy to counter with their thoughts.
A Reason to Get your Visitors Emotionally Involved in your Website
Consider the real thoughts of real travelers, such as “is Costa Rica worth visiting anymore?”
After reading travel reviews, they’re more emotionally involved and their real travel intent can be accessed by you.
Even your freelance content creators can’t deliver the detail and perspectives they can. There is a certain credibility and authoritativeness that real travelers have and Google may favor their input. Consider the effect of local Google business reviews for instance. If UGC can help validate your brand and travel packages, you might generate more bookings.
User-involvement on your site makes it look important. And when you don’t invite this engagement, it estranges you from your audience. Opening up to user-generated content might be the beginning of innovation in your digital travel marketing. It could boost your failing SEO strategy too.
Let’s take a further exploration into this amazing opportunity.
What Does UGC Content do for Your Travel Business?
✓ engages current customers and arriving newcomers and reduces bounce rates.
✓ supports the credibility of your service and travel packages.
✓ creates authoritative content that Google trusts.
✓ gives you leads for interviews, research, and further engagement with contributors.
✓ creates fresh content to keep Googlebot coming back and to keep customers more engaged with your brand.
✓ raise keyword diversity allowing you to rank for more phrases for more relevant traffic.
✓ UGC content often finds its way to social media sites as well.
Leveraging the Full Benefits of UGC
To reap the benefits of UGC produced contribution, we need SEO strategy, customer experience strategy plus content strategy. Content without support and an overall plan won’t succeed.
Search is highly question-focused now with emphasis on natural language. UGC is often focused on such questions and answers by actual customers.
How Do We Get This UGC Thing Started?
Okay, the benefits seem to be in place, and we only need to begin the plan and implementation of it.
Implementation Plan:
Phase 1: Planning and Setup
Purpose: Define how UGC will support your SEO and branding strategy.
- Define key pages for UGC integration (e.g., product pages, blog, forum, social media feeds).
Develop guidelines for UGC (quality, types, permissions). - Define your messages to attract the users and engagement you actually want.
- Set up tracking for UGC metrics (e.g., engagement rates, traffic from UGC pages).
Phase 2: Enable High Quality UGC Content Generation and Curation
- Encourage visitors to engage on your blogs, asking for feedback, personal experiences etc. but noting that all contributions are expected to be honest, original, and positive. Make others unwelcome.
- Launch UGC campaigns on social media with incentives for sharing experiences.
- Embed review widgets and social media feeds on high-traffic pages.
- Regularly update content galleries and monitor social tags for new, relevant content.
Phase 3: UGC Optimization and Monitoring
- Analyze keyword variations from UGC to optimize for long-tail search.
- Monitor engagement, bounce rates, and traffic on UGC pages for continuous improvement.
- add links to your own relevant content pieces.
Phase 4: Evaluation and Adjustment
- Conduct monthly audits on UGC contributions to assess quality and SEO impact.
- Adjust campaigns based on analytics insights, and refresh content in galleries and feeds as needed.
All of your UGC content must belong to your company once it’s placed whether photos, video or text. And it must be moderated, given bad actors will try to set you up for something negative and harmful to your brand. Your marketing manager or content strategist will need to be alert to “keep it clean” and positive.
Summary About UGC for Travel Websites
Your new UGC strategy opens you up to a group of brand fans and content contributors. It lets you scale up your content for SEO purposes, but also to deeper discussions of destinations, venues, journeys, challenges, insights, and adventures. Your content and your website get a legitimacy/brand boost and become a place for travelers to return to.
Don’t let all your traffic and customers be drawn to Expedia, Travelocity, TourRadar, TripAdvisor, Airbnb, and other competitors. Make your customers crave your personalized, humanized travel experiences with a real presence by letting them speak.
Find out more about building a healthy travel company, modernizing your travel business, and how to grow your travel business. Growth is good for your customer loyalty, revenue and profitability.
Contact me at 416 9998 6246 to discuss how I can help your travel business grow.
