Creativity is in the Eye of the Beholder
At some point in time, maybe now, you’re wondering about the creative appeal of your travel content pieces.
Creative expression really amps up the persuasive power of content, and there are travel publishers that put an emphasis on creative travel copywriting. They hire professional creative writers at great expense, because in essence, their creative flair and articles are engaging, immersive and persuasive. It helps sell a travel package, and a unique inimitable brand — to be “the only travel company for them.”
A post I read recently posed a great point, that (B2C) travel marketing is a branch of lifestyle content marketing. So in a sense, as a travel agency, tour company or destination organization, you are a lifestyle marketer.
At some point, all travel marketing teams have to face the challenge of weaving a wonderful travel vision for website visitors and their current travel customers. The question, with content strategy, is how exactly can we do that? If it’s done well, it helps reach customers emotionally, create a strong bond with them, and connect them fully with their travel intent. That means more bookings, revenue, and long-term business value.
Creative travel writing might seem like an unfathomable gift from the gods, but as I lay out here in this post, it can be learned. It’s particularly, important for travel marketers to have this skill to some extent. It’s a key element of the content mix.
Crafting the Beautiful Travel Experience
Travel lifestyle content tends to be easy on the selling and more indirectly focused on the actual experiences people are hoping for. It isn’t easy for a digital marketer to tone down the “sales” talk in favor of just lingering in the moment. And also, there’s the narcissistic vlogging, Instagram and Tiktok trend of travel marketers celebrating themselves instead of their audience.
By re-focusing on creativity and who the intended reader is, we can make our all-important creative content pieces more effective. If your creative pieces aren’t creating engagement, then it won’t hurt to try a different technique.
It’s Not Easy to Hit the Sweet Spot with Readers
If you’ve read a lot of travel blog posts and articles, you’ve likely read some impressive stories and adventures that kept you glued to the finish. And, there were likely other articles that tried to be creative and colorful, but failed. Oddly, still others weren’t very well written, yet they still kept you obsessed with the adventure or destination. And some were beautifully composed to melt even the strongest resistance to travel, but the visitor bounced after 30 seconds.
If your content isn’t about them, and is just about your company and your trip packages, it likely won’t be inspiring for them. Trying harder to impress them, actually pushes them further away from being the hero of their own travel dream. The fact is, travel is about the desired experiences of the customer.
Creative content should be all about creating a vivid picture that show them as the hero of their travel dream.
How Can you Portray the Ideal Travel Lifestyle Experience on your Website?
Crafting effective travel dreams for your unique audience will undoubtedly require amazing photos, illustrations, images, stories, words, and descriptions of travel experiences. It’s more like a tasty soup than a sumptuous meal.
You can’t please everyone, but what if you create specific travel articles/videos for specific traveler personas? And that could be part of several content streams for each type from Millennials with family, empty nest seniors, solo females, male adventurers, or those who savor ocean cruises. But you’ll need to adjust the tone of voice and themes to suit each one.
Specific Articles Will Turn Out to Be Your Big Producers
I’ve written several million visit blog posts — leaning heavily on information, education and SEO of course, with a flow narrative that kept readers immersed and curious to discover more. I’ve had posts see long average engagement times, over 10 minutes in some cases. The longer they read/visit the more likely a purchase will happen. And that was all by design — content topics, keywords, and information. They did contain some creative style and narrative that related to reader’s dreams. But not like you must in travel writing. Travel is much different than real estate, finance, building supplies, sporting goods, or property management, for example.
Yet, they were efficient, to the point, loaded with helpful info that people might share on social media or link to from their own blog posts. They worked well to interest thousands of people and capture backlinks (for SEO). Worked beautifully for massive Google traffic and leads!
Once established as ranking and traffic generators, these posts can be edited and refashioned for a more pleasing reading experience. And this is where creative writing skills come into play.
Creativity that Connects You to Customer’s Emotions
But info articles are very different from the immersive creative writing strategy we’re talking about here. This is more specific to a narrower audience to make a strong personal impact. We might call it “relevant creativity to attach to the emotional part of the travelers brain.” We’d refer to it as engagement.
Your analytics reports will eventually reveal which posts/videos visitors find interesting and how engaged they were with it.
So let’s leave out the SEO, information, and conversion demands of your content and drill down on what will make it compelling, entertaining, and conjure up visions in the traveler’s mind. This is a big part of advanced content strategy that speaks so well to customers.
5 Elements of a Compelling Creative Travel Article
- captivating narrative (topic theme that makes it make sense, valuable and compelling)
- emotional resonance (what makes it significant and desirable)
- authentic perspective (those personal, unique descriptions and accounts grounded in genuine experiences)
- immersive visuals (striking images in color, style, people, places and mood)
- actionable insights (key granular descriptions of events/places that give it texture and evoke thoughts of being there)
Some Guidance from the Pros!
What do professional writers say about creative travel writing?
Show, Don’t Tell: One of the most crucial rules in travel writing is to show rather than tell. Instead of simply stating facts, writers should paint a vivid picture using imagery and sensory details1. For example, rather than saying “The city was lively,” describe the crowds, sounds, and smells with emotive words to help the reader imagine it.
Use Storytelling Techniques: Employ storytelling elements like plot, character, and conflict to create a compelling narrative that keeps readers interested. If we frame your trip/package travel experiences as stories with a beginning, middle, and end, introducing characters and conflicts along the way, it’s a way of drawing them so they can picture themselves in the experience, as the hero of their travel story.
Infuse Scenes with Sensory Details: Like the great classic authors, professional travel writers stress the importance of grounding descriptions in the five senses. This approach brings your story to life for the reader. For instance, describe the aroma of coffee, the taste of ripe mango, or the feel of soft sand oozing through your toes on the beach.
Be Selective and Focus on Ideas: Selecting key highlights and memorable moments of the travel experience brings focus. Contrary to popular belief, travel writing should emphasize ideas, values and insights rather than pour out fanciful descriptions.
Create a Unique Voice: Create and use a unique writing style and tone of voice — yet thoughtfully matched to the client. Focus on an individual experience and perspective, as this is what makes your writing interesting, credible and trustworthy, and sets it apart from all the general articles online.
Use Creative Opening Techniques
Strong travel writing should hook readers from the heading and first sentence to the second paragraph. Those initial passages tell the reader whether they should keep on reading. Capture and use appropriate unique, beautiful, and impressive visuals to get them as engaged as possible. Whatever that first sentence is, it has to grab their imagination.
You might begin with a real-life story with its instant credibility boost. Use an anecdote or relevant story to warm readers up to a destination or peak an emotion. For example, talk about your shock as the bullfighter danced with a fast, athletic, charging bull at a bullfight in Spain, as the crowd roared, catching you unprepared for their love of that event. Or you might begin with the words of a very elderly local person in a village in China, and feel how lucky they are not to be bombarded by negative news and discouraging words every day from the US media. Many of your travelers want to escape the US to experience something slower and less stressful.
TourWriter’s Creative Writing Tips
Tour Writer, in their post on storytelling advises us to infuse the travel company’s brand image into the story to make them feel your brand is relevant to the journey and important to delivering the pleasant journey they hope for. This might be part of the personalization process where the brand is subtly fused with the traveler persona to make it a natural part of their trip.
They suggest rewriting passages to imagine the journey through the senses and turn ordinary events into something epic and romantic with well-chosen and vivid details. And using authentic, high-resolution photos makes your story more vividly real. Obviously, having been at the location experiencing its most compelling aspects is essential to find the right angles and fill in the granular texture of the experience.
Creative travel writers travel a lot. But does their experience in one location taint their view of the next? Or is their sudden joy in a new location a driving factor in an even more compelling article or video? Just something to think about as you plan how to generate original, compelling, and market-leading content for your valued customers. You don’t want to leave it all to your contributors. Quality control and collaboration are vital.
Do Instagram/Youtube Videos Help or Harm?
If you lack the gift of creative copywriting expression and style, a video might be a good replacement. And, Instagram and YouTube can generate a lot of visibility by themselves. There are positives and negatives. You have to consider how video complements or erodes engagement with your creative articles. Does the video make them want to read more, and move forward to view your travel trip packages? Or was their initial desire eroded, and they left?
Using Youtube or Instagram may take away the romance of the mind and heart, where visitors want to experience their own, unique, fantasized version of a destination (and not necessarily someone else’s experiences). As a travel experience seller, we’re not really promoting our own experience, but rather helping travelers create their experience in their minds. They’re the heroes of the story. And contrary to most travel videos, it has to be more than living vicariously through the videographer.
Too many travel & tourism vloggers make their videos all about themselves, presumably to build their visibility, brand and reputation. But is this the best route to increasing traveler’s own desire to take the trip? We’ve all watched hundreds of travel videos online, but what was their success rate in getting you to book a trip (conversion rate)?
Video produced to quietly support the destination, people and activities and still leave room for viewer’s own place in the unique travel experience is wise. Because travel consumers are buying their own unique experience with its mix of places, cultural activities, tastes, sights, and social activities. The interests of an adventurous Gen Z nomad solo traveler likely will not agree with the 60+ aged tourist who likes cruises, cuisine and cultural tours.
The key point other than to craft a fun, vivid and entertaining piece, is that the goal is to initiate a vision for your target traveler, and the travel dream they find so fascinating. Let’s make our creativity about them.
Discover more on travel content marketing for travel agencies, tour companies, hotels/resorts and travel management software companies.
Contact Gord at 41 6 998 6246 to discuss creative travel marketing services.
