Hiring Smartly for a Digital Travel Marketing Role

As a travel agency owner, DMO CEO, hotel owner, tour operator or SaaS travel software entrepreneur, you’re tasked with the challenge of hiring the right marketing people.

Can a single person have real impact on a small travel company? That would depend on their skills, drive, and creativity. There are a number of reasons why a single digital marketing consultant/producer, some of which I list below.

Two key reasons that are noteworthy are that they are a single of point of contact and they’re more affordable than an agency. This means you can put more of your marketing and advertising dollars to work where they’re needed. Each phase of your travel marketing campaigns needs to be nurtured and supported. Sometimes things have to be done immediately, while others can wait until you have the assets built to make it happen.

Excellence, Passion and Advanced Skills

Flexibility, adaptability, intense advanced skill sets, passion for travel, creativity, and dedication, almost like they’re your employee really give your marketing a big boost. Dedication, free from conflicts and distractions is important as I’m sure you know. That’s why you have employees work in the office. But at the end of the day, you need talent, not an agency.

There are tens of thousands of mediocre marketers available who do best practices, lean on ChatGPT, and have limited insight into what drives travel consumers. Are they going to be driven, expert-level producers, able to contribute substantially to your business?

Inspired travel marketing specialists have a sense of intensity to find solutions, build great content, and put out messaging that’s effective. Some are pushy, demanding the commitment and resources necessary to excel. This is no small matter, since underfunding, micromanagement, and poor support are the scourge of digital marketing today. Everyone wants something for nothing. And it ruins their businesses.

If you’re an investor, and your precious funds are on the line, you’ll want to hire several of these talented marketers I’m referring to here.  Can one single provider beat corporations?  I’ve worked miracles in the past, but today doing it on the cheap without resources or talent is pretty well impossible. And it takes more than talent and drive.

One Single Dedicated Provider – Why It Could Work

For a small to mid-sized travel company like yours, efficiency, versatility, and effectiveness are a priority.  Yet effectiveness has many inputs:

• market research — uncovering opportunity for growth in traffic, visibility, and impact.
• creative content creation skills — generating and crafting of impactful, engaging, and lead-generating content.
• expertise and marketing skill — deep understanding of content strategy psychology.
• versatility — multitalented, able to understand your brand, work with designers/technical people, communicate well, and find ways to contribute to your team.
• drive, desire, ambition — the drive to be o focus the complete power of your online presence on essential goals and objectives.
• enjoyment – a desire to live the position fully when your business is successful and has the financial resources.

However, funding being what it is, and what you’ll need to invest in, you have to be ultra-efficient with staffing. This means versatility and doing more will be a priority. Leaving gaps isn’t wise.

Having one single digital marketer to create authentic engaging content, run cost-effective PPC campaigns, juice up your email campaigns, do outreach, and engage audiences via social postings, while building on a foundation of consistent, high volume, free organic traffic from Google, Bing, Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook, and Twitter is a “nice to have.”

What Could Gord Provide that Will Make a Difference for Your Travel Business?

• bringing out the value/expertise/talent of your company/brand — to Google search users, blog visitors and subscribers, FB, Instagram and YouTube users
• act as a multitalented producer — who integrates tasking and weaves the brand more effectively into content.
• helping you find the true magnetic value of your brand and compelling unique value proposition — persistence and determination to find the essence of your brand’s true value to customers.
• truly feeling the joy of travel — determined to connect and delivered to audiences in a human and authentic way.
• achieving greater online reach — connecting with travel audiences for new leads and branding.
• attracting significantly more traffic — Via Google and Bing and social media channels.
• dynamic presence to impact and engage — to make your brand relatable and personal to prospects.
• improve data collection – collecting analytics, polls, and feedback about customer profiles, tastes and behavior.
• help to make your content richer, more digestible, appealing and effective — editing, refining, and polishing to perfection.
• bring out the travel experiences, flair, and wisdom of your team — leverage and bring out their joy of travel and making them a visible, always there, trusted friend to travelers.
• finding creative angles to keep fresh views of brand via words, topics and images — continuously representing the great experiences your customers are looking for.
• social media networking and posting for timely engagement/announcements.

Hire a travel marketing specialist with broad brand awareness, advanced SEO skills and powerful content generation skills to power up traffic, impact, engagement and real leads. And really, no one is the “expert” but instead, it’s an attitude or compulsion to learn, grow and experience more to create more value. Your business is the purpose. Making money and staying in business is the real goal.

Let’s face it, all of these tasks require a wide range of skills and the willingness to do them all. And there’s greater synchronicity for marketing with single person. With one reliable pro, you have one point of contact and communication so the usual staff disconnect is missing.

And if there are any gaps, you’ve got the funds to find additional providers (e.g., photographers, YouTube video producer, promotion graphic designer and web designer, CRO expert, along with key software tools).  With growth in sales, you’ll have funds to add people and software that might give you the edge on your competition.

Outsourcing to a Provider with Potential

Introducing me, Gord Collins. If you’ve read my travel blog, you know I can explore challenges, markets and solutions very deeply. Yes, I’ve written deep books on SEO, but don’t hold that against me. I can do more than SEO and content strategy, and will find many ways to add further value. I just like to excel at whatever I do. And travel is an exciting industry I want to carve out a niche in.

You’ve got gaps and we can collaborate and create a plan to fill them.

Not only can I provide a diverse set of skills but I grow and improve quickly — building on new experiences, resources, and opportunities.  Additionally, I can work with your most talented travel writers and videographers so that their beautiful content is viewed more and is more effective whether on Youtube, Instagram, Google search or Facebook.

We all know great content isn’t enough by itself, if no one sees it. And that’s where your promotion budget comes into play. You can’t go cheap with travel promotion because it’s reaching prospects at a critically important moment.  Great content needs promotion!

If we can get your marketing mix firing on all cylinders, it’s bound to generate significant booking growth.

Take a Closer Look at My Unique Value Proposition:

• content marketing — original, authentic content pieces, promotions, strategy, messaging, building audiences and reach, and building your brand
• visibility, top of mind, brand awareness and UVP — overall strategy of building market leader positioning to build credibility, trust, customer loyalty, and continuous long-term sales
• understanding and creating reach to your target audience — researching your target audience and building the specific content they want to see and receive messages they want to hear
• continuously building a bigger flow of traffic and leads — growing your booking and rebooking revenue streams via all digital lead sources
• more reach to potential business partners — greater reach to potential suppliers and businesses who might integrate your services into their mix
• impact and engagement – content that hooks the reader with interesting angles, visuals, and ideas and engages them with the reasons they’d like to travel
• brand loyalty and repeat business – building a more focused and stronger brand value proposition that brings customers back to find new reasons to travel and buy your packages
• social media connections and promotion — connect with more travelers and gain top-of-mind awareness through postings
• build subscriptions — create your company newsletter, use it to capture leads, and highlight your travel packages
• optimize promotions — capitalizing on customer intent and lowering abandonment rate
• expert SEO strategy — advanced optimization techniques to maximize full ranking potential of your website for Google’s ranking algorithm based on user intent and engagement rather than just keywords
• offsite marketing — optimized content for outplacement on other sites (promotions/link building) and negotiation of links on other websites
• cost-effective, research-driven PPC campaigns — discovering highest converting keyword phrases, raising ad quality scores
• travel assignments — doing all this work while occasionally traveling to get better results from your specialist creator providers, building destination guides, to more authenticity, storytelling, and richer visual in your content.

With me, you have a versatile travel marketing specialist who can cost-effectively take your travel business to the levels of success you are hoping for. Find me on Linkedin.

Yes, it’s a big challenge. Yet versatility is a big strength. It solves so many challenges.

Make the decision to activate me as your travel marketing specialist, a role I would really enjoy.

Contact me 416 998 6246 and let’s talk travel marketing!