Seriously Sprucing up your Website!

Do Expedia, Booking.com, TourRadar, hotels.com or Travelocity spend much time to make their websites as effective as possible?

Yes they do, because that engagement and interaction with customers on their site translates to bookings and upsells. They could do more. But here’s the problem. Most business owners are stuck on attitudes about blogs and what they can be.

Right now they have library status where minimal content is integrated. Other than links to booking widgets, there is no real cohesive visitor experience to bring the offer, value proposition and content experience together. Content needs to power the emotions that build loyalty.  Instead, on many travel website, the content/brand experience is spread across the site, or on Facebook or Instagram and it’s not cohesive.

What if your blog brought it all together into one amazing experience? Let’s explore that now.

 

Digital marketing et al has been reduced to PPC ads. There’s no way you’re going to win that battle against your market leaders.

6 Key Reasons why Blogs are the Answer:

  1. blog content is still highly regarded by Google
  2. blogs are intensely topical and their freshness attracts visitors
  3. blog content brings tremendous traffic, leads and brand awareness
  4. old blog posts rank well on Google and draw the best leads
  5. blogs can contain anything including all your social media feeds
  6. can be strongly visual activating the senses of visitors

There’s an opportunity or a gap here for you to capture a piece of the travel battlefield with your most powerful weapon — your blog. If outdated attitudes about blogging have caused you to withdraw, consider that if travel market leaders give you an opening, you should take it. While they cater to the lowest demoninator, you can present the same content in a tone that travel is exciting, personal, warm, and inviting.  It’s where you’re attracting high-quality customers, not just price-sensitive tourist ghost shoppers.

Blogs Can be a Garden of Engagement

This is where your best high-quality content gets seen, boosted, well-experienced, and fully packaged to make impact and present your brand as the only one they’ll ever want.

Engaging content, including your blog posts, builds a personal connection that differentiates your brand from the major travel platforms. That content creates a path for customers to arrive at your value proposition, and feel personal connection with them. It makes travelers feel relevant, significant, connected, with real meaning and purpose in their adventures. And if you’re hoping to capture repeat trips, these feelings are essential. Impersonal bookings don’t generate repeat sales.

And personal doesn’t mean unprofessional, cluttered or clingy. It only means you’re authentically interested in them.

Although everyone sees blog posts as simple text documents to draw big traffic from Google (they do, as I’ve written a million-visit blog post), your blog strategy should make it an engagement paradise for your visitors. As we’ll note here, there are many ways to enrich your blog and help you create more customers.

More than a Travel Catalog

With Expedia, the experience is more like a catalog shopping experience which attracts price-sensitive shoppers. They have a good selection of trips, destinations and tours but the lack of personal engagement is a massive opportunity to swipe them away from Expedia and the other travel marketplaces.

Big travel sites lack intimacy, warmth, and the glue of real human connectivity.

And when we speak of website engagement and connectivity, we’re not referring to landing pages and tour catalogs and flight choices. We’re really refering to a company blog.

Blogs best deliver the real joy of travel, and it is that emotion that drives travel sales.

Yes, big travel blogs capture a lot of traffic from Google, Facebook and other portals. But let’s not stop at traffic. Let’s walk the extra mile to build intense personal engagement that creates pre-travel joy and confidence to fully capture their intent to travel.

Take a quick look at nomadicmatt.com, one of the most well-read travel blogs. As the graphic shows, his website traffic is substantial. And his blog could be improved more with the tips below. A blog isn’t a library, it’s a key business asset driving traffic, impact, engagement and lead generation.

Travel and Leisure Magazine

Another powerful travel blog is travelandleisure which draws about 3 million clicks per month organically. They respect content and their blog, and they’re rewarded. The fact they’re one of the few is good news for you. If the big travel monopolies give you an opening, you should take it.

Travel and Leisure Blog
Screenshot courtesy of Travelandleisure.com
Travel and Leisure Fresh Blogs
Screenshot courtesy of Travelandleisure.com

What travelandlesiure shows us, is that building cohesive content for travelers is powerful and lucrative.  Which is why we need to shed outdated attitudes about blogs.  Being audacious with imagination is smart and will pay off.

A Blog is Your Most Important Engagement Device

A blog is a rich and powerful engagement device offering live connections to real travelers, real destination experiences,  tours, and more. The blog strategically brings your tours, hotels, attractions and destinations to life and creates a place where it all makes good sense. It brings your travel company, brand ambassadors, and travel products closer to travelers’ minds and hearts — for a more powerful sales effect.

Companies with weak, uninteresting, non-engaging blogs send a bad message — that “we’re a travel catalog offering discounted packages.” Weak blogs can’t generate traffic, make an emotional impact and can’t establish a connection for long term sales.

And your blog will fit in more productively with your product pages and subscription pages, by tapping into their travel intent deeper.

How to Enhance Your Travel Blog

In my previous posts, I mentioned many ways to build the bridge between travelers and your company. These are aspects I can help you develop and optimize. Yes, it is a lot of work, but you don’t have to concern yourself with that complexity. I take care of everything.

Let’s Explore steps to Build a Powerful Blog

  • acquire a writer/ travel content strategist who can engage with travelers and inspire them
  • design a new blog design and layout to make a visual impact on visitors and set a tone of appreciation of them
  • engage them in your blog posts, not in distributing them to somewhere else on your site (we want engagement)
  • create topical paths for different types of travelers
  • create topical paths for different destinations (e.g., Spain, Italy, USA, Central America)
  • create interactive tools/widgets for maps, weather, currency exchange, translation, transportation routes
  • create a mini-widget to carry packages from your catalog
  • integrate travel videos (your branded in-person videos or curated videos using stock video)
  • celebrate your authors, staff and company owners — create respect, and familiarity and make it personal and warm
  • use high-quality, relevant custom photos of destinations — visualizing the essence of the adventure
  • use two or three-column layout, with floating elements and different sidebar widgets for posts on similar topic themes — customized as much as you can
  • in the sidebar, promote your brand, an idea, or stimulate their strongest intent
  • create your own search box widget to let them find whatever it is they have on their mind (feedback on their interests)
  • present live news and travel events via a data feed
  • choose a font that’s suitable for travel and a font size that’s easy to read
  • highlight posts on “latest stories from destination” to ensure your site looks and is very fresh and current
  • create sections on visa/travel requirements, important things to know, where to go and see, what to eat, best beaches, interesting tours, planning tools, attractions, types of travel experiences, and best cities
  • create a form widget for subscriptions, with contest entry to promote signups
  • offer your own travel/destination guides customized for your audience which include emergency and safety info
  • provide links to your live web app or mobile app where you can speak directly with your customers as they travel

A talented web designer will know how to wireframe the idea and bring all of this together in a brilliant blog design. Your business deserves the best. Choose a spectacular blog that will be the talk of the travel world and nicely showcase your company and brand.

The key to outstanding travel marketing is great content that makes an impact. How you present content and offers to visitors is important.  We can do better than weak, scattered content pieces, and assemble them in an amazing blog where visitors enjoy your full brand experience.

📞 Contact Gord at 416 998 6246 for a free review of your travel website and how a new approach will make a big difference.

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