Blogs are Your Most Affordable and Powerful Marketing Tool

Expedia, Booking.com, TourRadar, Hotels.com or Travelocity do spend time to improve engagement and interaction with travel customers. They blog. And that translates to more inquiries, brand awareness, bookings and upsells — not to mention improved customer loyalty.

Let’s get right to the point that blogging is your most important (affordable and cost-efficient) marketing tool. Your travel blog brings trust/impact to ppc ad and social media generated visits.  It helps establish current relevance and a single powerful voice to establish your brand’s value. Consumers buy your brand.

Your branded travel blog helps you connect with customers emotionally through the exact topics, words and perspectives they want.  Blogs match your brand/experience/offer to their real intent and create a pre-trip shopping experience that results in bookings. That is powerful and continuously productive.

In fact, research shows old blog posts produce the highest volume of leads and revenue lift. Just like wine, time seems to make them richer, more savory and authentic.

Advertising and Blogging: A Powerful DUO

Yes, Google, Instagram and Facebook ads, product landing pages, social media posts and travel videos have their place. Advertising by itself, not integrated by authentic, relevant content doesn’t jibe with today’s savvy travelers who can smell something fishy right away. If authentic travel experiences is what they’re pursuing, then authentic, satisfying blog content seems to fit the bill.

In visiting your blog, travelers are opening their hearts and minds to your vision of the travel experience. It’s a privelege to have this opportunity to awaken them to a life-enhancing journey. Your blog posts can help them get over their inhibitions and worries and bolster their intent to book that trip. Our goal is to capture their travel intent and weave a vision of fulfillment, purpose and confidence — paving their path to personal satisfaction.

Freed from the Doghouse

Unfortunately, many blogs are kept caged in the doghouse and never allowed to reach their full traffic-building, engaging potential and revenue-generating power. And most are starved of financing, creative content expertise, and design support. It’s a miracle that they perform at all.

With billions of travel searches every year, you can carve out a good share of visibility and traffic, and let the blog present your travel company as the most compelling, enjoyable, and achieve an “only agency for me” status.

Why a Blog is Essential for Your Travel Company

  1. Builds Management/Staff Esteem
    Gives you and your staff an emotional lift that your company is continuously and widely visible, with the optimism that you’re leveraging a powerful tool to give the rest of your business a big boost.
  2. Showcases Expertise and Builds Trust
    A well-maintained blog positions a travel company as an authority in the industry. Sharing destination guides, travel tips, and curated itineraries demonstrates expertise, making customers trust the brand for their travel needs.
  3. Boosts SEO and Online Visibility
    Blogs are crucial for improving search engine rankings. By targeting long-tail keywords related to travel destinations, activities, and customer questions, blogs drive organic traffic to the website, attracting potential customers who are actively searching for travel information.
  4. Supports Content Marketing Strategy
    Blog content is versatile. It can be repurposed into social media posts, email newsletters, or videos, providing ongoing value across multiple platforms while keeping the brand top-of-mind.
  5. Encourages Engagement and Social Sharing
    Blogs spark conversations and interactions. Readers often comment, share posts, or ask questions, amplifying the reach of the content and fostering a community around the brand.
  6. Drives Lead Generation
    Through call-to-actions (CTAs), travel blogs can encourage readers to download guides, sign up for newsletters, or book consultations, converting casual readers into leads and customers.

What Makes Blogs Compelling for Travel Consumers?

  1. Storytelling and Inspiration
    Blogs tell stories that resonate emotionally. Travelers are inspired by vivid descriptions of destinations, personal anecdotes, and unique experiences that make them dream about their next adventure.
  2. Rich, Visual Content
    Travel blogs often include captivating photos, illustrations, imagery, maps, and videos that immerse readers in the destination, helping them visualize the experience and build excitement through their senses.
  3. Detailed, Practical Information
    Consumers value actionable insights, such as packing tips, travel itineraries, travel documentation/visas, budgeting advice, and cultural etiquette. Blogs answer their specific questions, reducing uncertainty and freeing up their intent to commit to a trip.
  4. Authenticity and Personal Connection
    Blogs often have a personal tone, reflecting real experiences and insights. This authenticity fosters a sense of connection with the writer and the brand, making it more relatable than generic marketing materials.
  5. Interactive Exploration
    Blogs allow readers to explore destinations virtually before committing. Hyperlinks to related articles, videos, or interactive maps let them dive deeper into topics of interest.

Traveler’s Garden of Engagement

Your blog can be a veritable garden of engagement where they explore all of their travel desires and resolve their fears and doubts. Because that is what they pre-trip online experience is all about.  They’re solving their personal issues such as relevance, affordability, and enjoyment. They’re trying to convince themselves of their urge to travel somewhere.

A travel blog helps them surmount these hangups and fears, to open their minds to the full value of a trip. Your blogs helps them create their story of travel bliss filling gaps and hurdles with every touchpoint with your blog. The path to traveler fulfillment is not a sales transaction funnel — it’s a flow of intense emotions that helps them overcome anything to achieve the personal rewards of their next trip/vacation.

Build it and They Will Come?

Before your blog can achieve success, it must present great content. Development plus SEO means it might take time, after all, you’re competing with other blogs/OTA’s that have gone through this process already. Trends happen and there are opportunities to overtake their ranking.

We can build your travel blog quietly to fully cover key traveler topics of interest and promote key elements of your value proposition. And, this is important, we can develop your blogging strategy and content and engagement tactics to align perfectly with transactional and sales promotions. So when granular treatments such as booking issues, traveler documentation, itinerary issues, and other micro travel information is a priority, they can be communicated more confidently since you’ve got the big picture covered.

Because if the traveler doesn’t believe in your company, transactional type issues won’t be important. They’re going to leave your site anyway and get the information from another OTA they feel is a credible brand.

When you solve the traveler’s big picture needs, the details will work themselves out (a visit with travel agents, CSRs, AI Chatbot, or help pages).

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 their lack of personal engagement is a massive opportunity for you to swipe them away from Expedia and the other travel marketplaces.  Big travel sites lack intimacy, warmth, authenticity, significance or the glue of real human connectivity. The brand strangles connecting at a warm, human level. It’s just one point to make about how your company can compete with the big monopolies.

And some small blogs often become major presences in the travel market. Nomadicmatt.com is one of them. Starting out humbly, it draws 10,000 visitors daily. This is all through a niche focus on budget travel, delivering trusted advice, and relating real-life experiences and comprehensive guides, while using SEO to build traffic. That’s the essence of earned media.

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 our confidence, audacity and creative imagination will bring tremendous results in promotiona and sales.

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 — all part of your winning content strategy.  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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