Mapping Out a Path to Market Your Skills
Who cares about progressive travel marketing skills today? Travel business clients might appreciate outstanding skills they can leverage to achieve their marketing goals.
Can one skilled, versatile marketer make a difference? You have to believe you can.
Our big challenge for marketing our skills might be problem definition. Just what are we trying to solve? Is it skills, company fit, appeal, value, performance, relevance, or inspiration? What is the package of marketing skills and benefits we need to present? What is it they really need us to be?
When the Bar is Set Really High, Find Something to Leverage
When you take a roll call of the travel marketing skills needed for 2025 and beyond, you might get depressed or anxious. Reading job descriptions only confuses. They’re a grab bag of poorly conceived, hard-to-achieve performance task-skills and you might not ever have the time to develop them.
It’s hard to think of skills alone as inspiring. Because travel managers are looking for that something special, a flair, expertise and dedication where they feel well supported and you’re creating special value that lifts their brand and generates leads
Developing your skills as a package is overwhelming and a serious challenge for everyone — because people give up. You’re left lost in a forest in a state of paralysis without a strategy.
A top issue with drawing and developing great talent, is that there are so few managers who can bring this together. It’s a bunch of people with big demands, but having a weak plan or strategy to solve the challenges discussed below.
Nevertheless, from our angle, we need to define the problem and then build our unbeatable value proposition. As in any marketing quest, the final goal is to be “the only marketer for them.” That’s where real confidence in you resides. Competition and comparison will erode even the best value proposition. You need to delete the competition.
It’s this singular significance of being the only marketer fro them which dissolves competitors into thin air. And that’s more important than beating them on skills we’re about to discuss below.
What is the Problem?
How to position my UVP, skill base, desire, experience and goals to be relevant to their ongoing ______________ challenge and more significant than other marketers.
The Solution:
I provide essential ________________________ for a travel company to help build their marketing power to capture visibility in their target market, engage customers, keep the business continuously viable, and improve marketing performance for long-term value.
Artificial Intelligence Might Help, but It Won’t Solve the Problem
Travel company CEOs know their niche markets and have a command of selling on the Internet. Some are avoiding the human talent challenge by looking to use AI and hand the challenge over to the AI bots – from travel package selling and customer service to content creation and marketing.
However, travel is moving increasingly towards high human touch engagement. Bots don’t do that stuff well. So while AI-assisted apps can help, they just automate the micromanagement transactions. You still need human talent to serve travelers. Therefore, your human connection to customers is the part that AI can’t replicate — although it tries to fake it.
Your unique personality and character can be very effective in marketing roles.
Because travel could be lonely and alienating for even the most composed traveler. As marketers, we’re selling the joy of travel, but also being a companion so they will enjoy it.
Knowing this, I am redesigning myself in the face of this difficult reality now to hopefully become a competent travel marketer. I’m aware of this being a tough challenge in a new industry — and to remain relevant in the world of hype. If you’re going through this too, let’s try and work our way through it.
In this post I’d like to list, explore and discuss some of the essential human talent skills needed in modern digital travel marketing. Because travel companies need not only skills, they need someone to help them with this difficult challenge of acquiring talent and fitting them into their current unique travel business opportunity, and in future.
Given the threat and opportunity of Generative AI, changing internet usage, travel preferences, new technology, demographics, and up against mega-corporate competition, we need to build a quiet, stable place for ourselves to see clearly, then build the best skills possible.
And if you’re a travel agency manager, which skills and talent are the best to hire? That depends on what your goals are and what your weaknesses are now.
If you have weak customer traffic, you’ll need more PPC, SEO, and promotion work to build traffic. For an agency with good customer flow, you might emphasize visitor conversion, loyalty and revenue growth. If you want to grow, new improved text and video content can enrich your brand experience, build relevance and significance, and help to spread the word to draw more customers.
So let’s get into the skills topic by reviewing the top skills required now:
1. Content Creation (Text/Visual)
Why Travel Content Creators? Travel writing is a common and powerful way to connect with travelers. Writers must understand the travel company’s brand, audience, and how to becoming compelling via articles and photos (and video too). The text content appears in social campaigns, blogs, industry articles, and often brings together the full travel value proposition. Creative imagination and actual experience and expertise in location is vital, which is why nomad travel writers are in such demand. However, travel content is now mundane and often a turnoff for some travelers so a content creator must craft beautifully and strategically designed content pieces that fit the big picture with the right tone of voice and style.
Key Skills: Strong understanding of audience desire, purpose, and fears, and of travel destinations and the real value they offer. A strong colorful communication style that connects with the audience. A willingness and ability to travel to cities/countries to develop a powerful portfolio that creates an authentic voice, that beats generative AI content solutions.
The Deliverable: text, images and video content for booking pages and blogs that engage and persuade.
2. Performance Marketing (PPC and Paid Social)
Why Pay Per Click Advertising Matters: Travel companies spend much more now on PPC ads. Duet to the cost and the targeting power of ads, they’re using ad optimization platforms to drive conversions through paid channels. They’re calling it performance marketing. For smaller travel companies, the challenge is greater if such programs are costly. It’s all highly reliant on analytics and conversion rate optimization. Mastering Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and other ad platforms is critical. The key is to not become a “technician or coder” but instead, find software/platforms that can do that work for you which have the conversion analytics insights.
Key skills: Expertise in Google Ads, Facebook Ads, programmatic advertising, ROI optimization, and managing multi-channel paid campaigns. Certification in Google Ads or Meta Blueprint could help your credibility.
The Deliverable: Design and execution of paid media ad campaigns that build reach to the very best customer prospects, and expose the travel company’s winning value proposition via ads and landing page design.
3. Customer Loyalty Marketing
Why Customer Loyalty Matters: A bird in hand. With rising acquisition costs, companies are focusing more on retaining customers and building LTV. Travel brands need marketers who understand how to engage subscribers/customers to prime them for future trips. Lifetime value is critically important thus the company’s loyalty program is all about brand building, continuous promotion, and presenting a picture of unbeatable value that marks their “only one for me travel brand.”
Key skills: CRM management, loyalty program design, lifecycle marketing, email marketing (e.g., Klaviyo, Mailchimp), and automation software use.
The Deliverable: Building strategic content to stay top of mind and reaffirm the value of your travel product/service and helping to make their loyalty program the best it can be.
4. SEO and Blogging
Why Travel SEO/Blogging Matters: Online content represents all aspects of a real world travel company — digitized for online customers. For decades now, creating interesting, engaging, impactful content is essential for connecting travelers to your travel brand. Content reaches travelers in their world right now, and transports them to where they want to go wrapped in an experience that captures their imagination. You’re trying to win the war for their imagination, change traveler perspectives, to become their best travel friend forever.
Key skills: Google business optimization, keyword research, outreach, promotion, and content generation which others are eager to share online help build ranking power and your reputation with Google.
The Deliverable: A blog with posts on the most relevant, current topics of interest to customers, and content that is consistent with their buying intent, which engages them, can rank high and wide on Google for maximum relevant traffic. Blogging produces more traffic than any other source.
5. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Why CRO matters: Improving website conversion rates directly impacts revenue. CRO specialists are in demand to optimize landing pages, booking flows, and calls-to-action. Of course, conversion begins with first contact through to post-purchase anxiety. It’s more than just what they do on the purchase page.
Key skills: A/B testing, user experience (UX) design, website heatmaps, and familiarity with tools like Optimizely, Adobe Experience Cloud, or Google Optimize.
The Deliverable: Assisting and being a part of the sales conversion team, by helping them understand what the content touchpoints are and how the content pieces move the customer along with sales funnel.
6. Video Content Creation and Marketing
Why it matters: Video is a powerful medium with impressive reach and conversion powers. Travel brands are investing in video to showcase destinations, interesting experiences, and their own brand and value proposition. It requires creative imagination to develop entertaining and compelling videos for specific audiences and video production skills to optimize it for YouTube and social platforms.
Key skills: Ideas, storyboarding, scriptwriting, video production and editing, YouTube SEO and social video strategy (Instagram Reels, TikTok).
The Deliverable: Helping the video producer with scripts, ideas, and some video and integrating it strategically with blog and social media content strategy.
7. Travel Influencer Marketing Management
Why it Influencer management matters: Influencers in the travel segment have significant reach and influence on travel decisions. Managing influencer partnerships and campaigns that drive measurable results is a high-value skill in the current market.
Key skills: Influencer research, identification and outreach, contract negotiation, content approval processes, and performance tracking.
The Deliverable: Finding the right travel influencers, communicating with them, and providing the ideas, content, news, to make it easy for them to talk about your company.
8. Email Marketing Automation
Why email still matters: Email remains the number on medium to communicate with customers and for nurturing leads, keeping top of mind and driving bookings. Good automation tools that personalize and segment email campaigns can generate high ROI.
Key skills: Proficiency with email marketing platforms like HubSpot, Mailchimp, or ActiveCampaign, segmentation strategies, and drip campaign development.
The Deliverable: Conducting email campaigns or helping the sales team create more compelling email that resonate with the company’s value proposition with fresh content that keeps them engaged and loyal.
Packaging Travel Marketing Skills
In researching travel companies, there is the issue of:
- having enough skills to make it viable for you to join them
- how long it will take to get you up to performance level
- your knowledge of or sympatico with their target audience
- small-mindedness about their business’s potential
- demonstrating real strategic skills to create performance
- demonstrating creative skill and talent
- possessing the specific skills they need for their challenges
- delivering high enough level competencies to help achieve success and performance
- offering enough versatility to fill the gaps and team role required
- possessing actual travel experience to master the knowledge of the travel experience they sell and present added value
- whether they can or will develop you to be a big asset for them
- your capacity, time, energy and resourcefulness to build these skills and maintain them
What is the Best Path to Superior Marketing Skills?
Planning and strategy: It begins with the desire to learn and improve, to understand the market — to see the big picture.
Then quietly assemble your assets, skills, interests and potential to visualize a path to a role you’ll love.
It means packaging your skills and then promoting them strongly to the right audience (via your research).
Of course, you don’t know where you’re going really. It’s blind ambition and faith that it’s going to be great — like taking a hike in Yosemite Park. The real success always arrives unexpectedly.
The Next Steps
Next, is impressing and building your connection with travel company CEOs (Linkedin) who have the power to hire you and invest in your professional growth. Without them, it’s just a crazy dream. In fact, they may see your development needs better than you do, but they may not understand your opportunity or potential well.
Choose an industry, sector or even demographic, and perhaps specialize in a key skill/segment that intrigues travel company owners, something which you’re strong in. Once in the role, it’s easier to afford and acquire the exact skills needed. Put your time, money and energy into one skill that could give you that edge on all the others. CEOs are impressed with outstanding skills that mark you as an expert.
What CEOs and marketing managers might be viewing is whether you know what you’re doing — to give them confidence. That’s beyond skills to awareness, strategy, and purpose.
Visualize the role you’re dreaming of — the expert, creative genius, high performer or team player, then build a path or bridge back to where you are. You might be in a spot like I’ve been where you lack the money, time, resources and confidence. The solution is to build the foundation with the skills and connections, then the path will appear.
There’s no religion required here. It’s all about faith in yourself, that you deserve a great professional working life and are willing to build it and live it.
Read more on travel agency marketing, travel management software and how you might energize your travel marketing company.
Title graphic designed by Wannapik