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Executive summary

For the first century of mass media, marketers had to essentially rent space on publishers pages and interrupt their content with advertising. Travel companies today are increasingly owning the media that distributes their messages and creating the content that people want to read.

Consumers want to be informed, entertained, and inspired, not sold.

While it isn’t new that travel companies and destinations are making original content to promote themselves, it is now the topic du jour among the marketing set. It makes a lot of sense for the travel industry: Consumers want to be informed, entertained and inspired, and modern content marketing builds the brand in consumers’ minds without an overt sales pitch.

This report will define the trend toward content marketing in the travel industry and show what led to its growth. It will also discuss what types of content and platforms marketers have at their disposal. Lastly, it will showcase examples of content marketing for travel brands and destinations and use those to establish actionable insights for producing and deploying original content.

Introduction

Innovative travel marketers are increasingly learning the value of storytelling and leaving the sales pitch behind. Traditional advertising, which either interrupts or exists alongside the content that people want to read and watch, is ignored more than ever — especially on the Internet. Marketers in all industries are now creating interesting, useful and entertaining stories to engage and interest consumers to start long-term relationships.

Marketing is increasingly about being the media, not just renting it.

The use of content marketing is nothing new, but it is increasingly important now that consumers have access to multiple channels for evaluating travel decisions. As long as marketers produce quality, authentic content, consumers will reward them by evangelizing for their brands.

Content Marketing in the Travel Industry: The what and why of content marketing

Content marketing means giving customers and potential customers useful content, regardless of whether they buy the company’s product. One way to distinguish content marketing from traditional advertising is that it is useful to the consumer, at least in the short term. In travel, this could be as simple as a guide to a city’s attractions and local customs, or an inspiring photo of a destination.

Today, 86 percent of business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers use some form of content marketing, according to the Content Marketing Institute.¹ It is also projected to become more important, as 55 percent of marketers expect content marketing spending to increase.

One classic early example of content marketing is the Michelin Guide,² which was originally aimed at promoting car travel by recommending hotels, and later branched off into rating restaurants that were worth a detour. The guide, which has been in print for 113 years, demonstrates the hallmarks of content marketing long before it became a buzzword in the digital age. The content is useful to the consumer, and it isn’t just about the brand. People don’t want to read about tires, but the helpful gourmet guide raises awareness of Michelin.

The travel industry is no stranger to creating original content. Airlines have provided their own magazines for decades. Hotels distribute local guides and provide a concierge for the same purpose. Local tourism boards normally produce useful brochures and visually rich content to promote the destination. Arthur Frommer, the guidebook author, even released a book-length guide³ on Belgium for Sabena, which was then the country’s national airline.

Travelers, like all consumers, are inundated with traditional corporate messaging, especially on the Internet. The traditional “outbound” style of marketing, where the brand interrupts the reader and stands in the way of doing something else, such as placing an ad in a magazine that readers must flip through to get to an article, is not terribly effective. Commercials on television, print ads, online banner ads, and even direct email campaigns are all important for raising awareness of a brand, but their returns are increasingly minimal.

Solve Media says⁴ that the response rate from banner ads is so dismal that you are more likely to scale Mount Everest than to click on one. The average web user sees 1,700 of them a day; at least those who aren’t turning the ads off completely with browser extensions that render them invisible. Also, the vast majority of clicks on banner ads are now coming from bots5, not actual leads.

According to Hubspot6, such outbound marketing efforts have a miserly 1.7% close rate. By contrast “inbound” marketing, which targets customers through permission, has a 14.6% close rate.

Inbound marketing depends on an opt-in on the customer’s part. For example, if a company produces an interesting infographic, it might require or prompt you to add your email address to an newsletter list. This constitutes inbound marketing.

Content marketing, in various forms, is a type of inbound marketing. Useful or entertaining original content gives customers a reason to get interested in a brand, follow them on social media or subscribe to an email list. Rather than stand in the way of something people want to see, content marketing is itself desirable to read or watch.

Creating useful custom content helps build relationships with the consumer. It reaches the consumer long before they even start to plan their trips. It gets them familiar with the brand or destination and hopefully appeals to them when they are ready to start planning. It isn’t the place for the hard sell.

Creating content

The original content that a destination or brand produces should match the customer that they are trying to reach.

Visuals are the new language of the digital era. The rise of Instagram and photo sharing on Facebook speak to this, as do the surfeit of photo sharing startups that have come since.

PhoCusWright’s U.S. Consumer Travel Report found⁷ that visual content, especially interactive maps, were most helpful to consumers. In a 2012 survey, 66 percent of respondents said that they use interactive maps that display lodging and attraction information for at least some trips. Traveler-submitted ratings and reviews were second, with 64 percent use.

Generally, visual content draws the customer’s gaze. To some extent, the emphasis on visual media is driven by evolving technology. Where a tiny video once took huge server and client resources, you can now watch a high-definition video on the go on a large smartphone screen. Especially for destinations, good photography and video are powerful tools for getting into a traveler’s bucket list. Travel is uniquely suited to visual media, and the industry has extensive experience in its production.

“There’s a reason why you don’t hear travel ads on the radio because it doesn’t give people that sense of place,” says Troy Thompson of Travel 2.0⁸, a management consulting group for tourism organisations. “Especially for tourism and travel, the visual aspects can’t be overlooked. People naturally start planning their trips based on what looks interesting or exciting.”

Sarah Fazendin, who advises boutique travel companies in Africa, and heads Globa.li⁹, a hotel booking platform, says that if a small operator can invest in one strategy for marketing, it should be visuals.

“Any sort of exotic destination truly is brought to life through compelling photos and video,” she says. “We rarely do media buy advertising, but always get the best possible photographers and videographers, even for a six-room safari lodge.”

Who creates content

The Content Marketing Institute finds that 53 percent of companies create their content in-house, and 44 percent employ outside contributors. It is very rare that a marketer exclusively outsources content creation, and this will likely be the norm as companies allocate great portions of marketing budgets to content. They also found that the the larger the company, the more likely they are to outsource.

Making the content yourself has its advantages, as does outsourcing. In-house creation helps ensure that you aren’t overcharged, gives you more control over production and makes it easier to think in the long term, rather than in a one-off campaign. In addition to a dedicated content creator, some firms such as hotels enlist other employees like the concierge as sources for recommendations of destinations and itineraries.

Outsourcing also has its benefits. Outside consultants might have more experience than employees. They might be hired for their resources, multimedia skills or ability to turn a project around faster. Writers and videographers that aren’t a part of your organization might also be seen as more independent and trustworthy. Some media outlets that offer sponsored content co-create the material with the client. Outside journalists are seen by many as more trustworthy than professional marketers.

An increasingly popular source for content creation is fans and loyal customers themselves. Soliciting and publishing fans’ photos, for example, encourages engagement and loyalty.

Boosting digital presence

The Internet is the main resource travelers use to discover destinations and plan trips. Google says¹⁰ that half of all travelers brainstorm their trips online before picking a destination, and that they visit 22 different sites over an average of 9.5 sessions before booking. The company also found¹¹ that 83 percent of U.S. leisure travelers and 76 percent of business travelers plan trips online. In a similar study across the pond, Webloyalty found¹² that 80.3 percent of British travelers mainly plan on their computers. SDL, which makes customer management tools, also found that globally, 85 percent of travelers are influenced¹³ by reading online reviews.

For destinations and travel providers, prominence in the search rankings are crucial for reaching potential customers long before they even begin planning.

There are no reliable tricks for gaming the search engines to get exposure. In the past, search engine optimization (SEO) techniques such as keyword stuffing were employed to put company websites higher in search queries. Google and other search engines have penalized websites for such tactics since 2011.

Search algorithms reward original content, such as blog posts, however. Blogs give corporate websites 434 percent more indexed pages, 97 percent more inbound links and 55 percent more visitors, according to ContentPlus¹⁴, a U.K.-based content marketing consultancy.

Measuring success

Content marketing is still in its infancy and companies are still in the early stages of gauging its benefits. The most popular metric for measuring content marketing success is web traffic. The Content Marketing Institute says that 62 percent use traffic to evaluate their campaigns.

Steve Rubel, the Chief Content Strategist for Edelman, the world’s largest independent public relations firm, agrees that standardization is coming for the sponsored content market.

“Twenty years ago, banner ads were all sizes and shapes and colors. Eventually the Interactive Advertising Bureau was formed, they standardized them, and it helped create a market,” Rubel says. “The same is coming for sponsored content. We will see standardized disclosure, formats and metrics. Pricing is also all over the map, and that will change as well.”

Another concern for this medium is impending regulation. Sponsored content breaks the mold of current rules and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission opened up for questions¹⁷ in September for a meeting on the “blurring of digital ads with digital content” scheduled for December.

Return on investment

When a company owns media channels and customers share the message on social networks, the marketer saves money on distribution. The return on investment for content marketing vs. other tactics is higher, but not because the investment it requires is cheap.

A 2013 study18 by Gartner, the information technology research and advisory company, found that creating and managing content accounts for 11.6 percent of digital marketing budgets. It’s share of the digital budget, which eats 2.5 percent of annual revenue on average, is second only to online advertising.

Content marketing is mainly focused on the early stages of the customer relationship. The number one goal of content marketing is customer retention and loyalty, according to the Content Marketing Institute study. But given the large share of the total marketing budget, there is also a drive to tie content to more than just soft metrics like engagement.

Putting content marketing’s less tangible benefits of engagement, trust and goodwill aside, it is also a cheaper and more reliable way to generate leads. A study¹⁹ by Kapost found that content marketing is more efficient than paid search marketing, which is believed to be to be the most cost-effective lead generation tactic²⁰. For a larger business, content marketing costs approximately $32,720 per month. After two years, the cost per lead drops to $64, which is 41 percent less than the $108 average cost per lead in paid search.

Alicianne Rand, Director of Marketing for NewsCred, which provides brands with custom content for syndication, says that linking content to revenue is difficult.

“Being able to lead-gen to the cost-per-lead and the revenue you get out of that lead is just as important. I’m not sure if a lot are measuring this, but if not they should be. But it is very difficult to make a one-to-one correlation between content and revenue,” she says.

To measure a piece of content’s effects, some marketers use a tactic called closed-loop analytics. Dottourism21 says that this tracks the customer through the process of viewing content, becoming a lead, and eventually a customer. It identifies which pages the site visitor views before buying. For instance, a hotel might use this to see what types of content a customer looks at before moving on to booking a room. The hotelier might find that a particular type of media such as video is attracting more guests than blog posts, and make better use of their time by emphasizing video content.

Content creation tips from Ross Borden, CEO of the Matador Network

Ross Borden is a self-described travel addict and CEO of Matador Network,²² a travel media outlet. For over three years, Matador has produced rich original content for destination marketing organizations (DMOs) including Fjord Norway, Canada Tourism Commission, the U.S. state of Montana and Queensland, Australia.

Borden shared some of his insights and tips for creating successful content and working with a third-party content provider such as his.

“First, do content. It’s 100 times more engaging and successful, and a much better return on investment. We’ve never had a banner-only campaign where the client has been as excited as the ones who engage in custom content.

Once you make the leap, communication is extremely important. We sit with the brand and figure out their brand objectives are up front and try to match those up with the person who creates the content and figure out how to package those goals into the content. Open communication is important too. We show the DMO a screenshot of the whole thing before it goes live in case they don’t like something about it, but the DMO needs to trust their partner and let them do their job.

Another thing that’s really important and seems obvious is that articles with DMOs should be packed with links to their partner airlines, hotels and resorts. That’s who the DMO works to produce results for. Content gives amazing opportunity to drive traffic to those partners. If you pack the content with links to the partners, you get readers when they are most engaged and inspired with the destination. If you just run banner ads on the side of the content, it is up to the person to find the hotel, do the search and somehow make it to the partner’s site. Leave it up to the reader and you are going to lose almost everyone.

Another thing that we have a rule about is absolute transparency. It must be clearly marked when we produce something for our clients or we risk losing trust of the audience. If we create amazing content, our audience will have a natural desire to see more, and they appreciate transparency when it comes from paid content.

You see a lot of instances in the entire travel industry with phony hotel reviews, brochures where everyone in the top ten paid to be in the top ten and such. We don’t do that. We just try to tell stories instead of just giving destinations an overly complimentary review. We just put journalists in a place, have them tell the story there. People see that is more authentic and they appreciate it.

We found that by partnering with influencers on the web, content is better, and they function as a separate distribution channel. We’ve got our Ambassador²³ team, for instance. These people are extremely influential, with large spheres of influence outside of Matador. They are heavily followed, always on the bleeding edge of what’s cool. They are rock stars in each of their respective worlds such as photography, conservation, sports, and activism. They give content a wider natural distribution.

With just any travel blogger, no matter how good it is, it is a throw of the dice whether someone is going to see it.”

Channels for delivering content

Content marketing has a few terms that are sometimes blurred, but there are distinctions to consider. There are channels that the brand owns, such as a company blog. Sponsored content on a third-party media site is also gaining traction. Social media is useful for distributing content, personally engaging with customers, and encouraging fans to create content for the brand.

Owned channels

The company’s own blog and branded magazines are a great way to get out the brand’s message and get potential customers familiar with the brand before they even begin to think about buying.

One of the most attractive parts of owning the media rather than just renting space in it is cost. Especially over the long-term, owning the media source saves money.

Owned media could include a blog, print media, video or interactive microsites. This is already commonplace. Airlines such as KLM²² and Copa²³ promote their services through interactive destination guides, for example. Whether you fly with them or not, the guides can still be useful.

A challenge for some companies is to resist treating content marketing like a traditional marketing campaign. Direct-mail campaigns and such can be evaluated by the number of leads generated immediately. In content marketing, more patience is needed.

“Companies need to adjust their expectations about how quickly they get results,” says Stacey Gordon of Suite Seven, a content marketing shop. “Engagement comes in the middle of the process. You create this content to engage these customers. They need to have a relationship with your brand before they say, ‘I’ve seen enough from this company and now I relate to them. They speak to me.’ It doesn’t happen right away. It takes time.”

The Kapost study mentioned above found that it takes 20 months for content marketing to reach the same efficiency of paid search of nine leads for every $1,000 spent. But after three years, as the audience for the company’s owned channel grows, the same expense generates 31 leads. The cost-per-lead also drops 80 percent after the first five months.

Consistently producing content helps maintain that relationship to the customer. For example, if interesting content attracted you to a hotel brand, you would be more likely to trust that hotel’s expertise over a mainstream media outlet.

“You picked your hotel, they got you as the type of customer that they cater to. You chose them for that purpose and build that relationship,” says Karim Meghji, Chief Product Officer and Vice President of Engineering at Buuteeq, a company that provides marketing software for hotels. “So if they offer you interesting things to do in the city, you might think, ‘Gosh maybe this hotel fits who I am,’ and listen.”

Sponsored content

One form of content marketing that is catching on is sponsored content, or paid syndication. This differs from traditional advertising because it weaves the marketing message directly into the content that readers come to a website for. In this case, the brand’s content is inserted into the news stream or social media feed, clearly marked as a marketing message.

Digital-native publishers such as AOL, Slate, Gawker and Buzzfeed are particularly keen on this type of marketing, often called advertorials or native advertising. For some sites it is the sole source of revenue. Facebook has “brand stories” and Twitter has “promoted trends.” A spot on these news sites and social platforms can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $1 million. Sometimes the marketer feeds content to the publisher directly, or participates with the publisher in making branded content, or simply sponsors a column or vertical with only arms-length involvement, much like naming on a sports stadium.

The content in this case still has to be useful to consumers, and only lightly branded. The publisher’s credibility is on the line, and some vet the content for newsworthiness. In early 2013, The Atlantic was greatly embarrassed²⁴ by a blatantly unchecked advertorial by the Church of Scientology, which came out not long before a massive investigative piece on the church in the New Yorker. This incident underscores the importance of disseminating useful content through the right channels. Publishers and advertisers must choose one another wisely to make sure that they serve the right readers instead of alienating the wrong ones. The Online Publishers Association found that 29 percent of its members report some form of reader backlash²⁵, so they are eager to prevent further incidents.

Social media

The other fast-growing channel for content marketing is social media where brands not only publish positive messages about themselves, but also earn them from fans.

Bob Offutt, a senior technology analyst at PhoCusWright, calls social engagement “earned content.” Social media sites are often used for customer feedback, but some travel marketers are using it as a source of content creation. Tourism Australia is a recognized innovator with 95 percent of its social media content sourced from fans. Reposting travelers’ photos on social platforms makes it easy to keep the stream of posts steady.

A recent survey of marketing professionals by Unisphere found that 71 percent employ social media to promote content, and it is even more prevalent in companies target younger consumers. Of those, 84 percent use Facebook and 79 percent use Twitter. Companies that wish to attract those outside of the United States should also use local social sites such as Mixi in Japan, Orkut in Brazil and Sina Weibo in China.

Examples of travel content marketing

The following is a diverse sample of content marketing by several destinations and travel companies. This is by no means a definitive or “best of” list, but merely a selection of good ones based on our conversations with experts in the field.

Owning the means of distribution

Here are a few cases of brands doing a great job of creating their own channels, building an audience, and providing a steady stream of content, or produced memorable one-off content marketing campaigns.

Southwest Airlines — Nuts About Southwest Blog

Southwest Airlines brands itself as a friendly, fun-loving airline where the staff is known to sing and tell jokes. To cement that reputation, its official blog, Nuts About Southwest<font=size=”4″>26 features airline employees and guest bloggers’ stories that relate to Southwest and its culture.

The blog publishes videos of Southwest’s “Live at 35” concerts that are held inside the cabins at 35,000 feet, employee community service and company history. Christi McNeill, the airline’s Social and Emerging Media Specialist says that the blog inspires people to think about travel and helps Southwest stay relevant with current events. However, some of the most frequently shared posts are the Flashback Fridays that feature nostalgic pictures from aviation’s previous decades such as 70s flight attendant outfits.

Another interesting thing that Southwest does is send certain customers a birthday card, simply wishing them a happy birthday with no coupons or other pushes to buy. The company says that it gets considerable positive buzz on social media from customers thanking them for the card.

Visit Philadelphia — Uwishunu

Philadelphia’s VisitPhilly.com and uwishunu.com together make up the top destination website of any large American city. The latter website, which was started in 2007, is an insider’s guide that is useful for locals as well as tourists. It publishes events and profiles on lesser-known destinations in the city several times daily. In 2012, it received 2.62 million visits, 71 percent of whom were from area locals.

“Uwishunu.com has successfully overcome the inherent challenge presented by being a blog run by a marketing organization — the potential perception challenge to the credibility and authenticity of its content — and developed a loyal audience through investing in high quality content,” says James Zale, Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp’s Vice President of Internet Strategy & Development. “GPTMC can distribute its messaging directly to consumers via a blog that reaches thousands daily, who in turn help spread the word, by sharing uwishunu.com content on their social networks.”

One of Uwishunu’s projects is Philly 10127, a series of 101 video profiles of Philadelphians presenting what they do and one thing in the city that they wish more people knew about.

Marriott Renaissance Hotels — R-Life and R-Navigator

Renaissance Hotels, an upscale hotel brand aimed at business travelers, has two well-regarded content marketing efforts.

RNavigators²⁸ is the hotel’s take on the concierge. Navigators are locals who share their granular knowledge of the destination on-site and online. Laypersons can also share their local street wisdom on social platforms with the hashtag #RDiscovery.

“Renaissance Hotels guests are Discoverers,” says Tricia Tumlinson, a spokesperson for Marriott. “They are naturally curious and they see business travel as an opportunity to explore the world. So, our mission as a brand is to help our guests to ‘live life to discover’ with every stay at Renaissance.”

Renaissance also hosts R-Life LIVE, an on-property music and entertainment platform that draws locals as well as guests.

Swissôtel Hotels & Resorts — The Ultimate Guide to Worldwide Etiquette

 

The hotel chain got thousands of Facebook likes for its simple, cleanly designed guide to etiquette²⁹ in 29 countries. The guide was very bare-bones, only covering essential differences in gestures when to tip, how to greet and how to toast. All of it could have been found on Wikipedia easily, but the packaging was superb, and with minimal branding.

National quirks are inherently interesting and they make one long to travel. Knowing that the American “OK” sign is extremely vulgar in Brazil is very useful and entertaining to the reader.

Matador Network — Big In The ‘Stans

 

Matador Network produced a web video series³⁰ following the Kabul, Afghanistan-based expatriate rock band White City around Central Asia. The series follows the band around one of the least-traveled parts of the globe as they remark on cultural differences between former Soviet Republics.

The musicians’ personalities and the fascinating nature of hard rock and partying amidst a fractured political climate and a bribe-hungry police provided a different perspective for a travelogue in an obscure region. The self-shot video is grainy, but unique.

Visit Britain — GREAT

In the wake of the 2012 Olympic tourism boom, Visit Britain ramped up its efforts in content marketing to attract tourists.

In addition to advertorials in Yahoo and Time Out, and more frequent social media engagement, Visit Britain made a concerted push for original web videos. Its dedicated video site, VisitBritain.tv³¹, has 971 short, professionally produced videos to inform travelers of the country’s attractions.

It also recently launched a responsive, mobile-friendly website called Lovewall³² to feature information, maps, and fans’ images of British destinations.

Morgans Hotel Group — #lifeofhudson And #mondrianmuse

Morgans Hotel Group, which operates the Delano, Mondrian, Royalton and Hudson hotels, positions itself as a stylish jet-setting brand. It’s website, Back of House³³, features a variety of original content that associate the brand with fashion and design.

During New York Fashion Week in September, the company invited popular fashion bloggers to stay in their New York hotels and document their stay on social media. The posts on Back of House were useful because readers were able to see what fashion bloggers do when they visit the city and it also helped support the brand’s creative image.

Every week, Back of House publishes fans’ instagram photos. Stylish photos tagged with @mondrianhotels and #MondrianMuse can be chosen to be placed in a gallery on the website.

Another helpful recurring content column from Morgans is the “Concierge Off Duty” posts, which feature ideal daily itineraries from the hotel operator’s concierges.

The Standard Hotel — Standard Culture & StandART

The Standard Hotel’s Standard Culture site is more like an art blog than a self-serving corporate ad. It has regular posts³⁴ on pop culture and the artsy zeitgeist as well as events in New York, LA and Miami, where its hotels are located.

For guests, the hotel has a special in-room channel called StandART³⁵, which showcases internationally acclaimed video artists’ work, curated by CreativeTime^36. The Hollywood location hosts short film festivals called “Short Shorts.”

Guests can also submit photos³⁷ of their stay for Standard Culture.

Las Vegas — How to Vegas

 

Las Vegas has fairly straightforward content on its website with an interactive map of the city’s attractions. The city uses its web page to promote its lesser-known niche destinations such as suggested itineraries for gay visitors, country music fans, and extreme sports. The “How to Vegas”³⁸ section has suggestions for those various types of traveler for different times of day that you can rearrange like a slot machine.

The city also has other planning tools³⁹ such as an interactive map.

In 2012, Virgin Airlines upped the content marketing ante with a half-hour long romantic comedy. The story about two people that meet on a plane is entertaining and it showcases some of Virgin’s unique features such as seat-to-seat instant messaging.

The short movie, Departure Date⁴⁰ stars Ben Feldman, Janeane Garafalo and Luis Guzman, and was directed by Kate Coiro. It was filmed on real Virgin flights to Sydney, Los Angeles, Dallas-Ft. Worth and London.

Real-time help from real people

Many brands and destinations are using personal brands of thought leaders and influencers to reach consumers. Some are celebrities, others are just everyday people. Some are reinventing the personal touch of the concierge and providing help and support for travelers over social networks.

Disney — Moms Panel

 

Families that are planning or considering a Disney vacation can ask questions from Disney’s “Moms Panel.”⁴¹ These Q&As can take away some uncertainty about the trip and make it easier to decide to go to a Disney park.

“If I’m in Ohio and I’m taking my four kids to Disney World every 10 years, dropping $15,000 there, I have some questions that need to be answered,” says Troy Thompson of Travel 2.0. If you really want me to come there you have to come up with some certainty gaps with specific help. Disney really understands the value of those questions for consumers.”

The “Moms” aren’t all mothers — some are men. But each has a profile describing themselves, their families, and their feelings about Disney.

Disney Interactive Moms and Family also operates a family of news websites with various types of content for parents, most of which don’t make overt sales pitches for Disney.

Thalys — Destinations Welcomers

 

When you book a journey with Thalys, which operates high-speed rail lines in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Northern France and the UK, you are treated to personal destination advice by the Welcomers.⁴² In a few cities served by the rail line, you can get personal restaurant, shopping, culture and nightlife picks from a few locals with different personalities. For example, you can follow the advice of Laurence, a “too cool mum” in Amsterdam or Phillipe, an “even tempered and arty” Bruxellois. Each Welcomer makes periodic recommendations in his or her city.

LA Tourism — Listography

 

Los Angeles, the world capital of celebrity, enlists it’s local stars to make recommendations.

In partnership with Los Angeles Magazine, whose writers interview the subjects for some of the features, LA’s tourism bureau shares famous Angelenos’ recommendations for what to do in the city. Each “Listography”⁴³ piece includes an interactive map of the star’s favorite places.

“Today’s travelers want to know where the locals go and our locals are celebrities,” says Susan Lomax of Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Bureau. “Visitors to LA want to experience what celebrities experience in LA – trendy favorites, legendary favorites and little-known favorites. And, of course, the hope is always that one might have a chance encounter with a celebrity if they visit one of these places.”

An advantage to using already-famous celebrities is that they will share the content with their many fans.

Banff Lake Louise Tourism — Banff Squirrel Ambassador

 

Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada seized an adorable Internet meme and ran with it to capitalize on the lesser-known destination’s sudden fame.

In 2009, an American couple used a shutter timer to take some shots of themselves in front of picturesque lake when a squirrel popped up and looked at the lens. They submitted it to National Geographic and it took off as an Internet meme. Banff Lake Louise Tourism turned the squirrel into the face of the park. The squirrel persona has over 14,000 followers on Twitter44, where he tweets about the park several times daily. The account tweets pictures and interacts with fans frequently.

Banff’s social media manager, who tweets for the squirrel, told Skift in a Q&A⁴⁵ that inauthentic content is easy to spot, even on Twitter.

“I think a good approach to using Twitter in tourism is to have someone at the helm who loves their product and then let them be themselves (with some guidelines, though!). People can smell if something’s not authentic-even in 140 characters … if you are tweeting to ‘XYZ Global Business’, it seems a lot less personal to me than tweeting Molly or Dave at XYZ Global. Many companies will identify who (or which animal) is doing their tweeting for them, and that makes sense to me.”

Visit Sweden: The World’s Most Democratic Twitter Handle

 

Sweden hands its Twitter account over to a new Swede every week. Compared to the mostly sanitized corporate social media streams, the uncensored results on @sweden46 have been interesting, to say the least.

Sweden selects its Twitter ambassadors from various backgrounds to present the country’s diversity. They choose curators who are good at using Twitter in English, and they are given carte blanche as long as they don’t break Swedish law, publish commercial content or post anything that endangers others. When the project began in 2011, this was the first tweet:

“Listen up, folks! I’m @kwasbeb, a regular swedish dude, and I’m taking over this goddamned account for a week! Expect bad sex and slapstick.”

Not all of the curators have been offensive, but Sonja Abrahamsson got @sweden some undesirable headlines with some baffling, controversial tweets47 about Hitler and Jews that stretched the boundaries of polite dinner conversation. But rather than cut them off, Sweden strengthened its brand of progressivism by letting it go.

“Instead of a streamlined image we present the diversity that makes Sweden what it is, says Lotta Thiringer of Visit Sweden. “As you know we had incidents where offensive content was published and the project became depicted as ‘either genius or insane’ in the media and voices were raised that Sweden was losing control over its brand in what some thought was ‘a crazy experiment,’ but we have never thought about censoring. We saw it as a democracy project, where the right to express yourself is un-contestable.”

Fan sourcing and social media

Brands can also earn content rather than make it. Destinations can leverage their visitors and residents love of the place to make great content. Brands with big fan bases are also using social media to curate information.

Marriott Australia — Teen Concierge Team

Marriott Australia’s teen concierges reach young people through social networks rather than in person. Their new initiative, This City My Way⁴⁸, hired six teenage girls between the ages of 14 and 19 to blog and Instagram destinations in their native cities for Marriott. Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Gold Coast (the locations where Marriott operates hotels) each have a teenage ambassador.

Tourists with questions about a trip to those cities are welcome to directly contact the teen concierges during the school holidays (Sept. 23 to Oct. 13) through Kik, an instant message service popular with young people.

Tourism Australia — Fan Sourcing Facebook Posts + The Best Job in the World

 

Tourism Australia is frequently cited as a content marketing leader for its creative use of social media.

Australia has the most popular destination Facebook page⁴⁹, with over 4.7 million global fans.

One of the keys to their success on several social media platforms is encouraging fans to contribute. They say that 95 percent of the content on Tourism Australia’s social media platforms is created by fans.

“The fans are the heros. They are the ones posting the pictures, they are the ones uncovering and discovering the great experiences in Australia,” says Jane Whitehead of Tourism Australia. “We just try to engage with them and let them tell the story and we try not to turn it into a commercial message.”

As in any content marketing campaign, visual content is the most inspiring and sharable. Tourism Australia is fortunate that as a destination, it offers a plethora of natural scenery, but it also distributes pictures of the country’s lesser-known attractions such as gourmet food and wine on social media.

One notable content marketing campaign that got Australia a lot of buzz was the “Best Job in the World” contest that encourages applications for incredible and well paid jobs in Australia. The job in the first campaign was caretaker at picturesque Hamilton Island in the Great Barrier Reef. The campaign instantly went viral and generated an estimated $70 million of marketing buzz for just $1 million.⁵⁰

National Car Rental Facebook Fan-Sourced Playlists

 

National Car Rental allowed its fans on Facebook to create a travel-themed playlist⁵¹ on the listening platform Songza.

Rob Connors, Assistant Vice President of Brand Marketing at National Car Rental says that the result was well suited to the company’s customer base of frequent business travelers.

“Using Facebook Insights, we saw that National’s Facebook fans had a strong affinity toward music — in fact, some of our highest performing posts were about music,” he said. “We felt that offering a playlist that was travel-friendly, mobile-accessible and included curated songs from other business pros, facilitated a connection amongst our fans around a topic that we know is a passion point.”

Carnival Cruise Lines — Moments That Matter and Moment Tracker

 

As Carnival continues to rehabilitate its image after the Triumph fire in February, it is turning to “cruiser-generated content” to emphasize the fun of cruises.

In July 2013, Carnival invited 10 active Instagrammers to take a Caribbean cruise and photograph their good times. Carnival then used these photos for a website, Moment Tracker52, which showed a minute-by-minute photo journal of the cruise through their phone lenses.

Based on this campaign, Carnival asked passengers and employees to share cruise photos on Facebook and Instagram. Of the 31,000 submissions, 500 were used in a TV ad in its “Moments that Matter” campaign, which launched in September.

“We found those looking to book a cruise are much more likely to listen to recommendations from previous cruisers. There’s a level of trust there that can’t be fabricated,” Pete Johnson of Arnold Worldwide, which developed the campaign said in a press release.

Airbnb: Hollywood and Vines

 

Airbnb, the peer-to-peer bed and breakfast provider, produced an artsy video created exclusively out of fan-produced clips. The sequences were stitched together for a 4-and-a-half minute54 commercial that ran on the Sundance Channel in September 2013. The video was filmed by hundreds of volunteers using Twitter’s Vine video app. Airbnb tweeted directions to the amatuer filmmakers.

The video is more like a celebration of the abstract notion of travel and movement than an ad. As Liz Gannes, a reporter at the tech news blog AllThingsD concluded, “the final result is more than a little quirky, and it’s definitely not an in-your-face advertisement for Airbnb. At all.”

Media partnerships

Digital media sources offer brands the chance to tell their story as content, rather than an ad. This puts the marketing message where the eyeballs already are. Some even do paid integration, a more overt and honest type of product placement.

JetBlue Getaways — Get Away With It and Buzzfeed Partnership

 

In 2012, Jet Blue created a live-streamed retro-style game show⁵⁵ called “Get Away With It” to promote its vacation packages. The show was streamed five times a day for five days. Contestants answered questions about travel to win trips from JetBlue.

The show itself is an offbeat and creative example of content marketing itself, and the airline used content marketing to promote the show. JetBlue did a partnership with Buzzfeed, an online news site that sells sponsored content exclusively, rather than banner ads. JetBlue’s posts, in typical Buzzfeed fashion, included shareable listicles such as “The Top 5 Mustaches in Game Show History” and “The 50 Most Beautiful Shots Taken Out Of Airplane Windows,” which aggregated royalty-free images from Flickr users.

American Airlines: Jimmy Kimmel Sketches

 

American Airlines gives us an example of paid integration with a sketch on Jimmy Kimmel Live, a late night comedy show. The show aired a series of overtly branded live commercial spots, starring Guillermo Rodriguez, a supporting character on the show. The skits featured American Airlines’ fully lie-flat seats and onboard Wi-Fi. Guillermo enjoys the seat enough to take one with him for a nap on the sidewalk.

“American’s partnership with ABC’s ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ is a prime example of our long standing strategy to align the American brand with relevant entertainment properties that are part of pop culture, offering a unique opportunity to reach a highly engaged and passionate audience with the product messages that are important to our customers.” said Rob Friedman, American’s Vice President of Marketing.

The spots with Guillermo were a hit online. A post⁵⁶ on American’s Facebook profile garnered 375 likes and 61 reshares.

Seven Twitter critters that define destinations through the right content marketing

by Samantha Shankman

With content marketing, every channel that creates content helps in building the brand’s reputation, and Twitter is one of the lowest hanging fruits for it.

Tourism boards can border on boring when they push out a stream of scheduled tweets that shout dates of upcoming events at followers. And it can be difficult to create one voice to define a destination that is filled with all kinds of attractions and locals.

That’s why tourism boards, museums, and travel attractions are turning their Twitter accounts over to a single clever character.

The best example of this is the Banff Squirrel, which Skift interviewed earlier in the year for insights into his social media strategies. Banff was kind enough to share the names of his friends that are also working Tweetdeck looking for potential visitors, sharing facts related to their destination or exhibit, and giving a place a voice, all in the real time.

Skift reached out to JasperThaBear for Tourism Jasper, Oisin The Deer for Warwickshire Museum Service and LASMmummy for Louisiana Art & Science Museum to see how the Twitter critters influenced a destinations’ or attractions’ social media engagement.

Although it is impossible for any destination to know the impact that their critters’ jokes have had on real-life visitor count, all agree that it’s raised awareness among potential visitors and locals.

Tara Kistler, Communications Coordinator at the Louisiana Arts and Science Museum, says a tweeting mummy on social media keeps the museum on locals’ minds.

“The LASM mummy itself has been a staple for locals to visit for nearly 50 years,” says Kistler. “The social media presence is allowing people to rediscover the mummy, and therefore it generates a great deal of curiosity and publicity.”

Below, more about how each character was chosen to take control of the Twitter handle and what they’ve done for the places they represent:

Banff Squirrel

Banff Squirrel’s rise to fame was serendipitous: It started with a walk along the lake and ended with his picture on computer screens around the world. Things have slowed down for Banff since his image went viral and he now spends his time tweeting about activities in his park and bantering with friends on Twitter. Banff’s playful engagement has motivated many other tourism boards to create a mascot.

LASM Mummy

LASM Mummy gives a voice to one of the oldest and most iconic exhibits at the Louisiana Art and Science Museum. The account’s primary goal is encouraging participation and engagement with visitors; it tweets news about Egyptian history and comments he overhears in the museum. This complements the museum’s official Twitter account @LASM, which promotes various museum programs, planetarium shows, and art exhibits.

Oisin The Deer

Oisin the Deer was chosen as the character and voice to represent the Warwickshire Museum when it launched its social media accounts in 2010. The museum can’t measure the direct impact on visitor count, but Dr. Jon Radley, Curator of Natural Sciences, says impact is indicated by the many visitors that frequently tweet photos of the real Oisin (an Irish Giant Deer Skeleton).

The museum’s team tries to stay away from dry publicity tweets and engage followers with behind-the-scenes photos, natural history factoids, and bantering with other Twitter critters.

Jasper

Jasper the Bear has been the mascot of Jasper, Canada for 65 years so it was only natural that Tourism Jasper chose his voice to run their Twitter handle starting in 2007. The consumer-driven account spreads the word on Jasper events, answers visitors’ questions, and reaches out to potential and returning visitors. The media relations team tweets about conferences and story ideas at @JasperABMedia.

Spotticus Giraffe

Spotticus Giraffe is the tweeting giraffe corpse inside the National Museum of Ireland. Spotticus is an active tweeter that sends out multiple tweets a day to talk about life inside the museum and interact with visitors. The giraffe’s sense of humor and enthusiasm on Twitter lends a friendly tone to the otherwise authoritative branding of the cultural institution.

Ralph the Otter

Ralph is the spokes-otter for the Blue Reef Aquarium in Portsmouth, UK. It actively retweets and replies to visitors, promotes museum events, and gives a voice to the real-life otters that are a main attraction at the museum. The Twitter account was started in August 2011 and now has a small following of 665 or so now.

Mr. T. Rex

Mr. T. Rex tweets from inside the Saint Louis Science Center. The account does not embrace the voice of T. Rex stuck in a museum and sticks to more formal event promotions and visitor interactions. This is shame because there is so much fun to be had as the voice of T.Rex. The account is active daily and has over 5,200 followers.

Seven key strategies for your content marketing strategy

Focus on helping the consumer, and helping them overcome uncertainty — The point of content marketing is to give the consumer help or entertainment in exchange for nothing at first. It elevates the brand and engages consumers long before they come close to a buying decision. Brands in every industry pack marketing close to the transaction, content helps build a relationship long before the trip planning stage.

For the travel industry, content can help build travel aspirations, associate the brand with the target customer demographic, and raise awareness of lesser-known aspects of a destination or service. Many travel brands and destinations have tools to help plan trips, but they also need to help ease fears and uncertainty of travel.

Leave the sales pitch for later — Consumers aren’t engaged by a constant stream of head-on marketing messages. Content is for telling a story and engaging customers as readers first. A marketer could more subtly nudge customers into the desired sale and still be helpful, however. A destination marketer, for example, could pack blog posts about trip planning with links partner airlines and hotels. This saves the reader time searching it out, but doesn’t alienate them.

“People research information online, not necessarily products and solutions,” says Jodi Dey, director of marketing at Kapost, a vendor of content marketing software. “They want valuable insights and education, not a pitch.”

Find a niche, don’t try to do everything for everyone — Whether your organization provides a service or promotes a travel destination, you have a narrow area of expertise in which you can truly help people.

“A lot of brands try to boil the ocean,” says Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute. “You need to go down into your content niche, where you can be the expert — focus on a specific type of person you are trying to have a conversation with.”

Focus your content creation around a niche that makes the most sense for your customers. Disney, for example, aims its content at families and Morgans Hotel Group focuses on design to attract aspiring fashionistas. Tailor your content to your customers’ tastes and your expertise.

Enlist influencers to make better viral content — Many of the examples of travel content marketing presented here rely on personalities. This could mean everyday people that consumers can relate to such as the Thalys Welcomers, Marriott’s teenage concierges and Sweden’s Twitter curators, or thought leaders like Morgans’ fashion bloggers or Los Angeles’ celebrity idols.

It’s best if you get the help of real influencers and experts with fans of their own. People that are already influential and well followed have an audience of their own, and material coming from them is often wider than the destination or company’s marketing department.

Post consistently — A key to successful content is volume. Content marketers, just like publishers, can’t allow a prolonged editorial lull. This goes for social media as well as blogs.

“Social media is about speed of content publishing. Consider a large-scale video production. By the time you have an approved budget and a shoot schedule it’s already too late — fans have lost interest,” according to a recent paper by General Assembly and Business Insider. “Consistent streams of ‘snackable content’ in the form of art-directed photos and eye candy, trump costly productions when it comes to turnaround time and quick wins.”

Great content marketers create quick hits like this, as well as high-quality, time-intensive content such as video.

Encourage dialogue — Travel marketers should be thinking like publishers, but the broadcast mentality — the one-way conversation from brand to consumer that has defined marketing for the past century, is outdated. Especially in the travel industry, where consumers are often ardent fans of destinations and brands, consumers can play a collaborative role in marketing. Soliciting active involvement engages customers, and encourages them to evangelize for the brand themselves. Tourism Australia sources 95% of its content from its own fans.

Asking for fan input for its driving playlist ensured that National Car Rental would recommend exactly what its customers want.

Be overt — Don’t insult your reader or customer’s intelligence. The travel industry has a history of poor disclosure of junkets, fake reviews and paid inclusion in official brochures.Content marketing in third party outlets needs to be transparently marked as such. Marketers don’t see this as negatively affecting reach or sharing. As long as you are telling stories and providing useful content that your customer can benefit from, it won’t deter readers.

Endnotes