How to Create Travel Content at Scale

Companies today are aware that the best way to reach potential customers is through content. 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers believe that content marketing is an important marketing strategy. Travel related content, in particular, can come in a variety of forms, from blog posts to social media posts and include written content as well as images, videos and audio.

Travel has begun to return and companies understand that content marketing is the best way to remain relevant. Most companies now have a firm grasp on creating some content. However, when it comes time to scale their output, these brands can struggle. So, how can they go from producing a few pieces of content per month to a dozen per week?

Let’s analyze how brands can create travel content at scale.

The primary driving force behind content at scale is personalization. Brands typically serve a few different generalized buyer personas. These buyer personas help to define the target customer, who they are, their needs and the best ways to market to them. Different forms of content are, therefore, necessary for different buyer personas. A buyer persona is also only a representative of a generalized group of people. Each of these people can relate to the buyer persona in some way, but they will also have their unique nuances and might resonate with different aspects of the same piece of content.

Also, different parts of the buyer journey require different styles and topics of content. A buyer who is only now searching for a place to stay when they travel to a foreign country, won’t be looking for the same piece of content as a buyer who’s already booked their location and is looking for fun activities to do.

Secondly, travel brands need more content to fuel social media campaigns, email newsletters and climb SEO rankings. A good content marketing strategy doesn’t just entail publishing a few articles to a blog and then hoping for the best. This content should be distributed across several different channels. Social media campaigns are built around larger pieces of content from a blog or whitepaper, and these can then be distributed through email newsletters.

The majority of customers are finding solutions to their questions by performing search engine searches with Google receiving over 3.5 billion searches per day. To account for this, brands need to make sure that they have not only enough content, but also the right pieces of content to climb the search rankings and get in the spotlight. They also need to be able to create an omnichannel experience to reach their customers in different ways.

Once you have the fundamentals in place, including your content strategy, buyer personas and customer journey map, you might want to turn your focus to the size of your content authoring team. Is it large enough to create content at scale or will they need outside help or additional staff?

For B2B and B2C brands, content creation is the most outsourced piece of their overall marketing strategy. Rather than try to complete everything in-house as part of a small team of marketers, brands enjoy much success by outsourcing. For larger companies, it can be easier to make another hire to deal with the additional demands.

Content teams also need the right tools and resources in place to help them to create more content and not be hindered in the process. A CMS platform that is easily customizable to your organization’s needs is required to create multiple pieces of content to be shared throughout.

With the right digital experience platform, your marketing team will have everything they need to create content at scale.

To successfully create content at scale, brands need to have several ideas for new content. One of the best ways to figure things out is to look to your audience for content ideas. Some of the questions you might find yourself asking are:

Once you’ve done your initial research on what your audience is talking about via social listening, you can then take action. Reach out for official statements, group online reviews together, carry out a survey to get feedback from direct sources..

Your audience will share the things that matter the most to them, or ask the questions which are troubling them the most. It’s up to you to then create the content that resonates with them and answers their questions. The brands that do this the best will not only have the benefit of tailoring their content to the right audience; they will also have the chance of going viral as happy consumers share their rich content.

To really get things moving, you can also experiment with user-generated content. Ads based on user-generated content receive 4 times higher click-through rates on average, while more 50% of consumers wish that brands would tell them what type of content to create and share.

For those unaware, user-generated content (UGC) is exactly what it sounds like; content that your audience posts online that your brand asks permission to use, or better yet, actively encourages and participates in.

For instance, you could run a competition challenging your audience to post a picture on Instagram showing them browsing your mobile application in a beautiful location while using your brand’s hashtag. The post with the most likes by the end of the month, wins a free trip.

User-generated content can also lead to finding travel influencers who can help promote your brand. Almost 80% of influencers are noticing more engagement80% of influencers are noticing more engagement than ever before in recent times. With users increasing their screen time as digital transformation continues, this is a trend that should not be overlooked.

Beyond listening and monitoring social media for ideas, you can also reach out to past or potential customers via surveys and quizzes. Depending on the size of your audience, you could produce statistical data or comment on survey respondents answers. For example, their most memorable hotel experiences or their happiest moment abroad.

Speaking directly to your target market helps you to convert more high-quality leads. It also gives you insight as to whether the content you are producing for our audience is effective. The best way to make adjustments to your content strategy is by gathering data, and your audience has the most useful data for your brand.

One piece of content should never remain as one piece of content. Videos can become podcasts and social media snippets; blog posts can become questions for social media; podcasts can become blog posts, etc.

Travel brands need to understand that creating content at scale is the way for them to stand out and get their voices heard. But, not only does the company culture about creating content need to change, but there is also a need for technical upgrades. Marketers need to be empowered at every stage of the customer journey and be able to deliver the most relevant content while creating an omnichannel experience.

Customers crave interactions with brands over many different touchpoints and across a variety of channels. However, they don’t want different experiences as they shift from channel to channel. Instead, marketers need to be able to create content that is native to each channel, yet doesn’t detract from the overall customer experience. To do this requires a CMS platform that can house content pools and allow for content to be repurposed across different channels.

There are different ways to bolster your content marketing strategy, but there’s one thing you can do that will streamline whichever strategy you adopt -centralizing your content.

If your content is spread across different systems and storage platforms, it can be hard to get a hold on your content strategy. Not to mention the difficulties around publishing that content in different formats across different channels.

When your content lives in the same place—including your blog articles, images, landing pages, and other assets—it’s far easier to relocate and repurpose old content. Plus, it also makes life that much easier for busy marketers and content authors who need easy access to all of your brand’s content.

Magnolia CMS offers web content management that is both future-proof and user-friendly. It can dynamically integrate access to all content across repositories, without the need to migrate. With this headless CMS and its marketer-friendly authoring interfaces, editors are free to control the experience, not just fill content in fields. The Magnolia Stories app, for instance, can be easily customized to suit how your editors prefer to create, curate, and distribute content.