Using Branded Content for Your Travel Business

Branded content is one of the most effective marketing strategies for your travel business. It makes you more memorable to your loyalists and appealing to your prospective customers. It’s used to target a particular demographic, personalizing content so that it aligns with their values, morals, preferences, needs, and more.

So, if you’re looking to apply branded content to your travel business, your search is over. Here are the top tips the Los Angeles SEO expert, Drive Traffic Media, recommends for you!

1. Know Your Values

One of the first steps to developing a brand image is determining what your values are. This makes your business more than just selling products and services—it’s a social entity that has thoughts and opinions and contributes to society too!

They also help you come up with content for your travel business. Do you want to focus on sustainable, environmentally-friendly eco-travel? Do you want to cater your business to people who want to travel the world on a budget? Do you want to focus on more social things like meeting new communities or more cultural things like visiting historical landmarks and such?

These are things you need to understand ideally, even before you start your business venture. If you already have your values laid out, then great! You’ve already come a long way to establishing your image. If not, then don’t worry about it—you could always do your research on trends and issues in the travel industry and figure out how you can find a place there.

2. Know What Your Audience Wants

Knowing what your audience wants is an important aspect of brand marketing. However, you shouldn’t limit yourself to just surface-level knowledge. You must also research and understand why your customers want what they want—that way, you can align your content with their needs and build a long-lasting relationship with them.

For example, you’re a travel agency in Florida, and one of your most frequent customers is a mother who loves booking your Disneyworld services. Surface-level knowledge sees that she and her family must love Disneyworld with its thrilling rides, yummy food, fun characters, and more. A more thorough knowledge, on the other hand, will see the mother wanting to create magical experiences for her children, experience that childlike wonder herself, and immerse in the fantastical world of Disney.

So, what does that say? The mother must love her family and is family-oriented. She would probably love it if you started writing about kid-friendly places or activities you can do as a family. The mother must also experience feelings of nostalgia—she loves feeling like a kid again. Incorporate nostalgia into your marketing strategies or bring back travel trends that were popular in the past!

3. Know Popular Formats

There are various types of content—there are articles, images, videos, podcasts, and so much more! Some work better than others at grabbing attention, and you need to figure out which format/s work well with your customers.

For example, millennials and Gen Z-ers are known to prefer video formats, so written content is probably not going to work as well for them. In the same way, if most of your target audience is on the older side, you probably won’t want to use social media platforms like Snapchat or TikTok to share your content!

Another part of knowing what format to use is knowing when to use them. You need to make sure your content keeps up with the trends and doesn’t have any outdated mindsets. For example, many tourists nowadays refuse to ride elephants because of safety and animal abuse concerns. You don’t want to include that if your company values say you care about the environment!

4. Use Experience

COVID-19 brought in a lot of changes in the world. Quarantine restrictions made it harder for people to go outside and see the world, so the travel industry decided to bring the world to the people instead. Experiential marketing boomed during the pandemic season and is unlikely to go out of fashion soon.

As such, you should use immersive content as much as possible. This transports your customers to places all over the world in the safety of their own homes while also inspiring wanderlust.

Doing this is pretty simple. Vlogs, for example, are easy and affordable forms of content that’ll develop that insatiable need to travel in no time. Customers can see and hear what it’s like being in another place through their screens. If you’ve got the resources for it, you could also try virtual (VR) or augmented (AR) reality content.

5. Get Creative

Now, we know that producing high-quality and valuable content is very important, but that’s not going to matter much if you can’t grab people’s attention in the first place, is it? You want to bring them in with ad campaigns that are unique, quirky, and creative and then convert them into customers with your content.

So, how exactly do you do this? Well, I’m afraid we can’t tell you that because we’re not exactly sure how to do it ourselves. Content can go viral for the most inane of reasons, so all you need to do is keep experimenting until you find something that works for you. Don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and do something unexpected—this will help people remember you and listen to what you’re trying to say.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, branded content is all about understanding your customers to a tee and providing content they’ll find useful and entertaining. It applies to a multitude of things, not just your travel business! It ensures your customers are happy, satisfied, and most importantly, loyal to your brand.