It’s a deeply uncertain time for the tourist industry. Lockdown is with us for some time yet and while the vaccine programme offers some hope for the future, it’s difficult to predict quite when things will ease.
There is some likelihood that incoming travel from overseas will be ‘difficult’ at best, so the UK industry will spend this year looking to internal markets for custom - the challenge for those hoping to attract visitors is how to make sure that when people are making decisions later in the year, that they are the ones they choose.
The key is to stay in the minds of your audience even if they’re not actively thinking and looking for you right now. It’s something we’ve discussed before and the issue remains - what do you do to keep the engine running, ready for when you can get moving again?
So try these basics for your content marketing:
Learn from what’s worked in the past
To help you prioritise your marketing communications in the coming weeks/months, it’s not a bad lesson to work out what’s worked in the past, on your website and your social media:
If you haven’t already, make sure that you’ve got analytics installed on your website (Google Analytics as the most likely).
More than that - use them. Review what you measure (if you’ve ever measured) and look especially at the likes of referrals, visitors and demographics - and the search terms which brought them to that site in the first place.
Equally, check what works on your social platforms too. If you’re in tourism, you should have a Facebook page for your business, so check out the Facebook Insights for engagement rates, what type of posts boost engagement, what times that your UK followers are checking in and their demographics too. It’s the same with Instagram. Review the patterns of use and what content they engage around. TikTok could also turn out to be the platform to help people of all ages discover your location and the attractions on offer.
Centre the messaging around what you’ve learnt
Settling on those three social media platforms is a little presumptuous, but Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are more likely to be the key social media platforms as they are the ones that significant portions of a tourism target audience use to share their experiences. And tourism is, of course, an experiential industry. People go on holiday to make memories and these are the platforms they, statistically, use most often to share those memories.
And that is the core of your messaging and digital strategy - understanding the motivation of why people want to be tourists and therefore what messages and content they are likely to be receptive to.
The analytics above should tell you what kinds of content worked so look for what topics and approaches worked well and were liked and shared widely, and what formats worked too (prose, video, photos and the like). Repeat what’s successful and tweak what wasn’t (it might not be that people don’t like photographs, just not those photographs…).
Content strategies are great and necessary but they are always enhanced by experience and by data. So make the most of what you should already have.
Align that strategy to targets
But there’s no point in that strategy if it doesn’t deliver what you want. Content that’s designed to create ‘likes’ rather than sales isn’t going to keep you fed and watered, so make sure your messages deliver on specified goals:
What are those goals? Sales? New markets? Higher brand profile? Pick the core gains you want to make and make sure your message aligns with that.
Just as important, if not more so, is who are you aiming at? Retrieving past customers? Getting new ones? What are the demographics of your market?
From knowing your audience, you should know what platforms will reach them best. If it's social media, there’s a world of difference between, say TikTok and Facebook in terms of audience and content type, so waving your hand airily at the whole world of social media isn’t so helpful. Think too about newsletters, blogs, PR and so on.
Get that content organised
Content design and editorial strategy are different, but the processes above should go some way to take you down those roads. The next key questions are: Tone of voice is key. If you’re audience are over sixty, then the language and tone will need to be different than if you’re targeting teenagers. You don’t have to mimic the language they use, but adopt a tone that your audience will be familiar with.
And how will you organise all this? Your best bet is to find ways of organising your content into an editorial calendar on Excel or Trello, if you’re a bit fancy.
It’ll give you clarity on what you’re saying and when and with aligning it to other marketing efforts or external events - your sausage-making weekends can be marketed during National Sausage Week for instance, when people are in the mood for sausage-related content (and if you click on that link, try not to be horrified by the images on that home page).
It’ll also hammer home the imperative for getting a bank of content. ‘Just-in-time’ content production is a miserable process that no-one enjoys…
With that knowledge, you should be able to drive your content marketing such that it keeps you front of mind for potential customers and partners. So that when that day comes when people can travel once more then it’ll be you they choose.
But if that seems daunting, get in touch, there’s a variety of ways we can help you take those first steps.
