Are you in the travel business, struggling to get customers or leads? Finding it hard to promote your company as a brand in the travel arena? Social media marketing helps improve your brand identity and generates sales for travel businesses, and it can be a lot of fun while you do it. At Admarkon, we help you create a social media marketing strategy for your travel business, from scratch.
As entrepreneurs, we all understand the importance of planning and strategy. When it comes to social media marketing, strategy and planning are often not followed in organizations, big and small. Social media marketing is mostly unorganized in many businesses, with random image posts and reels about random facts and information about the company and services. This has changed over the past few months. Today, businesses understand that social media is an integral part of marketing to the people and is especially important for creating a brand identity. Creating a social media strategy is essential to succeed in the travel industry and, for that matter, in any industry. So, how do you go about it?
Define Social Media Objectives and KPIs
The first and most important task is to define your objectives and KPIs for the social media marketing campaign. What do you want to achieve from your social media marketing? Is it sales, leads, more visitors to your website, or brand awareness? This would be your objective. Your objective could be different for your specific business. The travel industry is huge and could include airline bookings, hotel bookings, honeymoon packages, tour packages, trekking, and much more. Depending on your sub-niche, your objective differs. Your objective also varies based on the size of your company. Small companies may be looking for leads and sales, while slightly larger companies may also want to create brand awareness and customer loyalty.
When creating an objective for your social media marketing campaign, be clear and specific. For example, if you want to generate sales or leads, define how many sales or leads in what time frame. This will help scope your objective and provide better reference for your key performance indicators. Your objectives should be measurable. This is important to ensure you track your progress. Data that cannot be measured is not helpful for businesses, as you won’t know if you are on a progressive track or not.
Common Social Media Marketing Objectives Include:
- Increase Brand Awareness: Branding is essential for most businesses. While small businesses and startups may focus on immediate sales and leads, there will come a time when you need to establish your business as a brand.
- Drive Traffic to Your Website: This generally means driving more sales or leads. Traffic to your website doesn’t necessarily mean sales, but it’s a lead that could convert to sales at some point. Ensure you capture information about your visitors with an enticing form for marketing your website visitors at a later stage through email marketing, notifications, etc. While some of this traffic will convert to sales, this is one of the key objectives at a later stage.
- Enhance Customer Engagement and Loyalty: Your social media account is only as good as your followers. The more followers who recommend you, the better your profile and branding. This is a common objective to maintain your social media presence and improve your standing among competitors.
- Build a Strong Community: The number of followers has been a key indicator of success for many social media influencers. The more, the better and bigger they seem to be. As a business, increasing the number of followers (genuine ones, not bot followers) will establish your company as a leader in the industry. The number of followers is also one of the key objectives in social media marketing.
Key Performance Indicators for Social Media Objectives:
- Follower growth (number of followers gained per month/week)
- Engagement rates (likes, comments, and shares on your posts)
- Click-through rates to your website
- Conversion rates (from visitors to your website or directly from social media posts)
- Sentiment analysis based on reviews
Identify Target Audience and Buyer Personas
The second phase of creating your social media strategy for travel companies involves understanding your target audience. Who are the people interested in your services? This could range from people in the age group of 18–30 looking for solo travel to destinations like Leh Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, or remote Kerala. Or they could be couples looking for safe travel destinations for a honeymoon, like Goa, Kovalam, Europe, or others. Understanding your audience helps you create the right content for them. For instance, if you are a travel company catering to businesses, your content should focus more on business travel and business hotels. Creating content on travel destinations for couples and adventure travelers will fall flat among this audience.
Choose your audience carefully. Understand their age, gender, geographic location, travel motivations, and income levels, among other factors. Be as detailed as you can.
Example: Honeymoon Travel Company
- Age group: 21–45
- Travel preference: Couple, luxury
- Travel motivation: Honeymoon
- Income levels: People earning ₹1 lakh or more per month
- Preferred platform: Instagram
- Travel location type: Beaches
- Food preferences: Vegan
Based on the above information, you can create social media content for young couples looking for a honeymoon package with vegan food preferences on Instagram, with an income level of ₹1 lakh per month who can afford a luxury hotel. You would list luxury hotels that serve vegan food in destinations like Goa, Kovalam, Lakshadweep, Pondicherry, Diu, or Varkala.
With targeted content, you have a better chance of your audience relating to your services and a higher chance of these customers engaging with your business.
Select Relevant Social Media Platforms
Selecting the right social media platform determines the success or failure of your social media marketing for your travel business. Your audience is not on LinkedIn unless you are promoting business travel, and your business travel audience may not relate to your content if you promote it on Instagram or Facebook. While these audiences may occasionally engage with unrelated platforms, the traction and chance of conversion are much lower on platforms where people don’t use them for the desired purpose.
For instance, business hotel bookings are more relatable to people in sales who travel frequently. These audiences are more common on LinkedIn. When they see your content on LinkedIn, they are more likely to click and learn more about your services or products than if they saw the same content on Instagram or Facebook, where they are not in work mode.
The same applies to people looking to travel for vacations. Your content on Instagram will relate much better to these audiences, with travel photos and itineraries, than if you post it on LinkedIn, where people are more focused on work.
Each platform serves a particular purpose:
- Instagram: Great for entertaining content. Travel photos, destination photos, reels, and activity photos perform extremely well here. This is a visual platform—more pictures, more action, more videos.
- Facebook: As the largest social media platform globally, it’s great for a combination of visual and textual content. Excellent for storytelling and community building. For travel businesses, Facebook can have a significant impact.
- YouTube Videos: A go-to place for most people looking for reviews on hotels and destinations. A great platform to promote destination-related content like “What to Do in Kodaikanal This Summer” or “10 Spots You Should Visit in Coorg.” Videos garner a lot of attention for travel businesses and can drive traffic and awareness, making it great for brand building, community building, and generating leads.
- Pinterest: Ideal for sharing inspirations, infographics, and curated information. This search engine-optimized platform will drive consistent traffic to your website.
- LinkedIn: The platform for businesses and professionals. Use LinkedIn only if your target audience is traveling for work. There’s no place for destination travel videos and fancy photos here.
The key to choosing a social media platform is understanding your target audience. Know where your target audience goes for your type of services. Pick only one or two social media platforms to share your content. Don’t overwhelm yourself by choosing five different platforms, as maintaining them will take up all your time and effort, leaving little room for your core business.
Social media marketing is also about consistency. Ensure you maintain a consistent brand presence across your selected social media platforms. Some platforms perform well with three posts a day, while others might work with just one post a week. Be consistent, in any case.
Create a Content Strategy
The next phase of social media marketing is creating a content strategy. This is different from the actual content creation but refers to planning the content types and schedule. A well-crafted social media strategy should align the content strategy with the objectives and target audience. For travel industries, we create content for destinations, which are captivating but may not always align with the users’ or audience’s interests. Some audiences want to see activities involved in certain destinations, while others are looking for leisure-related content, like pools and facilities at the hotel they plan to visit. Creating content based on audience interest is a key factor when developing a content strategy. Always align your content with the interests of your audience.
The second important element of a content strategy is the schedule. Ensure consistency in your content. Don’t schedule content randomly based on convenience. Schedule content based on the platform. For instance, LinkedIn posts should be scheduled on weekdays, and you should post content during peak visiting hours, preferably in the morning, noon, and evening—not in the middle of the night or at 10 am or 3 pm. You can post 3-4 times a day on LinkedIn. For Instagram, the rules are different. Post one reel a day or 3 posts/carousels a day with 5 stories. You can post on weekends, but reduce the number of posts during weekends. When you create a content calendar, ensure that you meet the requirements and always post as per your schedule without fail.
When creating a content strategy, ensure that you have a balance between commercial/sales content and informational/entertaining content. Keep sales content to less than 20%, and most social media specialists will recommend no more than 5%. Try to post sales-related content only once or twice a week, preferably on days when the chances of conversions are high. Avoid posting sales-related content on weekends, even though it may be tempting. We often assume that people search for vacations during weekends, but in reality, weekends are rarely spent on social media platforms. Most people spend more time on chores and with family.
When creating a content strategy and calendar, ensure a mix of content types. For Instagram, mix reels and posts. For LinkedIn, add images, carousels, and articles. For Facebook, try a mix of videos, regular posts, and long content.
Engage and Interact with Your Audience
Most social media marketing campaigns for travel companies and other profiles fail because they end their campaign with content creation. Social media marketing goes beyond content creation. Engaging with visitors on your account and similar accounts helps boost your social media profiles significantly. Social media is a platform for communication and engagement with people who have similar interests. People appreciate comments, and they appreciate responses to those comments. Ensure your audience knows you are active on your social media profiles and welcome engagement. One comment leaves an impression on your audience and encourages them to leave more comments and engage with your content. Ask questions, run polls, and encourage people to share your content and generate more content with hashtags referring to your company.
Don’t just limit your engagement to your own profile. Leave comments on similar profiles, whether they belong to competitors or others who publish related content. Be open-minded, polite, and engage naturally. Participate as much as you can, and build relationships with people. That’s the purpose of social media. The results may take time, and you may not see significant changes for months, but eventually, you will notice a bump in traffic and engagement with your content.
Whenever possible, collaborate with influencers and bloggers. Industry partners, influencers, and bloggers can change your entire social media profile with a single comment or share.
Leverage Social Media Advertising
While organic social media marketing is reliable, it is a slow but sure way to win. However, most organizations do not have the time for an organic approach. With social media advertising, you will have instant reach to a wider audience faster than with organic content. The key is to balance both. Start your paid media only when you have enough content for your audience to consume. Do not start a social media advertising campaign with just 10 posts. Ensure your profile has 100, 200, or even 500 posts before launching your advertising campaign. Balance your social media ads by spending 20% of your budget on ads and 80% on organic content. Adjust your budget over time based on your success. Some travel social media profiles are known to spend 80% of their efforts on social media advertisements. If your ROI is good with ads, there’s no reason to shy away from social media advertising.
When advertising on social media, ensure that you choose the right platform. Experiment with different content types and run retargeting campaigns to engage with audiences who have previously shown interest in your services. For travel businesses, especially those focused on leisure, Facebook and Instagram are the best ad platforms.
Analyze and Optimize Your Strategy
Your social media advertising will require constant analysis and optimization. This ensures you spend the least amount of money for maximum conversion on paid ads. But what is equally important is the optimization of organic content. Often, your strategy may not be right. The target audience may be too broad or too narrow, or the content may not resonate with them. With proper analysis, you can optimize your content to drive better traffic, conversions, and visibility. Continuous refinement of your content ensures your data is getting the attention it deserves. Optimization does not just involve the types of content but also the timing of your posts, the content format (image, long posts, videos, carousels, etc.), and engagement levels.
External factors, such as algorithmic changes on social media platforms, can also impact your strategy. What worked for weeks or months may stop working altogether. Staying updated with algorithmic changes on social media accounts is a crucial part of your social media strategy.
Implementation Timeline
An implementation timeline is important to ensure you are sticking to your plan. Define when you should finish each task and how you intend to achieve your objectives. Break the strategy into smaller, achievable tasks. An example would be:
- Week 1: Define objectives, research the target audience, and select social media platforms.
- Week 2-3: Develop content strategy, create a content calendar, and set up advertising campaigns.
- Daily Tasks: Engage with your audience, collaborate with influencers, and optimize organic content.
- Weekly Tasks: Analyze performance, refine advertising strategy, and continue community building.
- Monthly Tasks: Iterate on content, advertising, and engagement based on data-driven insights.
