As an independent travel advisor, you might feel pressure to spend big bucks on marketing to attract business opportunities. We’re here to dispel that myth and show you how to utilize the free and existing resources available to build your travel business. With the abundance of free content from your travels, suppliers, and host agency, you can create compelling marketing stories without breaking the bank. Let’s explore how you can harness the power of free content and optimize your marketing efforts.
Free Content is Everywhere
In today’s digital age, free content is everywhere. From blogs and online news sources to newsletters and digital guides to social media, there’s so much content you could say there’s too much! The key to building your content strategy lies in knowing where to find good content and how to utilize it strategically to make yourself a valuable source of information for your clients. Embrace the resources at your fingertips and tap into these sources.
1. Supplier Toolkits/Marketing Websites
Most suppliers have a plethora of content for you to use to send to clients, including emails about their product and brand, flyers about specific destinations or promotions, plus recommended social posts. You can usually find it on the booking site or another website that the supplier hosts.
Supplier content is excellent content to pull from if you’re putting a group together for a specific destination or just really like a brand and want to utilize its content for email, social channels, and even your website. Another great tip is to follow a few Business Development Managers (BDMs) of brands you’re fond of on social media so you can reshare their posts to your travel business social channels.
2. Your Host Agency or its Consortium
Your host agency or your agency’s consortium is a great source of travel content. For example, Levarté Travel’s consortium, TravelSavers, offers our members a lot of ready-to-share content, including exclusive digital campaigns each month that include a landing page, email templates, and social posts. Plus, they have a tool that houses tons of pre-made social posts and videos from suppliers that you can post directly to your social channels or download the creative to make your post. And if that isn’t enough, you can sign up for brochures to mail to your clients. You do have to sign up for the direct mail program, but it’s excellent content that reaches your clients at home.
3. Industry Associations
At Levarté Travel, we encourage our travel agent members to join and follow industry associations, including CLIA, ASTA, IATA, and more. These associations stay on top of the travel industry and are a great resource to help you keep your clients informed of the changing travel market. From articles on new cruise ships coming out to the “must know before you go” tips when traveling to a particular destination, travel industry associations rock. Use them to help you easily create content and be the expert you are as the CEO of your travel business.
4. Client Trips and Your Trips
The most authentic way to capture a vacation or experience is by utilizing people who have done it, including yourself. As a best practice, interview your client after their trip and ask if you can record it or use what they say in an upcoming blog or social post. Also, ask for a review; the 5-star ones are great to share as a social post or a listing on your company website. In addition to your clients’ trips, we know that if you are a travel agent, you love travel. From your weekend getaways to your month-long adventures, take plenty of pictures and videos and write recaps each day so you can turn that content into your next marketing campaign to entice your clients to start planning their own trip.
Put Your Content to Work
Now that you know where to find FREE content for your travel business, your next step is to create a plan to use it. Having a well thought-out plan for your content strategy ensures your clients get consistently creative and informative content that will make them want to do business with you. Even the Levarté Travel team relies on content calendars to stay ahead of our monthly priorities and keep us on track to produce great content for our members! For example, this blog was part of the September marketing campaign around travel content.
Outlining a monthly campaign doesn’t take more than 30 minutes.
As a reference, below is a start to a 3-month theme calendar just for you.
• January: All about cruising – source content from different cruise companies and promote the joys of cruising all month long. If you know you have a lot of foodie clients on your mailing list, you could compare their restaurants on board.
• February: Pull information from a variety of tour companies, like Globus Family of Brands or Collette, and compare their Ireland tours. You have north and south, and explain to your clients why it is worth doing both!
• March: Talk about River Cruising! Compare a few river cruise brands and their ships. Explain to your clients why river cruising is the new way to see the world. Outline what their experience will be like and get them to book!
So, start outlining your next content campaign today to help you add more prospects to your list and get more client bookings!