ALL ABOUT YOU — BUSINESS ADVICE
MOVERS & SHAKERS
Western & Oriental Travel has appointed Karen Kundi as trade sales manager, covering Western & Oriental
Travel, Regent Holidays, Rainbow Tours and Villa Select. Previously, she has worked for Norwegian Cruise Line and Hurtigruten in similar roles.
Gemma Le Sauvage (pictured) has joined Travel Solutions as Channel Island corporate manager. Meanwhile, Alex Jones (née Burke) has been promoted to operations director, Adrian Dixon has been promoted to corporate manager and Triona Doran and Nicolle Perkins have joined the business travel team.
The Latin American Travel Association (Lata) has appointed its first full-time employee. Megan Parkinson joins
as executive manager and her responsibilities will include administrative and membership duties and event management. Previously, she worked in the voluntary role of head of the Lata Foundation events team and at Chimu Adventures.
Historic Scotland director of commercial and tourism Stephen Duncan (pictured) and Titanic Belfast chief executive Tim Husbands MBE have joined the board of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions following a recent ballot by members.
As traditional marketing methods diminish in impact, travel content marketing is increasingly important. In the fourth of our five-part cut-out-and-keep series, Melt Content’s Dan Hart focuses on the process of travel content marketing. This month, it’s time to go back and really hone your strategy.
Remember what you want
Previously, we touched on assessing your objectives – and as you get closer to delivering content, it’s vital to keep coming back to this. Repeatedly ask yourself: what is the ultimate aim of this campaign? It may be that you want to build greater brand awareness, improve search rankings, engage with customers, or simply entertain your audience and encourage social sharing. Having a clear, tangible goal ensures you never lose sight of what you are trying to achieve.
Think about how to get it
There’s always more than one way to get from A to Z. Find the approach that best fits your company, situation and budget. Let’s say you want to overhaul a Twitter feed only being used by customers to complain. What you are really looking to do is improve your social media customer engagement. Therefore, you need to get the right people and processes in place to start Twitter conversations with already-interested customers, seek their opinions and respond directly to their feedback – good or bad.
Always do your research
Many objectives will require a more methodical approach. For example, to climb the search rankings, you must work on search engine optimisation. First, identify search opportunities that coincide
44 •
travelweekly.co.uk — 16 October 2014
with customer usage and your
own objectives. Next, list all related topics
CLARIFY YOUR
CONTENT STRATEGY
and match these with what you wish to promote. Third, explore keyword opportunities that relate to the topics and match commercial opportunities. Finally, create content based on these results.
Decide on your content
Once you’ve worked out your objective and done the
research, you’ll have a clearer idea of what content you should be creating.
Take customer engagement
Advice from Dan Hart
managing director,
meltcontent.com
through social media. You may find the best way to increase engagement and create a more positive social media presence is to arrange a competition for existing and prospective customers. Your research may reveal new topics to target, and the best way to exploit this opportunity is with a search engine optimisation refresh of relevant pages, new landing pages and delivery of
supporting content in the form of blogs, videos and social media posts.
Create and place content
By now, you’ll know if you’re writing a blog, drawing up a competition, populating an image gallery or producing a video – and where it will appear. But you should also cross-promote it. Let’s say
you’ve created a video for your site – you could add it to YouTube, post it on Facebook, tweet about it and even document the filming process for your blog. Always remember to ask yourself: what is the ultimate aim of this campaign?
Next time...
How to measure and analyse the success of your content and ongoing content management.
MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS!
YOUR CUT-OUT-AND-KEEP GUIDE PART FOUR
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