Content fever continues to spread, with ever more travel companies getting the message on “brand publishing,” what it is and how they should do it. But a question that is often overlooked is why this is so important in the first place.
NB This is a guest article by Matthew Barker, head of strategy at IandI Travel Media.
The travel industry is pumping out articles and ebooks, hosting blog trips, posting photos to Instagram, working on our subscription lists, but to what end?
We have the faint notion that “content” allows us to sell directly to our audiences, but the actual mechanics behind that process can be less clear and, despite the content deluge, few companies are doing this strategically and with a firm grasp on the bottom line value.
Part of the problem is a disconnect between “content” and the rest of digital marketing strategy. Content is the engine that drives our marketing, it isn’t a standalone activity in its own right.
The better the content, the more powerful the engine. But you still need to use it strategically to reach and engage the audience at the right time and place, and at some point you need to find ways of turning those new audiences into sales.
So here are three brief examples of how content can integrate with wider digital strategy to have a tangible impact on your bottom line:
Lowering paid search CPAs
If, like most travel companies, paid search (namely Google Adwords) is swallowing the lion’s share of your marketing budget, even a small improvement in campaign efficiency can have a massive impact on your returns.
The key to PPC success is ruthlessly optimising conversion rates while lowering the cost per acquisition (CPA), i.e. how much you spend to get a customer. When you’re spending several dollars per click at high volume, getting a handle on the CPA is critically important.
Smart content strategy can play an important role here. Engaging people with stand-out content first and then bringing them back to your site with targeted search ads gives you highly-engaged, pre-qualified audiences who are much more likely to convert than consumers coming in cold with no previous contact.
You can segment this audience and use search ads to re-capture them at the moment of purchase. With the analytics data indicating exactly how much more likely they are to convert, you can adjust your bid strategy to spend more on acquiring this traffic and still see lower CPAs thanks to much improved bounce and conversion rates.
Targeting paid search to people who’ve previously engaged with your content is a great way of using content to support bottom-line results.
Your success will depend on the quality and nature of your content, and its relevance for the audience you’re trying to reach. You need to offer people extraordinary content that is perfectly suited to their needs at that stage in the journey to purchase.
But the content alone is not enough - coupling it with search retargeting opens the door to consistent and scalable returns.
Improving CLV with email
Regardless of how you’re bringing in the leads and sales, extending the value from each one is another important, but often ignored, efficiency. Retaining prospects and customers is usually much cheaper than acquiring new ones and you already know that happy and engaged customers are more likely to repeat book and can be powerful evangelists for word-of-mouth referrals.
Email is a perfect channel for extending Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) but you’ve got to be smarter than simply blasting out company updates and your latest promotions. Recognise that email isn’t always great as a lead-gen tool, but that winning opt-in permission to access someone’s inbox gives you a huge opportunity to share relevant, valuable content and reinforce your brand’s credibility and authority.
A common mistake is to send the “company newsletter” format email: Aim to send what your audience wants to read, not what you want to tell them. You can even go as far as to curate an email magazine with content from other quality sources in addition to your own.
The goal is to use your email to establish your credibility and expertise. When they’re ready to make a repeat booking, or recommend a supplier to their friends, it’ll be your brand that comes to mind.
With the conversion path reports you’ll see email emerging as an assisting channel, kicking off conversion paths at the start of the journey to purchase:
Again - exemplary content is the vital first step. But it won’t suffice on its own. You need to understand where your email fits within the wider strategy in order to evaluate its true impact.
Converting PR & exposure into leads
In the widest sense, PR is any form of earned exposure: press coverage is the obvious example but social media visibility, blogger partnerships and “influencer marketing” all qualify as online PR.
Whereas in the past you could only guesstimate the value of PR via metrics such as ad value equivalent (AVE), these days robust analytics and attribution modelling allow you to trace high-funnel interactions from PR activity all the way down to leads and revenue.
But doing this requires an understanding of the journey to purchase, and what content and information your customers require at each stage. It’s reasonable to expect some leads from a PR engagement, but it’s also likely that much of the audience won’t be prepared to make a booking at the exact moment they’re reached.
By creating touchpoints and connections to maintain contact with these people as they move through the funnel you can bring more of them back to the site when they do become ready to part with their cash, thus improving your returns from the entire engagement.
Email, retargeting and social are all obvious tools - which one you choose will depend on the nature of your target audience, where they’re active and the types of content they need to make a purchase decision.
Takeaway
There are countless other ways to unlock ROI from brand publishing - with smart content strategy you can identify the most appropriate solutions for the audience and with proper attribution modelling it’s easier to evaluate bottom-line outcomes, even with long and convoluted conversion paths.
Getting these two pieces in place is the essential first step before making any content investment.
NB This is a guest article by Matthew Barker, head of strategy at I&ITravelMedia.
NB2 Image by Shutterstock