Create a Loyal Fan Base by Creating Great Content

Though it tends to be underestimated, content marketing is one of the most valuable things you can do to drive sales to your business, and to create a customer base that is loyal, engaged, recurring, and acts as advocate on your behalf.

Chances are, your site is already jam-packed with content that you can make use of as marketing material for your business. The goal of good content marketing is to take this information and leverage it across various platforms, to serve it to your clients in such a manner that it will drive sales your way.

Pack your bags with the right content

When it comes to creating great content, your focus should be creating something that will grab the customer, inspire emotion, and ultimately conclude in a sale. In the travel industry, inspiration is everywhere; find items that you can use and put them to work for you:

• Focus on your demographic: make sure that whatever content you’re putting out there is geared for your target audience.
• Educate and inform: in the hospitality industry, it is easy to come up with valuable, informative topics that will leave your audience feeling like they’ve learned something and leave them wanting more.
• Inspire a fan base: the right content, delivered in the right way, can create a loyal customer who not only books with you time and again, but also becomes a brand evangelist by sharing your content with their network of family and friends, thus driving more people to your content and services.

Pick the right form of transportation

While there are many possible ways to deliver your content to the masses, there are a few that are the most popular, and with good reason: they work. Get your content in gear and get it out there:

• Facebook: share posts and pictures that link back to your site, or get a great conversation going among fans. They’ll remember and return.
• Your blog: you should have a blog, and it should be scheduled to post new content regularly. Use some of your preexisting information pages and tweak them a little; this is an easy way to generate blog topics that can then be linked to your other internal pages and your social media channels.
• Twitter: a great marketing tool, Twitter allows you to facilitate conversations and drive people to your blog, site, or other social media outlets.
• Instagram: particularly handy in the travel industry, this social media platform allows you to regularly share pictures with your followers of what your business has to offer. Be sure to link back to your site where you can expand on the information. Because it’s so easy to use the “like” and “share” functions of this app, it becomes a powerful tool for reaching a broader audience. Finally, Instagram is a wonderful tool for getting your audience involved by encouraging them to share their own awesome images of their travels in East Africa.

Set sail with your strategy

Know where, why and when you’re going to take your content and send it out to your audience with some basic strategy:

• Integration is key: think in terms of user experience, make things easily reachable, and link as much internally within your site as possible. Get your audience to your site through a gorgeous picture of an exotic animal or stunning beach on your Instagram, and keep them there with the fascinating blog post you’ve got about the delights of Kenya or the intrigues of Zanzibar.
• Avoid fixated focus on keywords for search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is very important, yes, but it doesn’t serve when articles and posts are written with only SEO in mind. If you’ve begun your journey on the right track, you’ll have had your SEO strategy worked out well in advance and your content will reflect those efforts. Like we discussed in a previous post here, use natural, varied and semantic keywords and phrases; when you do, you can’t go wrong.

Start looking through your existing site for content you can use in other ways, plan your strategy, and start syndicating by using the many tools at your disposal. You’ll build your audience and drive traffic to your site (and to sales) in no time.

Direct Pay Online provides global e-commerce and online payments solutions for the travel and related industries.