The rising trend of Indians travelling internationally is not something that can be missed easily. Outbound travel from India is growing exponentially every year; the Yatra Winter Travel Survey 2017 showed that 36% of travellers were planning an international holiday. On an overall basis, it is estimated that 25 million Indians travelled overseas in 2017, which is growing a very healthy double-digit rate, setting India on the path to become one of the largest outbound travel markets in the world in the next few years.

Moreover, it is not just the lure of shopping and eating in international locations that brings travellers to foreign shores. With an increasing number of Indian travellers, especially millennials, prioritizing personal experiences over material things, it’s fueling the growth of a more experiential travel ecosystem across the world.

Latching on to this insight, VisitBritain launched its new brand campaign ‘I Travel For’ in Mumbai last month. The campaign will run across digital channels, including Facebook and website to engage with potential travellers and inspire them to book a holiday to Britain right now. Using short films and story-telling to showcase unexpected experiences, the campaign aligns the passions that motivate people to travel with experiences that can only be had in Britain, inspiring overseas visitors to book a trip right now.

Driven primarily across Facebook and Instagram, the campaign will also feature Britain’s iconic landmarks and attractions. Additionally, the films highlight common travel interests such as adventure, culinary, relaxation, culture and the undiscovered.

Still from the campaign film, of an unexplored destination in Great Britain.

Highlighting the new brand campaign, VisitBritain Chief Executive Sally Balcombe said, “I Travel For campaign in India will be targeting Buzzseeker travellers. This campaign aims to build on the strong growth we have seen in visits from India, showcasing that Britain is bursting with fun activities and adventure, exciting and contemporary culture and highlighting less-explored destinations. By promoting unexpected experiences, alongside globally renowned and iconic cultural landmarks and attractions, VisitBritain wants to inspire more visitors from India to book a trip to Britain right now.”

Between January and September 2017, there were a record 436,000 inbound visits from India to the UK, up 32% compared to the same period in 2016. Visits from India spent a record £355 million between January and September 2017, up 7% on same period in 2016.

In February last year, VisitBritain tapped into India’s love for Bollywood and Harry Potter by launching a marketing campaign #OMGB (Oh my Great Britain) ‘Home of Amazing Moments’, to inspire Indian travellers to visit the UK. The seven week campaign ran successfully across social platforms, highlighting unique experiences Britain can offer.

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Ever since the launch of Snapchat, every social media platform has been scrambling to come up with a similar tool that lets users broadcast their pictures or videos in real time. Of all those attempts, Instagram Stories has probably managed to garner the most attention. The photo-sharing platform has always remained a favourite for F&B brands looking to leverage the tool to market their business.

Why should you use it?

Because it offers an addictive and authentic way for people and brands to share with others. Instagram has an extremely active user-base, reported to be at 250 million daily active users. That gives your brand a much wider audience than any other traditional channel. It is also very easy to create content on Instagram story; nobody has to wrack their brains over a post for an hour. Get the picture right and you are good to go. It also gives a great base to experiment with different ideas. Put up an Instagram story and measure its response. Even if it isn’t good, the story will anyway disappear within 24 hours, giving you a clean slate to start off again. Additionally, much like Snapchat, Instagram also has a great armour of tools and filters to make your stories more engaging, creative and fun.

Here are some of the top ways you can leverage this new-age marketing platform for your hospitality brand –

#1. Use it to unveil new menu items – There’s nothing better than looking at great pictures of delicious food items on Instagram. Take beautiful shots of new menu items, or even the menu itself, and caption them with words from the chef or list down some of the ingredients for the dish. If you create an Instagram Story about your hotel or restaurant, makes sure to add a location sticker. This helps to share your stories to people who don’t follow you yet, as Instagram collates all stories around particular locations to show it to people in areas nearby.

Radisson in Noida has been happily experimenting with the platform for a while now.

Ramendra Pratap Singh, General Manager at Radisson Noida, says, “With the growth of mobile users, we strongly believe that Instagram is a critical guest engagement platform for the hospitality industry as we step into 2018. We have been leveraging Instagram Stories to promote the variety of F&B offerings and experience in various restaurant at Radisson Noida through visuals. This new format helps us staying current in feeds and creates a stronger recall for the brand.”

#2. Let influencers takeover your account for a day – Working with influencers on social media platforms is one of the best ways to connect with the young generation of consumers. Nowadays, a lot of brands let influencers take over their account and post content that speaks to their target audience through cross-promotion techniques. This way, brands can easily double their audience count. Additionally, takeovers are a great way to get in front of a new audience via someone who has already built up a following in that same domain and understands what users are looking for.

#3. Take the audience backstage – Giving your fans a glimpse into what goes on behind-the-scenes at your hotel or restaurant is a great way to make them feel like they’re part of the experience. Your brand could post a great picture on the feed, and then use Instagram story to showcase what went into making that shot perfect. Another great way is to post an Instagram story of the process of cooking a crowd-favourite dish, or even giving them a tour of the entire place. This lends more credibility to your brand as it depicts authenticity, and that is something that people love.

#4. Announce your event, send out its teaser – Is your hotel prepping for a big event? Do you have a band performing live in the evening? Then there is absolutely no better way to let people know about it than Instagram stories. By giving them tiny bits about how you are ramping up for the event, your brand can keep the buzz strong, and make sure more and more people turn up for the actual event later.

#5. Redirect users to longer pieces of content or even to your website – If your brand has an active blog, or if the face of your brand speaks about something relevant to the industry in general, make sure to entice your Instagram followers to check it out. Tell the audience what the content is about, give them a reason to read the entire piece, and then add the call-to-action to invite viewers to ‘click on the link in bio’ or ‘swipe up to read more’. You can also use this feature to display any particular offering or product and then redirect users to that content on your website as well. This not just gives you viewers on this platform, but also increases clicks to your main website.

Want more tips to navigate through Instagram stories? Read this.

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If you don’t get it right, your job as a Content Marketer can pose some serious questions. When you see those crazy number of comments on the “Great Ixigo Travel Quiz“, you are like I could have done that too or when you see Lonely Planet’s numbers skyrocketing on Social Media, you tell your buddy, it’s all because of the cult status of the brand. If that’s not enough, your mind says give me the ad-budget, I will show you how I can do a launch campaign like Yotel Singapore, though viral content marketer Aashish Chopra strongly advocates not running after paid views.

Sometimes you hate content marketing to the core as your day job isn’t about those viral content pieces, the client (if you’re an agency) or the boss (if you’re on the brand-side) wants you to follow the content calendar, push the brand as he has got sales on his mind. You question yourself, question your content’s value and whether your efforts are doing any good for the brand.

Image Source: Free Vectors via www.vecteezy.com

This brings us back to the game of “Content Marketing”. What really it is? Simon Kemp, recently wrote a great post on finding content ideas.

He starts of by defining the key goal  for a content marketer i.e. ‘Create content that delivers increased brand value’

I am lifting the below image directly from Simon’s blog where he has emphasized that you should maintain the balance between the needs of your audience and what your brand wants to say. Quite right, if you go on addressing your brand’s needs without considering what the audience want, there will be a big disconnect.

Not being able to balance the needs of your audience is the key problem with most content marketers today. A lot of us are too obsessed with the brand – this is what our brand has to offer, this is how we can change the consumer experience. But on a second thought, are we thinking about what our consumer wants.

In a mobile-first world, where your content is competing for attention span in the news feed, think about why, just why would the audience really care about your message. What is the value you are delivering to them?

Start with Content Discovery

Using Answer the Public, you can find some great ideas on what the audience is actually searching for. Imagine your hotel wants to promote the newly opened Chinese restaurant in its premises. As a content marketer you might want to discover what do people want are people searching for? Answer the Public, gives many combinations depending on user search queries and the below are just some of the example search results.

Trends around What:

• What is Chinese cuisine
• What characteristics make Chinese cuisine distinct
• what is authentic Chinese cuisine
• what is northern Chinese cuisine

Trends around Why:

• why Chinese food is healthy
• why Chinese food is so good
• why Chinese food on Christmas

Break the Daily Content Routine

Fixed publishing schedule is one of the reasons why most content marketers cannot imagine contagious marketing ideas. You have daily goals for content and are under regular pressure to produce box office hits everyday. Instead, break the daily posting cycle and change it to an optimum frequency that’s most relevant for your brand and audience. Initially, it might require some convincing however if you can show the value, change can be brought in.

Provide useful information to your audience

Rendezvous Hotel Singapore does a great job of giving tips on nearby surroundings.

They also do a good job of linking customer testimonials with relevant images from within the hotel. In the below image, they have linked the wedding image with customer’s feedback message.

ParkRoyal SG is targeting the Instagram generation with its thematic series #parkroyalpicks. The question that they have to ask is who is their audience and whether they will go to Instagram for these backdrop shots.

Speak the language they understand

Wanderlust, a hotel in Little India is targeting the voyagers and millennial generation with its smart messaging and break the status quo content. The hotel seems to be targeting the travellers and not the tourists, the adventure theme of the hotel is well supported by relevant creatives/copy.

Quincy Hotel, another boutique hotel at Mt Elizabeth in Singapore is using a unique teddy toy to talk to its audience on Social Media.

The teddy is a cohesive part of the brand’s communication strategy on Social Media.

The above post is a part of multi-part series to examine the “Content Marketing” landscape in Singapore & India. While we have started with hospitality industry, going forward, we will be delving into more industries within the travel landscape!

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Any brand now has more platforms than ever to communicate with their audience, each one slightly different than the other. Social media platforms hold a significant spot in the entire marketing map of any brand yet their relevance has changed over the years. Some have gained an even more important spot while some have lost their lustre. To complicate matters further for the brand, audience now prefer even simpler channels like messaging to be in touch with the brand. The likes of WeChat are already giving plenty of sleepless nights to the social media giants and the trend is likely to continue. Who would have thought things will be promoted and paid for via a chat app?

The change isn’t just limited to the platforms where the users are but how rapidly existing formats are gaining momentum and new formats are coming in. While we haven’t seen the pitch, we are quite sure that video wasn’t something that Mark Zuckerberg focused heavily on when he first pitched Facebook to Peter Thiel. And yet, the platform is now full of videos and is taking the fight against the video giant. YouTube on the other hand now has a large array of 360 videos and VR is the talk of the town.

But where does that leave the marketers? It is an everyday fight between maintaining the momentum on already popular platforms and identifying where the action is shifting. While it is easier for brands with a global scale to allocate resources to experiment, it isn’t the same for startups. And the challenges extend much further.

For almost two years, we have been actively meeting and getting acquainted with entrepreneurs in travel industry. Each one of them building something unique to address the pain points of travellers. Some of them carry strong experiences of working in marketing roles and teach us a trick or two while many others are tech superheroes who rise up to challenges with code. However, irrespective of the expertise, they have to do a bit of both to minimise the required resources in the early days.

We are trying to make the job a little bit easier for the second type of entrepreneurs by bringing together the best marketers, tourism boards and content creators from across the country to share their knowledge with them during TravelNEXUS. For the first type of entrepreneurs who have cracked the marketing code, we are offering a platform to showcase their work and share their learnings with others (Sign up here, we want you there).

We have an array of discussions and keynotes lined up where domain experts will join to share insights. There will be discussions on how travel and hospitality companies can unlock the maximum potential of conventional social media channels as well as identify the upcoming ones or how brands can maximise the impact of their campaigns among many other things. The event is supported by hospitality partner Ramada Gurgaon Central and travel partner Plush Escapes. Leading social media news portal Social Samosa will also bring its expertise to the event. You can read more about TravelNEXUS here.

Full Schedule

The event was originally scheduled to be held on March 25, 2017 at Ramada Gurgaon Central however, we have to push it further due to some unavoidable circumstances. New event date will be updated soon. We know you want to put your every penny towards your business which is why we have kept the registration costs as low as we could. You can reach us through our social channels, mail or use the comment section for any queries you may have.

Registration link.

Update March 17, 2017- Event date to be rescheduled.

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There is no dearth of options Facebook has on offer for brands. And the social platform seems to have a special kind of affection for travel brands if we judge by the even higher number of advertising options for them. Naturally a large fraction of all the businesses use Facebook, some to make more business out of it and some to keep a web presence for their brand.

Over the past few months, Facebook made certain changes to how the brand pages work including a redesign. In another update, they have made the number of likes less visible to visitors. This seemingly insignificant change can have major impact on the approach page managers take. The number of likes incorrectly used to be a scale for measurement but suddenly it is insignificant to a visitor.

“Content is the king” is a phrase used very often when we talk about social media marketing. Earlier this year, when were putting together the data for our Facebook marketing report for travel brands, we observed that some brands were leading in terms of engagement but the fan base was not as big. Their content was reaching way beyond their own fan base. On the other side, there were few brands having large fan base but barely any engagement on the posts. Clearly something wasn’t right.

Removing the page like count (making it less visible) means that for many, the measuring scale changed from how many likes the page has to how much interaction the posts are getting. Anyone visiting the page would now look at the posts directly. Marketers often complain how their advertising costs are driven up because some brands aren’t targeting the right audience. This would deter these brands from targeting wider audience irrelevant to their business just to gain page likes. If they need better engagement, they will have to build well targeted audience for their page. This would also improve the returns for the ones who have been doing it right. Younger brands would also appreciate the change as this would save them from being passed on because they appear too new to the online space.

This should also give Facebook a bump in advertising revenues as brands target their pages better and also spend on giving their powerful content an initial push to drive engagement with promoted posts. Overall it looks like a small yet smart change from Facebook. Would love to hear what the experts in this space have to say on this. Do share in comments or join the conversation here.

The post Facebook’s little change might get brands to use the advertising tools better appeared first on TravHQ.

There is an increasing number of platforms for travel brands to connect with their audience and it’s the same story with formats. Playing the creative note, brands are competing against each other in a bid to stay on top of their customers’ mind but that isn’t all child’s play. To stay ahead of the curve, travel marketers have to keep learning and adapting to the change.

TiE Delhi, in order to help with the same, is hosting the Travel Marketing Summit 2016 this Friday (September 30). We have the full agenda of the event and the sessions certainly look interesting.

Following the opening address, there will be a fireside chat on the Emerging trends in Travel Marketing. Naveen Seshadri, COO at Lonely Planet and Daksh Sharma, Founding Partner at TravHQ will discuss what marketing trends we will see in travel. Following this, Anshuman Bapna, Chief Product Officer at MakeMyTrip will share insights on the behaviour of young digital consumers which can help brands better tailor their strategy.

Ajay Jain, Founder, Kunzum.com will talk about the opportunities in India’s travel market which will be followed by Dishad Master from Mercury Himalayan Explorations sharing tips on the art of storytelling and how content marketing can be the best sales tool.

TripAdvisor is the undoubted leader if we talk about user generated content. Nikhil Ganju, Country Manager, TripAdvisor India will talk about the power of user generated content and how platforms like TripAdvisor can be used to engage audience. There will be many other exciting sessions that will offer insights on important topics like finding the right platforms for marketing a travel brand and best practices to drive engagement among others.

Navneet Kaushal, CEO, PageTraffic and Ashish Chopra, Head-Content Marketing, ixigo will share top tips from their experience of promoting startups on a shoestring budget. Ashish is the man behind all those quirky videos by ixigo and has received various awards for pulling such successful campaigns. Certainly the right man to learn travel marketing from.

If you are a travel startup, we would love to hear your story. Connect with our team at the event. The event will be hosted at WelcomHotel Sheraton, Saket, New Delhi. You can avail discounts on registration by using promo code “travHQ”. Register here.

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Facebook is an important piece in the marketing puzzle for any travel brand. It boasts of over 1.5 billion monthly active users with almost 65 percent of them accessing the social network on a daily basis. Along with the tech savvy millennials, a large number of people in India who are experiencing internet for the first time on mobile are on Facebook. This allows the brands to reach a wide variety of audience.

For this report, we selected a total of 25 brands from 5 different industry verticals including Airlines, Hotels, Metasearch, Destinations and OTAs. The brands have been using the platform in different ways to inspire their audience and position themselves well.

We observed and tracked their activities on Facebook for two weeks to understand how they are employing diverse strategies and experimenting with different tactics for growth. To achieve that, we have observed the size of their community, nature of content, growth rate and how the fans are communicating with these brands.

Some of the brands included in the research really set a benchmark and serve as a great example for other brands. The report also offers a curation of the best practices and social media strategies that travel brands can adopt to make the most out of Facebook. Find the link to download the free report below.

TravHQ Exclusive: State of Social Travel Report

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No matter how good the image of your brand is, you will always have dissatisfied customers. This statement goes even further for tourism sector as it is a service industry and the customer opinions are often subjective. Even the best hotels will leave some customers unhappy because they expected better, OTAs will get cursed because the payment gateway caused trouble and these are just the cases when they aren’t at fault. At times even brands can be at fault and there is a genuine complaint on social media. In both the cases, it is very important for them to handle it responsibly and it is surprising how even the biggest names make mistakes aggravating the situation.

Whether the social media damage has been caused by a genuine goof up or is an attempt by an influencer trying to gain attention, it will have a negative impact on your travel brand. It is of utmost importance to control the fire and prevent any more damage. Here are some of the pointers you should keep in mind:

#1- Have a courteous tone

The tourism & hospitality industry is all about being as friendly and hospitable as possible and the same character should be carried to your social media accounts. It is important to remember this at all times, even when a fraction of your community is speaking against you. The whole point of having a social media presence is to interact with your community. Be polite and humble in your communication and don’t be provoked by what the individuals say. It is an open community and every consumer has his voice.

#2- Disclose your association

It is good to be passionate about the brand you represent but it is very important to remember that your opinion might not always match with the brand’s message. If you are joining the conversation from your personal account, make sure you disclose your association with your brand. Hiding the fact won’t do any good as most details are just a Google search away and things will get worse when consumers find out. Even if you are the company director, mention that before you say anything from your personal account. Some brand accounts also mention name of the individual responding to the queries and complaints which is also a good practice to follow.

Lufthansa’s account includes name of the person responding to the query

#3- Don’t restrict the voices

The biggest mistake brands make on social media is deleting negative responses or blocking people who post them. This will definitely offend the individuals if their original complaint hasn’t and then they will cross the lines to damage the image of your brand. They will go to other social media platforms, post publically on their accounts, ask their friends to share, ask influencers to share and it won’t take long before you have a new crisis to deal with. Instead let the comments or tweets stay and try to respond to them in the best possible manner.

Do not delete the negative comments but make sure they are answered

#4- Be patient

Never try to share even the first level responses without putting thought into it. It appears very irresponsible on the part of a brand to not have complete knowledge about the subject. Seek help internally from the concerned department for clarity if required before putting anything on a public platform. You don’t want to give the consumers another chance to criticise you or your brand. Be patient, take your time in drafting the responses and get a second opinion if needed.

#5- Involve key management

If the sparks continue to fly, don’t hesitate to get your senior management team involved. It is important that they monitor the situation and if required, join in the conversation to handle the situation. Airlines often get into travellers’ crosshair and that is why we have seen the top management of major airlines actively monitor the social media accounts. They often join in if there is a major situation. This not only helps them deal with the problem but also highlights that the brand holds its customers in high regards. AirAsia India CEO Mittu Chandilya uses Twitter to engage with customers whenever required. Recently, popular journalist Barkha Dutt tweeted about her bad experience with the Indigo staff which was followed by a storm of tweets against the airline. IndiGo President Aditya Ghosh took care of the situation by looking into the incident and apologising on behalf of the staff member.

As evident from Barkha Dutt’s follow-up tweet, Aditya’s prompt response on Twitter did translate her sentiment towards the airline

#6- Accept and apologise

Above all, if you’ve made a mistake, be honest about it and accept the same. Sending a pre-defined template response like British Airways did with cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar, holds no brand & customer value. Do remember that just an apology won’t do. Along with that, also share an explanation on how you will do damage control for it. Your customers will stay positive and even appreciate you for taking full responsibility.

With inputs from our Founding Partner, Daksh Sharma.

Join the discussions on travel marketing and get inputs from the topic experts here.

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#SoMeT15US, organized by Destination Think, was held on October 14th and 15th at Harrah’s Theatre, New Orleans. The objective of this business conference was to assist different destinations & brands become stronger on social media and thereby add more value to the digital industry. To know more details about this particular conference, you can go through its webpage.

Here are some interesting tweets that emerged from #SoMeT15US:

#1. The essence of Marketing

Keep your marketing simple, subtle, "embrace what others say" about you, put the DNA of your people in your marketing @FCuypers #SoMeT15US

— Social Media Tourism (@SoMeTourism) October 14, 2015

Our Take: Frank’s tweet points out a basic but relevant point ignored by marketers frequently. At times products and services offered to the customers do not meet their needs or demands. Understanding the pulse, the minds of the people and emotional needs of potential customers is really important. Marketing, as a practice, needs to be flexible. Just as too many cooks might spoil the broth, complicating the process of marketing unnecessarily does not work well.

#2. The power of visuals

Images get 5x the engagement as text-based posts & the #1 thing that makes images memorable is people. #SoMeT15US

— Rachel Ann (@xRachelLew) October 14, 2015

Our Take: A picture is worth a million words and the same is true for social media. We take less time to process images as compared to text and that is why images get more engagement as compared to text. Using more graphics and photographs will drive up the engagement for your brand account. Adding people to photos works even better as compared to photos that don’t include real people.

#3. Intuitive Blog-posts- Your SEO Goldmine

"Our blog posts are the most valuable & underrated asset we produce because they have huge evergreen SEO benefits."-@LandLopers #SoMeT15US

— Molly Allwein (@molly_vstpgh) October 15, 2015

Our Take: Professional blogs of companies are either not updated frequently or totally neglected. Various studies have suggested that blogs can drive close to 50 percent more traffic on the website of a business. This underscores the importance and value of corporate blogs. SEO plays a significant role in the online world and blogs can play an important role in increasing visibility on search engines.

#4. Social Media is just inevitable

"Be careful what you wish for, the spotlight is now on us & we have to deliver."- @wilhelmus #SoMeT15US #endgame pic.twitter.com/5OTuW5vCtT

— Molly Allwein (@molly_vstpgh) October 15, 2015

Our Take: Nowadays it is hard to find people who don’t use social media. Even the baby boomers are actively using platforms like Facebook to share stories and find content that interests them. People don’t just look up for brands on Google anymore. They search for Facebook page or Twitter handles as well and that is why it is important to have strong social media presence.

#5. Reputation = Return on Investment

"Reputation is our ROI" says @seanmdixon at #SoMeT15US Crowdsource inspiration from consumer-written reviews and content

— ReviewPro (@ReviewPro) October 15, 2015

Our Take: Sean precisely summed up the use of social media for marketing. Brands often try to measure social media ROI in terms of sales or leads but that is a debatable approach. While social media can drive sales as well, it should primarily be used to build an image for the brand and give it a character with the right messaging. For travel brands, social media can be used to inspire a traveller to take a journey rather than selling a destination package.

Did you come across any interesting tweets around #SoMeT15US? Do share them with us.

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