It can be challenging for most travel marketers to create a successful marketing campaign for their audience who often find themselves jumping between umpteen websites and apps, selecting the best airlines, stay and experience offered in all the varied tourist locations around the globe. Considering the amount of thought and research put in by tourists before planning a trip, it is important for travel brands to create an exceptional content plan that will spread their reach worldwide.
Different regions have different dialects, values, cultural norms, and purchasing preferences. As part of your travel brand content strategy, you must understand these cultural differences to effectively reach the masses of different geographies. All in all, for a brand that deals with audiences from different countries, it's optimal to take the approach of ‘Think Globally, Act Locally'.
This concept harps on creating a content strategy that targets minute nuances of every region based on what your audience might look for while addressing a larger global audience all at the same time. So, how do travel brands who follow this approach create specific marketing campaigns? Here are a few points that brands have focused on to create campaigns that have won the hearts of their audience -
Building A Regional Understanding
When it comes to creating region-specific marketing campaigns, you must pay attention to their regional language. This not only means using the language but understanding the details such as traditions, experiences etc that are well-connected to the particular region. With this, they ensure that all elements of their campaign reflect the region in all ways. From the ad copy to the images and designs used, everything builds a local feel to their campaign, thus connecting their audience while also making the brand position itself as someone who truly understands the region. With the consideration of focusing on what your audience might be going through, what they would be interested in and the key points of communication they are looking for, these brands have enhanced their campaigns to make a lasting impact.
One of the prime examples of this is Airbnb’s “Celebrate it My Way” campaign, which was done in China. This campaign was done on the occasion of Chinese New Year to attract millennials who work away from home. With this campaign, the brand aimed to bridge the gap between millennials and their parents by asking them to “kidnap” their parents to travel overseas with them. Enlisting the help of six Chinese celebrities, they were able to select five millennial followers to take their parents on a 48-hour trip asking them to share their experiences on social media. This campaign was able to pinpoint a particular emotion that was prevalent in the region and tried to solve this problem through a campaign that made them belong to the community.
Focus On Personalisation
As a brand that is known to have a presence in that region, it is important for you to get a hang of your audience and their thinking style. Personalisation is the key here. Despite it being an English speaking country, you may still need to craft your content such that it represents the audience in that region. For instance, if you’re selling travel bags, a UK campaign may mention ‘luggage’ following British English while a US campaign would mention it as ‘baggage/ bags’. This is the level of personalisation that brands need to deliver to connect with the audience.
While expanding your footprint in more regions, understand your brand’s level of awareness in different countries. Despite being popular among Americans, your brand might not be something a consumer from the Asian market could have never heard of, making it completely new to them. But it is crucial to address your audience, no matter the geographical location, in the same way, giving them a special advantage while giving them a feel of who you are.
That’s exactly what Best Western did. This chain of hotels which is known to be located in multiple countries across the globe has a knack for personalisation. They created a unique email marketing campaign that was sent to both new and existing customers sending them personalised promotions. But that’s not all, they also implemented a new approach called geographic segmentation which allowed them to provide their audience with specific discounts and relevant deals based on where they live, with a simple CTA(call to action) to book through their app. With this, the brand was able to capture new markets allowing them to increase their app downloads by 143%, experiencing a click-through rate of more than 10%.
Building A Community
As a brand that caters for multiple regions, it is necessary for brands to build a global sense of community connecting various people divided based on regions, religions and other geographical differences. By doing this, not only do you get people to have a connection with your brand but also serve you to build a loyal following across borders. Airbnb with their #WeAccept campaign was able to establish such a value for their audience spread across multiple countries.
Based on these points, it is quite clear that every great marketing campaign needs a great content strategy that is able to connect the audience with the brand. It’s important for us to remember that the key to building a long-term relationship with our customers is to understand who they are, what they want and try to deliver the solutions through our brand. These concepts help your brand lay a strong foundation for you to go global while focusing on your audience from every region. With this unique market approach, you can effectively reach global audiences wherever they are and ‘Let your content travel around the world.’