Ed Bussey, founder and chief executive of Quill
How many adverts do you remember seeing yesterday? 5? 10? 100? The true number is probably closer to 2000.
It’s a striking statistic, considering that, at best, you can probably only recall a couple.
Would-be travellers are being bombarded with everything from sunsets to skydiving on a daily basis, making it all the more difficult to stand out in the increasingly competitive online landscape.
The way our audiences consume content is changing; the time they spend online now outstrips that spent watching television.
Populated by agile consumers armed with ad-blockers and multiple tabs, the digital space is ill suited to traditional advertising techniques – in fact, those surfing the web are more likely to summit Everest than click on a banner ad.
Research carried out by Travel Weekly found that over two thirds of summer holidays are booked online.
In a fiercely competitive market it’s crucial that travel companies adapt their approaches to the rapidly evolving behaviours of their digital audiences.
Gone are the days of passive audiences waiting to be reached.
With 93% of global travelers saying their bookings were impacted by online reviews, the internet is empowering customers and they are actively looking for people who can inform their purchasing decisions.
As a result, businesses can no longer afford to merely advertise; they need to use content to build a dialogue with their target audiences.
They have to become publishers. If your online content is good: if it’s funny, entertaining or informative, then it will help you to reach your customers.
The right messaging within your content can be hugely effective – just compare the YouTube ratings of American Airlines to Virgin America.
Both uploaded in-flight safety videos that served the legal purpose of being informative.
But while American Airlines produced a sedate explanation of seatbelt mechanics, Virgin America created an all-singing, all-dancing choreographed safety demonstration. One received 90,000 views, the other 9,000,000.
The content marketing opportunities are particularly acute for the travel industry.
The internet offers us such a vast range of choices that we can, paradoxically, find ourselves paralysed into choosing nothing at all.
According to Marketing Magazine, people spend an average of 73 days between first looking online for a holiday and making a booking.
Persuading these would-be customers to spend this period of research engaging in useful content represents an enormous marketing opportunity, but it can also be helpful to the consumer, preventing them from feeling overwhelmed by the wealth of choice on offer.
In an industry as international as travel, engaging potential customers can have as much to do with understanding your market as producing eye-catching content.
Using native speaking content creators, it is possible to tailor campaigns to unfamiliar languages and cultures in a way that advertising budgets rarely permit.
Take, for instance, KFC who famously had their slogan ‘finger-lickin’ good’ translated to Chinese. Their advert then read ‘we’ll eat your fingers off’.
In a globalised economy, the ability to quickly and flexibly localise your content – with a consistent brand tone of voice – so that it engages people all over the world isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.
The future of the travel industry will be defined by the consumer’s search for high quality content to engage with.
In that new digital context, the travel brands that can become publishers will have an unprecedented opportunity.
Quill is a content creation company founded in 2010 which uses a global network of 3,000 specialist writers, photographers, video producers and graphic designers to create tailored content for advertising campaigns.