The travel industry is a competitive space. One sure-fire way to cut through your rival brands’ noise and reach your potential customers is to generate interesting, authentic PR stories that people want to read and engage with. You want to be front of mind with potential travellers, ensuring that they trust your brand and eventually choose you as their preferred travel website.
PR can help you achieve this, giving you the opportunity to shape positive messages and opinions about your brand that could later help would-be adventurers choose you over competitors. There are different types of PR, each with its own unique purpose, and getting a good on grasp on how to use them to benefit your travel business can definitely give you a competitive advantage.
The best types of PR for the travel industry
- Generating unique data and insight from research or surveys can attract lots of media attention and raise your brand’s profile. Think about which data is the most meaningful to your brand and what you’d like to achieve with the research or survey results. The media are more likely to share your story if you can generate some really interesting or unexpected stats. You could also look to commission the research or survey on a quarterly or yearly basis, giving you extra clout when it comes to predicting trends or reflecting on changes over time.
- Running competitions can help you meet numerous objectives: raising brand and/or product awareness, collecting data for nurture or personalisation campaigns, engaging existing customers. Go big with a grand prize or run smaller competitions regularly – both can work well. For some PR value, try working with a charity; you could donate money for every 1,000 entries or donate a holiday for them to use in fundraising competitions of their own.
- Put simply, you want your prospects and customers to believe that you know what you’re talking about when it comes to travel. Having an authoritative voice earns trust, which is vitally important when it comes to building your brand’s profile and winning customers. Your brand needs to be poised and ready to comment on travel news and trends wherever possible. This could be online, digitally via video or a podcast, on the radio, in print or on the TV. Your goal should be to become a go-to voice in the travel industry, with the media seeking you out for comment whenever a travel story breaks.
Working with a digital PR provider
To excel at PR and gain a competitive edge over your rival brands, you need to take an always-on approach to generating newsworthy content and actively seeking out stories to be a part of. It can be a time-consuming task, so working with an experienced digital PR provider will ensure that you get as much coverage as possible with the help of an expert team. Working with an experienced provider will also give you access to a network of travel journalists, content creators and influencers, giving you the benefit of strong existing relationships that would otherwise take you time and work to build.
How PR can benefit SEO
Digital PR can help you to earn vital, high-quality backlinks to your website, which will have a knock-on positive effect to your page and domain authority. One high-quality link from an authoritative website has the potential to make a greater impact than several links from low-quality websites, and the more high-quality links, the better. The number of domains linking to a page correlates with rankings more than any other factor. Using PR to secure these authoritative links can help your organic search rankings soar.
Skilfully written press releases and content that target your most profitable travel keywords can help your search rankings increase even further. It can take Google a while to index and rank content, so to speed the process up, share your stories on social media and with industry influencers.
Conclusion
Creating interesting, shareable and unique newsworthy PR stories can help your business grow. Brand awareness, valuable data collection, increased website traffic and improved search engine visibility are just some of the goals great PR can help you achieve. Giving your PR strategy the time and effort it requires to flourish is best done using an experienced digital PR agency, whose expertise in integrating great content with PR and SEO will help you to stand out from competitors and to sit front of mind with prospective customers.
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