At the EyeforTravel European Travel Summit on Sales & Marketing tomorrow here in Munich, I’m going to be making a presentation focused on helping other travel businesses develop their social content strategy.
You can see a copy of my presentation here.
The trick here is, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Each and every one of your companies is different. So, taking a page from my management consultant playbook, I have come up with a social content strategy framework that I believe scales well to all travel businesses, and in fact, all businesses that are developing a content strategy of any sort.
Without going into too much detail (come to see me live at a travel conference!), here is a taste of the framework:
The organizing principle of this framework is that THE WEB IS THE PLATFORM. This becomes increasingly evident as you go through implementing the framework.
1. Within your site, a successful content strategy provides users with the
a) most relevant content from the
b) most trustworthy sources in the
c) most appropriate context.
2. Throughout the web, a successful content strategy delivers
a) the most relevant content to your
b) targeted customers through the
c) most appropriate channels.
3. When you’re developing your internal and web-wide strategies around the key areas above, think of how your site connects and collaborates with:
a) Search Engines
b) Communities, the
c) Blogosphere, and
d) Destinations
PART I:
The situation today is not that we don’t have enough social content out there - we have too much of it. The key is to determine which content is the most relevant to your users, and which best supports and strengthens your underlying value proposition.
Sometimes, the most trustworthy content isn’t social content at all - sometimes it is authoritarian content (provided by a brand or source known for providing an objective perspective, like a ratings agency), or even editorial content (commentary provided by a business editor that holds significant weight with readers, e.g. Lonely Planet).
And where we choose to make our content available to users is also critical to supporting our underlying mission. It’s no use providing hotels reviews to users after they’ve already purchased their hotel room, nor is it valuable to provide too much detail at the hotel level before the user has figured out which city they want to visit. Providing the right content at the right time in the user’s experience is an essential and often overlooked component to a successful content strategy.
PART II & III:
Let’s think about content, customers, and channels in the context of Search Engines first. Search engines, as we all know, are absolutely critical if we want users to find us. 85+% of online travel sessions start with a search engine. So we need to create landing pages that are relevant as far as Google is concerned, and that means we need to have a) key words that match the user query, b) fresh, unique content, and c) lots of inbound links that validate the value of our content. There are other search engines out there besides Google however, and there are other algorithms at work to measure relevance. A truly successful search engine content strategy takes all this into consideration.
What about Communities? Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, TripAdvisor, Virtual Tourist - where does it end? A successful content strategy takes a methodical look at each of these communities, evaluates their relative importance to the business, and prioritizes them as such. Remember, the Web is the Platform. Start with the communities most likely to be interested in your product or service. This might involve doing a cross-platform demographic analysis. What is the goal of your community strategy? Is it building brand awareness amongst an important or hard-to-reach constituency? Or is it to drive qualified traffic to your site? This will affect how you implement your community strategy.
How about the Blogosphere? This is a great platform for generating publicity about your company, products or services, but it’s a two-way street. Like any good relationship, the more you give, the more you get. If you can help bloggers do their jobs well, then you will be justly rewarded. How can you utilize the company blog for your benefit, while also helping other blogs be more successful? How can you build genuine, collaborative relationships with the right bloggers? There’s a whole presentation in each one of these paragraphs, but let’s at least acknowledge that developing a voice in the blogosphere and interacting with other voices is likely an essential part of any content strategy.
And finally, other Destination sites. What marketing partnerships make sense for your organization? What about booking and content widgets - pay-per-click campaigns, etc. Think about symbiotic businesses that might want to provide their users with access to your content. Is there a way to benefit from content syndication, which in turn helps SEO?
So, lots of stuff to talk about - and only about 10 minutes or so for the presentation. I’m looking forward to an engaging discussion tomorrow!