4 Essential Lessons for Travel Marketing on Instagram
When it comes to travel marketing, you should tighten your targeting while broadening your service message. When you are marketing on Instagram, you are promoting a service, and you should approach the process in a fairly broad manner so that if you needed to work in some travel insurance offers, taxi offers, restaurant offers, etc., then it wouldn’t be too difficult. However, when it comes to your target audience, you should keep things tight. Most people are happy to look at vacation pictures of exotic places. The people you are looking for are the people who are “Already” posting vacation pictures. You are looking for the people who “Do” rather than the great many who simply watch.
1 – You Need to Spend Money
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The Instagram promotions system is woefully unfair. It is strongly biased toward the massive companies that spend thousands per post. If you are not investing a lot of money into Instagram promotions, then you are not going to get good value for money. Nevertheless, Instagram will actively ignore accounts that are not paying for promotions or drawing people in from search engines and other websites. Ergo, you need to spend at least a little money each month on Instagram’s promotional advertising network if you want to slowly grow your account.
You also need to buy an audience. Do not buy spam or bot followers, unless you are trying to impress a big client. Otherwise, you need to buy Instagram accounts from an online marketplace like Fame Swap. Buy the accounts of people who already post about vacations and travel. Take over their accounts and promote your primary social media accounts and your services. If Instagram sees followers coming from other people’s accounts over to your primary account, that too is a signal that they should be recommending your Instagram profile to other people.
2 – Livin’ the Van Life…
The “Van Life” trend was fleeting but intensely popular. People took to their vans, and traveled the world, taking photos along the way. The reason why this trend died in such a horrific fashion was that it became way too commercialized. It went from being an outsider lifestyle to an ad-making machine.
It wasn’t too long before people were green-screening their so-called experiences, and people soured on the idea of the van life. But, we can draw two lessons from this trend. The first lesson is to jump on trends as soon as possible because they flame out very quickly. The second is that you should probably avoid trying to be authentic when it comes to trends. By all means, be authentic when marketing your core services and your core brand principles, but when it comes to trends, exploit them like a Disney worker and do it until the trend is deader than flared jeans.
3 – Stories for Flash Promotions and Posts for Brand Building
Reels and regular posts need to be of very high quality. They need to show your best side, they need to show what you offer, they need to explain why people can trust you, and they need to show that you are consistently good at what you do.
Stories will disappear in 24 hours, and here is where you push your offers, your discounts, your timed promotions and so forth. The great thing about stories is that their 24-hour shelf life helps to set a ticking clock. Add things like single-use discount codes to that people feel compelled to screenshot the code with the justification “Just in case I need it.” If you promote good and enticing offers via your stories, you can often snag a few impulsive buyers.
4 – Push a Brand Principle Over Pushing Selling Points
This is vitally important for travel services and travel companies. The biggest and easiest temptation is to post pictures and videos of all the lovely places your travel agency offers, but this is a mistake. As mentioned in the introduction, most people are happy to follow and look at those pictures. They are the sort of people who are not likely to buy. Instead, you need to push a selling point.
If you have the best off-season prices, post pictures of the locations with discount offers right there in the photos. Do stories showing the setting, and then showing the hotel with the words, “We only charge $75 per night to stay right here.” Show the lovely setting, and perhaps the main attraction, and then show a picture of a plane with the tagline, “Flights are only $144 between now and June.” If your brand principle is that you offer the most luxurious travel packages, then show off the luxury package and compare it with the standard package. Yes, you are still showing off the location and such, but they are only being shown as a means of communicating your brand principles (or primary selling point).
