How Collaboration is the Key to Content Creation for Travel Brands

While social media channels may vary in popularity, high-quality content is always craved by customers. And social media sources provide a way to deliver this digital content effectively and efficiently. But before a brand can leverage these social media platforms, they must create compelling content that’s relevant and resonates with their audience and brand. This is especially important for travel and hospitality brands because travelers consider the brand to be a part of their travel experience. That’s why hospitality marketing experts need to create quality content that engages their target travel market, while promoting their brand’s message and driving traffic to their websites. Original content creation can be difficult and time-consuming, yet by collaborating with outside sources, you can develop a cooperative team that seeks and shares quality content. TravelWeekly.com explored ways for travel brands to start a collaborative social media effort that will help to improve their hospitality marketing results.

Seek Out Sharable Sources

To develop a culture that collaborates to share quality content, it all comes down to relationships. Once you find strong collaborators, you must maintain those relationships while finding and fostering new ones. Start your search for collaborators in the following worthwhile ways:

1. Pursue Your Professional Database – Contact your current colleagues, partners, and media contacts and let them know that you’re seeking collaborators for social media content creation. Explain your desire to share quality content to lighten the load for everyone. You may be surprised at how many people are sharing the same struggle and are open to this collaborative effort.

2. Contact Your Customer Database – Engage your current customers by asking them to contribute content. Ask them to share their travel experiences, offer testimonials, or simply post vacation photos. You can even incentivize this request with contests, prizes, and rewards to increase the total response. This provides user-generated content that personally speaks to your target market because it’s relevant to their interests and experiences. In addition to developing a large content database, customers will appreciate being involved and feel valued by the brand. This can create customer loyalty and strong brand advocacy.

3. Seek Out Sales Reps – Sales reps want to keep your business, so they should be willing to contribute to your business. Take them up on their openness by having them provide social media content, such as tweets, video content, and links to images that will interest your audience and reflect your brand’s quality.

4. Curate Content – Often called resharing or repurposing, this involves collecting and showcasing information about a popular topic from various online sources, and then posting it on your social media pages. This shows your audience that you understand their interests and encourages them to return to your page to get the latest updates.

5. Pin Your Efforts on Pinterest Boards – Invite others to create shared-interest boards on Pinterest. Ask your fans, followers, customers, clients, colleagues, and others to pin photos that exhibit your brand’s attributes or their experience with your brand. This creates fun and fascinating content that’s bound to be shared among many.

6. Stay Up on Social Media Industry Updates – Since you’re sharing social media content with other sources, you want to be aware of the content they’re sharing to see if it could benefit your brand. Social media platforms have made this task easy. For example, Facebook features an Interest List that shows a summary of recent posts from any members you add to the list. And Twitter lists let you organize tweets from different people by categories. For this collaborative effort, you can divide tweets by clients, colleagues, partners, suppliers, and others to easily see what different people are tweeting at any time.

7. Review Your Response and Results – Once your brand has collaborated on sharing quality content, you’ll want to measure your progress beyond mere comments and compliments. Luckily, there are many analytics tools today that can help you monitor and measure the success of your collaborative content creation effort.

Learn how high-quality content creation can improve your hospitality marketing. Contact MDG.

MDG, a full-service advertising agency with offices in Boca Raton and New York, NY, is one of Florida’s top hospitality marketing companies and branding firms. MDG’s core capabilities include advertising, branding, logo design, creative, infographic development, digital marketing, creative media planning and buying, radio and TV advertising, website design and development, email marketing, mobile marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and SEO. To keep up with the latest trends in hospitality marketing and advertising, contact MDG.