More than half the world’s population uses social media. 59% to be exact.
So knowing how to boost engagement across your communication channels is crucial for marketing success.
It’s not just about how many people you reach. Instead, success comes from how many people actively engage with your messages and content, and ultimately, your brand. If you use the right tactics to boost engagement across your travel business marketing, you should see better results from each campaign you run.
This guide covers some of the most effective ways travel businesses can boost engagement across their marketing platforms.
Understanding engagement
Engagement refers to how people interact with your campaigns and messages. This is an umbrella term that helps you understand how effective your marketing efforts are and how well they’re resonating with your target audience.
Simply put, the more you can boost engagement across your travel marketing channels, the more success you’ll see. This is because if your audience is showing an interest in the messages you’re putting out, this could equate to more conversions.
It’s important that you don’t solely look at reach when running marketing campaigns, but you also consider how to boost customer engagement.
For example, you could send out an email newsletter to 5000 people, but nobody opens it. You could send the same email to 500 people and 200 open it. In this case, higher engagement is more valuable than how many people you reach.
How to boost engagement across your marketing efforts
Whether you’re running ads, publishing content on your blog, sending emails, or more, here are some of the best strategies your travel business can use to boost customer engagement.
1. Set and measure engagement metrics
First, you need to understand how you’re going to measure engagement. This entails establishing what engagement metrics you’re going to follow. It should also include engagement benchmarks and/or goals.
Engagement may look different for every marketing channel you use. And how you measure engagement should align with your goal for that marketing channel. Different types of engagement offer greater value.
For example, social media engagement could be measured in the following ways:
- Likes
- Shares
- New followers
- Clicks through to your website
- Direct messaging
If your travel business is promoting a special offer, you’ll get more value from engagement with your CTA or website link than you would from generating a lot of likes.
So, start by establishing what metrics are important to your marketing goals and which are vanity metrics. Then, understand how you will monitor these metrics. You should be able to do this through the analytics offered by each marketing platform.
Once you measure and monitor your metrics, you can identify where you need to boost engagement to increase your ROI.
2. Understand your audience on each channel
Possibly the best way to boost engagement is to have a thorough understanding of your target audience. This should involve understanding their interests, and pain points.
Refrain from merely looking at plain demographic information here. Instead, you need to understand what would motivate a person to book a travel experience with your business. The better you understand what factors would motivate a sale, the more you can address those factors in your marketing content.
One of the best ways to do this is to create detailed buyer personas for your different target audience segments.
When doing so, you’ll also need to understand your different audiences across your different communication channels. While you may be speaking to the same people on different mediums, the kind of content that people engage with differs on each platform.
For example, people might want to see entertaining or inspirational content on TikTok and Instagram, yet they might want more detailed, informational content through your digital newsletter. Make sure you tailor your content and messaging on each channel to match the interests of your audience.
3. Personalize your content
Following on from the idea of understanding your audience, it’s important that you personalize your messaging and content wherever possible. This means sending the right message to the right person at the right time.
One of the best ways to do this is to use a CRM to monitor all of your customer data and use email and automation to personalize your communications.
For example, your email marketing strategy shouldn't just involve a single list. Instead, you should have segmented lists based on your different audience segments. This could be existing customers and prospects, lists of people who have bought different travel experiences, or engaged with different content.
Whatever the case, segmentation allows you to send more personalized, relevant content to each list. This is a surefire way to boost engagement.
You could also use segmentation and personalization in your paid ads strategy. When running ads that target different audience demographics, or promote different travel offers, make sure you personalize those ads to the unique interests of each audience segment.
4. Focus on effective wording
Your communication and distribution channels might reach a lot of people, but these efforts will be ineffective if your wording is off.
Compelling copywriting is vital for any kind of marketing activity. In order to make this a success, you need to speak to the interests and pain points of your audience and sell the benefits of your offers instead of just selling your products.
For example, you could be promoting a new travel experience on social media. Don’t just write about what the travel experience includes. Instead, touch on elements like how someone would feel when booking this experience.
Mention that it’s relaxing, full of adventure, that it would broaden their horizons, etc. This helps you bring emotion into your messaging, which makes it more persuasive.
The most impactful wording should be included at the beginning. For example, your email subject line determines your open rate. The first paragraph in your blog content determines whether people will keep on reading. The headline of your ad plays the biggest role in getting people to click on the ad.
So, start off all your messaging with a strong hook that speaks to your audience’s interests and makes them curious. This is essential for any communication channel your business uses.
5. Include relevant information
If you’re going to boost engagement across your communication channels, then you need to make sure any information you share is relevant and valuable.
Maybe you’re promoting a tour video, a travel product, or a piece of blog content on previous group trips. In each case, the information you’re promoting has to be relevant to the message you use.
For example, if you’re running ads, the landing page and its URL need to be relevant to the headline and ad copy.
You also want to ensure that you are constantly adding value to any information you share. The best way to boost engagement is to offer something of significance to your audience.
Perhaps your content teaches them something, entertains them, inspires them, or offers something special (like a discount). Incentivizing your audience in some way is an excellent way to boost customer engagement.
6. Use compelling CTAs
Even if you hook your audience in and build up their interest, you won't be able to boost engagement without a strong call to action (CTA).
Your CTA ultimately dictates whether someone engages with your messaging, so make sure that all of your marketing messages are focused around a clear and compelling CTA.
Here are some things to keep in mind with CTAs:
- Ensure that every marketing message is focused on a single CTA. If you include more than one, you could confuse your audience which could negatively impact engagement
- Keep the CTA short and actionable
- Ensure the CTA design stands out. Use colors and bold fonts where you can (in line with your brand pantones)
- Really utilize your CTA to entice a prospective customer to take action. For example “Click Here to Get 10% Off” displays a value proposition. This is more appealing than “Click Here to Book”
The better your CTAs are, the better your engagement rates will be.
7. Make your communications visually appealing
You can boost engagement by enhancing the visual appeal of your content.
Adding plenty of relevant images and videos will make your content a lot more interesting and easier to understand. In fact, 91% of consumers prefer visual content to written content.
This is because visual content is easier to digest and it helps you tell a story without having to actually write out an explanation.
Supporting your written communications with outstanding visual content will certainly boost engagement - especially for travel-related content.
8. A/B test
Your communication channels and messaging should be tested on a constant basis to optimize your results.
You can test various elements of your messaging, such as your subject lines, CTAs, images, ad headlines, and more. This helps you to understand what your audience prefers, which can help you boost overall engagement.
For example, let's say you’re running a search ad campaign. Start by split testing your ad heading in the campaign and see which one attracts the most clicks. Then, optimize your ad to only run with the most engaging heading. The more you test, the better your results will be.
Conclusion
As a travel business, being active on social media is one thing, but boosting efforts across your communication channels is essential for optimal engagement. And the best part - with the right tactics, it doesn’t have to require any extra budget.
This will help you generate more interest in your marketing campaigns, which will ultimately help you acquire more customers, and ultimately, more conversions.
Using the tactics listed above across your social media and marketing platforms can help you to boost engagement and results with minimal effort.
