“Social media allows us to behave in ways that we are hardwired for in the first place – as humans. We can get frank recommendations from other humans instead of from faceless companies.”
– Francois Gossieaux, The Hyper-Social Organization: Eclipse Your Competition by Leveraging Social Media.
Social media, as part of a holistic, structured SEO strategy can be a useful tool to drive traffic to your brand; thereby, building your brand’s reach. A successful social media strategy, in turn, will increase sales and ultimately your bottom line. It is accepted in the digital media marketing industry that the search engine optimisation methodology provides the map that unites visitors and websites together.
This statement is further backed by the following 2017 statistics, as quoted by SearchEngineJournal.com:
- 61% of all visits to a brand’s website from social media websites come from Facebook.
- More than 2 billion searches are performed on Facebook daily.
- Companies are predicted to spend $79 billion on SEO by 2020.
- There are over 3.5 billion internet users worldwide.
By looking at these figures, we can see the potential that social media marketing (as part of the overall SEO strategy) has on driving traffic to your website and building your influence as a major role player in your business’s niche or category.
Social Media and your travel brand: A case study
The advent of social media has transformed the travel industry and brought with it a huge range of benefits. As a result, it is vital to gain a keen insight into the benefits of travel social media. Consequently, the question that should be asked is how do you go about using social media to market your brand?
By way of answering this question, let’s consider the following case study:
Let’s assume that you have run an African, South American, and Asian adventure travel company from the USA which targets the Millennial generation (18-29 years). Your short- to medium-term goal is to grow your brand globally and increase your website’s ranking on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Here are some tips to help you improve your brand’s global reach:
Develop an ideal persona
As part of the initial development of your marketing campaign, it’s critical that you build a virtual model of what your ideal target audience should look like. The case study mentioned above that your target audience should be the global millennial. Therefore, your ideal consumer is aged between 18-29 years. They live in an online world that is dominated by social media and networking. They are tolerant of ethnic differences. And, they believe strongly in following their dreams, including adventuring around the world.
Social Media platforms
There are many social media platforms available for marketing strategists to use as part of their marketing campaign. Simultaneously, it is important not to dilute your marketing efforts by running adverts across all of these platforms. Therefore, it is critical that you choose the best social media platforms based on the demographics of your target audience. Again, our case study (as well as the statistics mentioned above) show that the millennial generation will use Facebook, Instagram, as well as Snapchat as their primary ways to communicate with their social network.
Visual marketing content
The millennial is also part of a generation that is used to high-quality graphics and highly visual content. Additionally, marketing methodologies have shifted to providing the answer to the consumer’s challenges, wants, and needs. Ergo, the millennial wants to travel and adventure to countries in South America, Africa, and the Indo-Asian region. To attract his/her attention, you need to provide the solution to their desire for unique adventures. Therefore; it is essential to create marketing content that provides the answer to the millennial’s requests.
