In recent years, the travel industry has evolved and steadily integrated changes that have influenced travel experiences and how agencies market themselves. Research and bookings have moved from the traditional style to existing online, making it compulsory for agencies to optimize website content and engage their customers online.
The industry’s competition is also extreme, with different travel agencies emerging as the days go by. Each of these travel agencies has one end goal – to extend their reach and sell to more travelers than they already have. As a result, staying relevant will mean that you need a strategy (or a string of strategy) that keeps you in the reach of your target audience.
Many strategies can seemingly push you towards promoting your travel agency and increasing your sales. However, within these strategies, only a few stand out and can boost your agency’s visibility.
One of these is the use of social media, particularly Pinterest.
Most travel agencies already understand the importance of using social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook to promote their services, but not many have hit the jackpot with Pinterest. Pinterest has a large audience reach and can be used to promote niche travel opportunities to them.
Why Pinterest?
This social media service is already popular as a bookmarking website for matters ranging from DIYs and crafts, to styling, recipes, and décor. It also makes a viable platform to generate business opportunities for industries that promote the visual culture.
Pinterest and ‘search inspiration’ are very synonymous. It’s distinct from other platforms because it helps users narrow down their interests, wish lists and find out how to get exactly what they need quickly. For users, they can easily look up travel inspiration on Pinterest and are more influenced to make different purchases.
The high-quality images on these platforms tend to capture users’ imagination and attention, and the bookmarking feature (called pins) makes it easier for them to organize their plans on their boards. People and business profiles can follow each other on Pinterest.
How Exactly Does This Work for Travel Agencies?
First, it allows businesses and agencies to use the hundreds and thousands of photos they take on tours. Pinterest allows you to generate content that differs from those on your agency’s website and other social media.
Also, your content is easily segmented based on audience interests and preferences. Pinterest boards are used to organize content according to a specified category. To make it easier for your users, you should make these boards easily searchable and relevant to your travel offering. You can capture your various audience’s attention with high-quality images and short videos that will subjugate peoples’ attention.
Best of all, Pinterest gives you evergreen content that grows over time. This social media service’s travel searches can redirect your audience to your website long after you may have posted your content there. Lonely Planet, with more than 780,000 followers and an average of 3.7 million monthly views, is a leading travel agency with a massive reach, mostly as a result of Pinterest.
Backlinking Pinterest images to the articles and information on your website will always bring back users to your website whenever they click on your images on Pinterest.
The Best Pinterest Strategies to Adopt
Understanding the intricacies of Pinterest allows you to have the best experience when using it to promote your travel agency business. Here’s how to use Pinterest effectively;
Create Showcases for Your Various Audiences
Top on the list is the use of boards to organize your content (pins) based on the defined category, so it’s easily found and relevant to your travel offering. However, it’s important to plan ahead for these boards, even before you start creating pins.
With Pinterest, people are more deliberate with their searches and planning than other platforms. They plan ahead of time and use this platform to build trips through the years. So, it’s important to plan your boards ahead of creating them to include your offerings and the services that people will find more useful.
Once you have the content plan in hand, go ahead to create boards with optimized and SEO-friendly titles and descriptions. The goal shouldn’t be to make so many boards, but to create a few useful and optimized boards.
Create boards with pins for wedding trips, yoga retreats, or any other themed retreat that you offer. Also, one reason why a lot of people travel is to explore new tastes. Make sure you create boards for trips that’ll interest foodies. Create various segmented boards based on your audience’s interest.
Treat your boards a little more than mere lists. Regard them as website pages. Invest time in developing them as much as you will for a typical website. From good page title, to meta-description, to SEO-ranking, you always need to make sure your pages are optimized so you can stay relevant in Pinterest search results. A tool like Yoast can aid your SEO and meta-description optimization so that you can focus on other strategies.
Use High-Quality and Optimized Images
The key to making it big time on Pinterest is to use high-quality images. There’s no way around that if your plan is to optimize your travel agency’s options and attract your target audience. Whenever you take photos, whether of food, people, or places, make sure you use a high-quality camera to take those photos.
Beautiful and high-resolution images attract a higher percentage of users on Pinterest (especially those on mobile), so you want to make sure your images fit nicely and catch their attention.
Another thing to pay attention to is how these images fit the correct sizing on Pinterest. Pins on Pinterest are best optimized to suit the purpose they’re created for. Most of the pins are in portrait orientation and have a maximum width allowance. Pinterest suggests a 2:3 or 600px wide x 900px high aspect ratio when sizing pins for travel companies.
Creating pins in the perfect dimensions that fit mobile and desktop views gives your agency’s offerings a higher chance of reaching and converting your target audience. Also, you don’t necessarily need to engage the expertise of a professional designer to do this.
A tool like PosterMyWall allows you to create images that fit perfectly in Pinterest while enabling you to go the extra mile by creating tempting advertisements for your next tour.
You’ll also usually need to provide text overlays to your images (they are referred to as rich pins) to give more context to your photos. PosterMyWall can efficiently take care of your editing needs on Pinterest, giving you more time to focus on other necessities.
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Take Advantage of Smartfeed
One feature that has come to be the definition of visibility and traffic direction for Pinterest users is SmartFeed. This is the Pinterest algorithm that helps increase the relevance of the Pins a user sees for their personal interests.
Users only have Pins that are relevant to their Likes, Interests, and the Boards they follow. The key factors that may influence Pins’ ranking for the Smart Feed are domain (profile) quality, individual pin quality, pinner quality, and topical relevance.
Some necessary steps need to be taken for you to take advantage of SmartFeed.
- First, your website needs to be verified. This increases your recognition and trust on Pinterest.
- Next, make sure all your Pins are well described and optimized with relevant keywords. This applies to those pins and their descriptions on your profile. However, you shouldn’t stuff your description with Keywords because doing that creates terrible experiences for users and increases your bounce rate. Such a strategy only calls the potential audience’s attention but doesn’t necessarily convert them. An enticing description with the necessary keywords is the way to optimize your Pinterest.
- Then, always work with great visual and written content because that’s the only way SmartFeed will pick up your content.
You now know how essential Pinterest is to your travel business. But just as it’s important to your business is the same way SmartFeed is to your Pinterest profile. The key is to keep optimizing your pins and making them stay relevant in the long run.
Promote Your Pinterest Profile and Pins
Once you have your profile up and running, you need to inform your current audience about it and keep attracting new people to the services your agency offers. There are different ways to do this, but top on the list is to promote and connect it to your other social media platforms.
You most likely have accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and the likes (if you don’t have these, then you should open right away!). Inform your audience about this and post these platforms about the new development.
Besides, from your website and social media, you should have been able to curate an email marketing list. Send newsletters to your subscribers to inform and invite them to connect on Pinterest. And as you keep sending newsletters, include Pinterest call-to-actions on your newsletters.
Final Thoughts
Using Pinterest for your travel agency is vital. Not only is it essential, but it’s also an easy and straightforward way to market your business. Once you take the right steps from the onset, you can continue to enjoy the benefits of a great pin long after it’s created.
With these useful strategies, you can utilize this platform alongside others to maximize your business and extend your reach to get more travelers interested in traveling with you.
