Should you use blogging or email marketing for your travel brand?

Less than five years ago, starting a blog was a big marketing focus in the travel community.

Not only were SEO bonuses very appealing, but travel blogging was also an incredibly popular format that promised a large target audience if you found the right niche.

Although most travel blogs are still powerful, email marketing he also had a moment in the last few years.

With low cost, high return on investment, and a simple way to maintain customer engagement, questions have recently arisen about whether sharing content via email is better than posting it on a blog.

First of all: this is not a post that compares the two approaches to crowning a joint winner.

Creating blog content and email marketing are two quite different types of content and both have their advantages.

However, if you are a new travel brand wondering what format to focus on, or want to change your marketing strategy by investing more resources in the approach, it is definitely worth considering each one taking into account several different factors.

This post will help you do just that.

Benefits of blog content

Blogging is a form that has been around for decades.

Whether you’re a big travel brand with a blog on your site or a dedicated travel lover who runs a blog and shares their stories, this kind of content has many benefits.

The first advantage is more useful for brands with sites that offer a product or service. Having a blog is a great way to drive more traffic to your site and reach potential customers who may not have been affected by traditional advertising material.

On average, companies with a blog see 55% more site visitors than not, so there is huge potential to increase your customer base.

From an SEO standpoint, a blog that you regularly update with new content can do wonders about how well your site ranks in search engines.

Not only can you increase traffic by creating content that targets long-tailed keywords, but have a blog indexing also helps support the rankings of your commercial sites.

A blog can also be a very useful tool for building links, which in turn helps to increase the ranking of your website.

Blog content can help promote your brand as a source of authority in your industry. By consistently sharing valuable and engaging insights, you will gain a reputation as a reliable source of information.

This will lead to greater brand awareness and help increase the customer base.

Finally, when it comes to brand image, blog content is one of the best ways to establish a “voice” and tone that your audience will recognize.

Regularly posting new posts on your travel blog, all of which embody the values ​​of your brand, will help improve visibility and enhance your image, especially if that tone is reflected in all of your other marketing channels.

Benefits of Email Marketing

Email marketing has as many benefits as writing blog content, whether you’re sending regular newsletters, moving leads down the customer funnel, keeping in touch with existing customers, or increasing the engagement of your target audience.

More commercial brands typically use email marketing to promote products and offers, but email marketing is often another channel for sharing content and communicating with customers in the travel industry.

One of the biggest benefits of email marketing is that it is a fairly inexpensive strategy that is ideal if you are a relatively small business or travel blogger working alone.

You can also run campaigns without too much effort if you’re willing to put in the work in the beginning, making this approach pretty easy to run even without a lot of experience.

A key advantage that is often mentioned in email marketing is its impressive return on investment (ROI).

Exact numbers will vary by industry and campaign type, but on average they can create brands about $ 36 for every $ 1 spent on email marketing, which is an impressive statistic.

The nature of email marketing means that recipients of your content must provide their contact information to join your mailing list, which means that everyone who reads your content is already interested in what you share.

This means that your audience is much more involved with your content than any other channel, leading to a higher level of interaction and more successful conversion.

Another advantage is that uninterested recipients can unsubscribe so you don’t waste time or resources presenting your content to people who won’t be dealing with it.

Commitment is a general advantage of email marketing, both with existing and potential customers.

When you send email content, you send (sometimes customized) messages straight to your audience’s Inbox, which means they’re much more likely to engage with that content than any of your other marketing efforts and feel closer to your brand. brands because of this.

Sending regular email content can be very helpful for travel brands who want to keep their offer in front of the heads of their audience.

For example, when potential customers decide to book a vacation, they first go to the website of this brand.

Email marketing ensures that you maintain regular contact with your audience and build a relationship with that communication that will hopefully lead customers to think about your brand independently and increase conversion rates.

Finally, another key advantage of email marketing is that it is a great channel for distributing customized content.

80% consumers are told that they are more likely to shop from brands that offer a customized experience, so customizing your email and providing relevant content on your mailing list means you are much more likely to increase your audience.

Audience involvement

Attempting to market email marketing and blog content is counterproductive. Both approaches have very different purposes and are often used together as part of a broader marketing strategy.

However, one area of ​​overlap between the two is audience involvement, which offers some interesting comparisons to explore.

Commitment is an essential part of the user experience, and a good user experience is the key to a positive brand image, repeat customers and business growth.

Today’s consumers have more choices than ever before about the content and brands they support.

The travel industry is a sector where competition is particularly strong, so engagement is something that almost every brand strives to improve.

Travel blog content can improve audience involvement if you take the time to produce interesting, emotional, and valuable content that your audience is really happy to read.

Once a reader is on your site, use banners and calls to action to encourage them to engage with other blog posts and landing pages, consolidating your brand in your mind and hopefully starting to move down the funnel customers against booking.

However, you must first gain interested readers who arrive at your blog.

And if they don’t make a purchase or inquiry on your first visit, you need to make a strong enough impression that they will return to your blog themselves and read more content there.

This is one devilish challenge.

The state of the world we live in today means that brands are not just competing with each other for the attention of potential customers. They also compete to fill the limited amount of time modern consumers have each day to read and collaborate with new content.

Most people don’t have time to look for new things to enjoy; they want the content at their fingertips to get involved immediately without too much effort.

This is where email marketing comes into play.

Blogging has certainly experienced its heyday and remains a very valuable channel that is soon going nowhere.

However, to get your customer’s attention while driving to work, cooking a kettle, or scrolling before bed, reading an email that’s already in her inbox and contains a select selection of stories, ideas, and further reading will be a clear first choice before searching . instead, post a blog post.

Is there still room for blogs that regularly post long-form content for their audiences?

Of course!

However, as attention declines, concerns about device separation grow, and the desire for instant gratification is greater than ever, email marketing has a lot to do with it, making it the perfect form to reach and engage today’s consumer.

When should you create blog content?

As described at the beginning of this article, there is no “winner” when comparing blogging to email marketing.

There are many instances where creating blog content is the best choice in the travel marketing strategy we’ve listed below.

• You can create large amounts of content.
• Your target audience enjoys collaborating with long-lasting informative content.
• You are skilled writing content that keeps the reader engagedit resonates emotionally with them and helps them transfer from the present moment.
• You already have an established blog with some recurring readers.
• You are a travel brand that values ​​sharing unique tips and insights just as much as you value bookings.
• You target longtail keyword phrases as part of your SEO strategy.
• You want to increase the amount of traffic that comes to your site.
• You want to establish your brand as a leader of thought or a reliable source of advice in your sector.

When should you create email content?

Some factors suggest that creating email content such as a newsletter or regular “rounding out” would be the best approach.

• You have limited resources to write content, which means creating short email newsletters is more manageable.
• You have a limited budget to build your marketing strategy.
• You have the ability to write shorter, instantly appealing pieces of content.
• You want to develop a sense of “community” among your clients and build closer relationships with them.
• You already have a good amount of content to share on your site.
• Looking for ways to move more leads down the customer funnel.

The best way forward

If possible, the best way forward is to dedicate time to developing blog content and email as part of your broader marketing strategy.

Email marketing can take a variety of forms, from automated messages to remind customers of what they’ve seen on a website, to more personalized brand messages that share stories, insights, and tips.

Many brand newsletters include links to content on their blog, which is a fantastic way to combine these two approaches and drive more traffic to the site, while attracting the customer’s need for instant, easily digestible content.

The best way forward is to combine your approaches and use both blogging and email marketing in an integrated way.

Start by focusing on creating an attractive, evergreen blog content. Once you achieve a good stock of content, focus more on email, where you can use that content to more actively build community and collaborate.

If you are an established travel brand, it is likely that you already have both techniques in your marketing strategy.

In this case, it’s worth considering the impact your email content has on customer engagement, and whether you could tailor the content you send to improve it while updating your blog and linking back to these new posts in your emails.

If you are a new brand developing a marketing strategy, follow the above conditions and decide where you want to focus your efforts based on your goals and capabilities.

As this post pointed out, both email marketing and blog content creation have their advantages. Both are extremely useful methods by which travel companies can establish a recognizable brand image and attract their audience.

Instead of crowning the winner between the two, consider the value each of these formats has for today’s consumers and adjust your offer accordingly to achieve the best possible results.

More sources:

---

Selected image: ra2 studio / Shutterstock