How to promote the personal brand of a travel expert
The world is changing at a tremendous speed, with the advent of new technologies business processes are changing, and now, making a purchasing decision people are less focused on price policy and prefer to buy from specific people they know as experts and trust. Therefore, a personal brand gives a good impetus to any business, including tourism.
For travel experts, developing a personal brand is an opportunity to open up related areas: consulting other people, directly monetizing social networks by selling advertising, creating educational products, etc. In this article, we'll look at the steps worth applying to strengthen your promotion strategy and take your sales to the next level.
How and where to position your brand In the first stage, it is important to determine the positioning of the personal brand and choose a niche with which people will associate you. In the field of travel can be two options. You can position yourself as a generalist in the selection of different tours in different countries. When you have skill in a certain direction you can choose a narrower niche, for example, independent travel, hot tours, etc. In this case, people will be easier to associate you with a particular direction. Before you choose a niche, it is worth taking into account the level of competition and if a certain area is over saturated by strong players, it is necessary to shift direction. On the other hand, it is worth paying attention to the presence of interest and demand.
The second preparatory element is the choice of the platform. Even though the number of social networks is increasing, the focus of attention of entrepreneurs narrows to the classical version, Instagram. There is no doubt that Instagram occupies a leading position because it has more advertising opportunities, higher activity, and faster returns. Instagram is a social photo album where people initially focused on interpersonal relationships, which is very important for the development of a personal brand. Instagram has multiformatness: posts, Stories, videos, live broadcasts, Reels. This touches on different points of perception, users perceive you visually, hear your voice, have the opportunity to ask you questions, and so on. As a result, this builds recognition and perception of you as a person and as an expert.
In any way, your activity should be diversified and your brand should be presented on different platforms because one of the most important qualities of a personal brand is adaptability.
How to form an effective content strategy Different people have various principles of information perception and decision-making. There are emotional buyers, who need to be ignited, surprised, and delighted. There are rational buyers for whom you have to provide specific numbers. The category of buyers exists who pay attention to social proof, for whom testimonials, and successful cases are important. These people look at overall profile statistics, so for young accounts, it is effective to buy Instagram followers and other involvement metrics to build trust. As a result, for your strategy to be effective and bring results, you should publish a variety of content.
In the main feed, you can publish tour reviews, hotel guides, tour comparisons, interviews with experts, a summary format that provides customers with concentrated information, for example, from the city guide.
In Instagram Stories, it is effective to publish reviews of your tourists, broadcast backstage from travels, create micro master classes and recommendations for travelers. You can also make a selection of interesting attractions, places to dine, or hotels, and engage your audience with surveys. For the travel industry, the ideal direction is Instagram games, when you offer people to play a particular game in which there is a promotional element. The purpose of this format is to involve the audience as much as possible and through the experience of gamification, convey information about the product. Moreover, games in Stories are an effective tool for increasing reach.
Conduct live broadcasts, which can be in the format of communication with subscribers, a detailed master class, a review of trend tours, analysis of a particular case, etc.
It is desirable to publish content three times a week and maintain the following ratio: 40 percent of expert content that brings the most value, 40 percent of product content where you talk about specific tours, and 20 percent of personal content that broadcasts your lifestyle and showcases you as a multifaceted person.
How to promote a personal brand Instagram is a place where there is a large concentration of experts, companies, and personal brands. Because of that, the entry threshold grows and it becomes more and more difficult to promote for free. Nowadays, to quickly get out of the shadow of competitors, people buy real followers, likes, comments, etc. It allows to quickly generate initial profile results, to create a mass effect and a trusted first impression for new users. This is an effective marketing step that can significantly increase attention retention and raise the effectiveness of the next advertising steps.
The classic tool of promotion is targeted advertising. One of its important mechanics is dynamic advertising. For example, you can make five images, and ten texts, the system will form different advertisements and begin to show for different segments of the audience. As a result, the system remembers the successful patterns and shows users the ads to which they respond better, which greatly increases the effectiveness. Use the Lookalike Audiences tool. You can upload your customer base, the system will analyze what they have in common and search for the same audience to show them your ads. Another effective tactic of targeted advertising is working with micro audiences. This tool provides the ability to show ads to one specific person and is effective in the case you want to reach the decision-maker. In general, confident mastery of targeted advertising is a basic business skill of the modern man.
Working with bloggers is another profitable tool for promoting your personal brand. You can buy posts from niche opinion leaders or if you have an initial audience, you can do mutual PR and exchange announcements with the blogger in your posts. These methods help to attract a lot of loyal and interested audiences.
To sum up, developing a personal brand is one of the most effective ways to create a steady stream of tourists. With the right approach, you can build a community of loyal audience and your Instagram account will become a valuable asset with enormous financial potential in the long term.
