The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing for Luxury Travel Brands

Content marketing for luxury travel brands can be tricky. To help you navigate the waters, we will cover how to plan and execute luxury content marketing strategies.

We’ll examine the stages of luxury travel you need to plan content around, the six steps for effective luxury content marketing, and tips to ensure your luxury content marketing efforts succeed. 

The Luxury Content team has over a decade of experience creating strategic content for small and large brands. If you are a luxury travel company looking to leverage content marketing, contact us today for a game-changing content strategy.

Luxury vs. Mass Marketing: What’s The Difference?

Before we get too far into things, we must define our terms.

Two distinctive segments of marketing are the luxury market and the mass market. These two consumer segments have diametrically opposite values and must be marketed and sold differently. 

The primary difference between the two segments is what each wants from their purchases. 

Luxury consumers tend to value highly personalized and exclusive products, services and experiences, as the cost isn’t a barrier to consumption.

Luxury consumers tend to value highly personalized and exclusive products, services and experiences, as the cost isn’t a barrier to consumption. Mass market consumers want value and functionality, opting to get as much bang for their buck as possible. 

The luxury travel market holds to this, with luxury travelers expecting highly personalized services and unique experiences that are often off the beaten path.

Your content marketing efforts should reflect this if you want to reach and resonate with your core audience.

How you can connect with luxury travelers

We will flesh this out more in later sections, but to connect with luxury travelers, you must have a holistic understanding of your desired audience. This means:

• Understanding what they are looking for
• Knowing how you can meet their needs
• Having a clear idea of how and when they want to engage with you
• Knowing where they are looking for the type of content you provide

All of this is best understood by first building out buyer personas. These are semi-realistic representations of your target audience and can help you better understand their wants, needs, and specific pain points that your company solves.

When creating buyer personas, ensure you use accurate data. Try and speak with your current customer base to get answers. If you are launching a new business, try to talk with customers of your direct competitors. 

You may have to guess at some of the data points. That said, make as few assumptions as possible. The more assumptions you make, the higher the likelihood of making decisions off incorrect data. 

To help you build out your personas, I’ve included some basic information about the modern luxury traveler below.

The Profile of Luxury Travelers

If you are serious about succeeding in luxury travel content marketing, you first need to understand who you are targeting. 

Different generations and segments within those generations will require different approaches to content marketing. It’s critical you cater to each of those segments appropriately to maximize your marketing budget.

Luxury travelers by age

While baby boomers and Generation X still dominate more traditional luxury travel, younger generations are increasingly closing the gap.

The luxury travel market is quickly changing in terms of demographics. One of the primary drivers of this change is the millennial and zoomer generations maturing in their careers, leading to higher earnings and larger discretionary spending. 

While baby boomers and Generation X still dominate more traditional luxury travel, younger generations are increasingly closing the gap.

What luxury travelers are looking for

Along with this demographic shift, one of the key changes comes in what luxury travelers are looking for.

However, new generations of luxury travelers seek experiential travel opportunities, with high-end resorts and first-class flights a secondary aspect of these trips.

In the past, many luxury travelers sought stays at 5-star hotels, exclusive cruises, first-class flights, and exotic destinations. Unique experiences were often a part of trips but were not necessarily a focus or the primary purpose.

However, new generations of luxury travelers seek experiential travel opportunities, with high-end resorts and first-class flights a secondary aspect of these trips.

Two of the fastest-growing segments are wellness travelers, with spending expected to grow by 21% annually through 2025. and luxury eco-tourism, expected to register a CAGR of 14.3% from 2021 to 2027.

This points to the need for companies in the luxury travel space to innovate their experiences and highlight these experiences and other local experiential travel opportunities in the content they produce.

Understand exactly what your specific audience is looking for, and plan how to present this information to them at each stage of their travel planning, which will be discussed below.

The 4 Stages of Luxury Travel Planning

For content marketing for luxury travel, the purchase cycle of luxury travelers can be broken down into four distinct stages.

To maximize content marketing efforts, you should address each of these stages. Each phase will require careful thought and planning as different types of content will perform better at each stage, and other segments of your audience will need to be targeted individually.

The fantasy stage – “I think it’s time for a vacation.”

In the fantasy stage, your audience first considers taking a luxury vacation. During this stage, they may be stressed, tired, frustrated, or bored, looking to alleviate these feelings through a luxury trip.

During the fantasy stage, consumers are looking to be inspired. They want to see others traveling and know an adventure awaits them. 

Younger audiences may feel adventurous or excited and want to be in motion. However, these different audiences are turning to a luxury trip as the solution to their problems, feelings, or emotions.

During the fantasy stage, consumers are looking to be inspired. They want to see others traveling and know an adventure awaits them. 

Typically, the type of content they find at this stage will be general and highlight the upsides and benefits of travel. It may focus on specific locations and experiences or be more generalized visuals meant to entice and inspire.

People at this stage may discover content through multiple mediums ranging from television to billboards, social media, blogs, and videos. It’s critical to be open with the type of content you produce and understand at this stage when your specific audience is looking for that content.

The planning stage – “What kind of experience do we want this time?”

Once your target audience has reached the planning phase of luxury travel, they are committed to taking a trip. However, they don’t necessarily know where they will be going and what they will be doing.

The planning stage is your brand’s time to shine. First impressions mean everything here as the planning stage is where people will be narrowing down their options.

This is your brand’s time to shine. First impressions mean everything here as the planning stage is where people will be narrowing down things like:

• Travel destination
• Hotel or resort or alternative stay
• Guided tours and other things to do
• Notable dining options
• Airlines and seating class
• Car rental or public transportation options

Unless a person decides to visit a destination they’ve been to previously, all of these things are up for grabs. So, you need specific content to adequately educate potential clientele to add your luxury brand or business to their shortlist.

Remember, at this stage, people aren’t necessarily making their final bookings yet. Plans will inevitably change as people research their destination, and things like flights and hotel choices will likely change.

During this phase, your primary purpose is to be the most comprehensive source of information for luxury travelers. If you manage this, your marketing efforts will likely pay off when people make their final bookings during the next phase.

The buying stage – “Let’s book everything now.”

At this point, your potential clientele has done sufficient research on where they will be traveling to and what points of interest they want to see. The next stage of content marketing for luxury travel will be the buying stage.

Your content marketing efforts during the buying stage should illuminate audiences as to the benefits of your brand or business over alternatives. 

Your audience is ready to book everything from accommodations to transportation and tours. For luxury travelers, this is also when they will be looking to make reservations at luxury dining establishments or appointments for shopping at more exclusive boutiques. 

If you did your job adequately during the planning stage, your audience would likely have learned about all these things through you. So, it’s natural that your business, whether you’re a travel agent, hotel, resort, or airline, is one of the businesses they patronize. Congratulations!

Your content marketing efforts at this point should illuminate audiences as to the benefits of your brand or business over alternatives. 

Don’t shy away from giving an honest and complete description of the benefits and what might be lacking. Not every luxury brand is the exact match for every luxury consumer. That’s why we have diverse choices in luxury.

However, if you are helpful to everyone who consumes your content, even if they don’t spend with you, you might get a referral. This brings us to the next stage of planning for content marketing for luxury travel.

The exploration stage – “I can’t wait to see what’s out there and share it!”

It’s time for the trip, and your clients are ecstatic! They can’t wait to share everything about their journey with friends and family. 

Your content marketing efforts at this stage should focus on allowing your customers to share easily and often about your brand.

You can almost guarantee that over half of your audience will post images to at least one social media platform. It’s estimated that around 60% of travelers share photos of their trip on social media. When it comes to millennials and younger generations, that number skyrockets to 90%.

Every photo they take is a chance to share your brand with their followers and potentially capture another customer. This is known as user-generated content (UGC), and it’s a powerfully effective and potentially cost-effective way to reach more of your desired audience.

Your content marketing efforts at this stage should focus on allowing your customers to share easily and often. It’s critical at this stage to think outside the box and ensure your presentation of everything is perfect, ensuring greater opportunities for UGC.

Now that you understand these four stages you need to plan for let’s move on to the more actionable areas of content marketing for luxury travel.

The 6 Steps of Effective Content Marketing For Luxury Travel

Each of these steps is critical for content marketing success. Do not skip around, and don’t just skim through them, as you will likely fail to hit the mark, and your content efforts will be scattered and lacking. 

Remember, you are a luxury brand, and effective content marketing for luxury travel means everything must be consistent with this luxury label.

Mapping out your funnels using the stages of luxury travel planning

If you’ve done even the slightest bit of content marketing research, you will already be familiar with the idea of funnels (or flywheels or whatever other shape you choose).

In both sales and marketing, funnels are used as an illustrative way to map out the steps people take when moving from being completely unaware of your product or service to converting into buyers.

Crafty marketers and business owners (including Jeff Bezos) have figured out that a flywheel represents a more effective model. The flywheel more effectively stores and releases energy (or, in this case, engages visitors) than the traditional funnel.

Because this is a beginner’s guide, we will stick to the concept of a funnel as it’s easier for most people to conceptualize. However, the critical thing you need to remember is that your audience will likely move in between each stage of the funnel in a non-linear way, and therefore you should make it easy for them to do so.

You should also consider that just because someone has purchased from you doesn’t mean they have dropped out of the funnel. It’s critical to keep them engaged even after they have taken their trip, hence the exploration stage of planning.

The luxury travel content marketing funnel

There are two primary types of funnels, business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C).

While luxury travel can fall into both, we will focus on the latter of the two as non-business travel represents 80% of world tourism. That said, you can apply this same funnel to B2B audiences.

The typical B2C funnel goes something like this:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

As you’ve probably deduced, we will map our luxury travel planning stages to this content funnel. So, you end up with something like this:

• Awareness – fantasy stage
• Interest – planning stage
• Desire – buying stage
• Action – exploration stage

While these stages don’t correspond perfectly, they should show how to drive people down your funnel into converting and becoming loyal clientele.

Understanding the types of content for each stage of your funnel

Now that you have your funnel stages, you can map content to each stage. This means first understanding the different types of content that perform best at each stage.

While a large variety of content will work for each stage of the luxury travel content marketing funnel, we’ll examine the top five content types for each.

Best content for the fantasy stage

Remember that the fantasy stage is where people are first coming to the conclusion they want to take a luxury trip. Visual content is key here as you want to connect in their minds the boredom/stress/restlessness of their current state to the fun/excitement/relaxation of a luxury trip.

You need to consider all of the places where your target audience is going to consume this top-of-the-funnel content and where it will have the most significant impact.

A fantastic example of this is the billboards often seen along major expressways in cities worldwide that advertise exotic travel destinations.

These billboards can easily be placed along roadways frequented by high-net-worth individuals and others who would take a luxury vacation. It’s also likely the person will see the billboard during heavy traffic when they may be stressed out and probably want to be anywhere other than where they are.

Take this a step further, and you can reach these same people through social media advertising when they get to their office or later in the day when they get home. Depending on their age, you can also likely reach them through television ads. 

All of this serves to hammer home the idea that taking a vacation is exactly what they need to alleviate their current stress.

The five types of content that perform best during the fantasy stage of luxury content planning include:

• Long-form video
• Billboards
• Social media
• Short-form video
• Television ads

There are plenty of other mediums for delivering content that can entice people during the fantasy stage of luxury marketing. Ensure you consistently experiment and try to utilize multiple mediums in conjunction with one another.

Best content for the planning stage

As I noted above, this is your brand’s time to shine. In the planning stage, daydreams and fantasies of taking that luxury trip become a reality. This is also where people decide where they want to stay, what they want to do, and ultimately who they will be giving money to.

Content-wise, this is where you should be providing an extraordinary amount of value, as it’s where you can quickly lose luxury travelers to alternative options.

All of your content should be geared toward helping potential clients to understand their full range of options in terms of dining, hotels, things to do, unique experiences to be had, etc. Everything should be thorough and should be segmented to address all of your different audiences.

Content types that work exceptionally well at this stage include:

• Blog content
• Long-form videos
• Ebooks and guides
• Social media
• Email newsletters

A ton of great content can be created to capture people coming in from the fantasy stage or fresh visitors via social media or search engines.

An example of this type of content in action might be an article providing a mock itinerary for couples planning a luxury vacation with a week to travel.

Let’s examine this using the above example of the billboard for the fantasy stage. Both people know they want to take a vacation to a tropical destination. As each of them drives by a billboard on the way to work advertising the beaches in Thailand, they figure that will be a great place to visit.

Both people know they can get a week and a half off from work, so including flight time, that gives them about six days to visit. So, they begin the planning stage by searching Google for a six-day luxury itinerary to see the different options.

Their search brings them to a blog article on the website of a five-star hotel in Bangkok. This hotel has a complete mock itinerary with everything planned out perfectly.

The article contains videos promoting different dining options, including the hotel’s Michelin-star restaurants. There are also images of other popular luxury spas in the area, including the hotel’s highly-rated spa. Finally, they talk about getting to the islands and provide a mock itinerary, including the hotel’s in-house concierge service and their sister property on one of the larger islands.

This article serves as the starting point for the couple to plan their short vacation and gives them plenty of advice for planning the perfect stay.

Because of this article, the couple, now ready to move to the buying stage after sufficient research, decides to utilize the hotel’s concierge service for booking their vacation to ensure they have a perfect trip without the headache of planning every detail.

One thing to note about content at this stage is you need to account for younger audiences. While older luxury travelers tend to prefer well-planned trips booked by travel agents, younger generations often seek more flexibility. Remember, if you aren’t giving potential clients what they want, another brand is.

Best content for the buying stage

People now understand where they want to go and what they will do. It’s time to make the bookings and purchase things like new luggage or climate-appropriate clothing.

Regardless of what industry you are in, airlines, hotels, agents, guides, or fashion retailers, this is where final decisions are made, and money is spent.

During the planning phase, people try to understand their different options and then shortlist them. However, during the buying phase, they look at the pros and cons of these shortlisted choices.

Content at this stage should focus on the benefits of what your brand offers. You should focus on each audience segment’s pain points and address why your brand meets their specific needs.

Examples of content types that work exceptionally well at this stage include:

• Comparison articles
• Testimonials
• Reviews from previous clients
• Influencer content
• Short-form videos

Continuing from our example above, once the couple wraps up the planning stage, they look at how they will book everything. There are a few options: leave things open-ended and travel without a plan, book everything manually for the entire trip, or utilize a travel agent to plan everything for them.

The article they read providing the mock itinerary led them to information about a travel agent affiliated with the hotel. One of the things that immediately stood out about the service was the many positive reviews from other couples who were in a similar position of only having a week to travel.

Using these testimonials, combined with the many different videos and photos of all the available travel options, the couple decides to go with the service. They reason that they don’t want to waste time or risk potentially poor experiences with only a week to travel.

This service then books them a full luxury vacation itinerary, with stays at both the hotel’s properties in the city and on the islands and then plans luxury tours of each location.

All of this was made possible through content that resonated with the couple and led them to believe this service was better than alternative options and fit their needs perfectly.

Best content for the exploration stage

While the previous three steps focus on the purchase cycle, this fourth stage, the exploration stage, is focused on engaging people after they’ve made their purchases and even long after their trip has ended.

There are ample opportunities to create strong brand advocacy through user-generated content both before a person makes their trip, during their journey, and after they’ve returned home. If you want to maximize your content marketing efforts, making it easy for people to generate and share this content and understanding what other types of content you can deliver at this stage is key.

Some of the best types of content for the exploration stage, both user-generated and brand-generated, include:

• Social media
• Short-form videos
• Customer satisfaction surveys
• Customer support and concierge services
• Loyalty programs

All of your content at this stage should be geared toward helping current customers better enjoy your product or service or making it easy for them to spread the word about your product or service to their friends or family.

Continuing with the example of the couple taking their one-week luxury vacation, what opportunities exist to better engage them with content during the exploration stage?

The hotel they stay at could have QR codes in strategic locations encouraging the couple to leave a review or take a satisfaction survey. When they go out to dinner, the night spots or restaurants could have their social media handles easily discoverable, so any pictures of the couple having a good time are tagged to the establishment and shared with friends and family. All of these businesses, at least the larger ones, can utilize loyalty programs to encourage further travel and develop content around these programs for ongoing marketing.

There are so many opportunities to reach the friends and family of your clientele and increase the odds of repeat business from current customers. Ignore this stage of content marketing for luxury travel at your peril. Your brand could be leaving significant profits and goodwill on the table.

Planning content for each stage of your funnel

This is one of the most important steps when implementing content marketing for luxury travel brands, and it can easily pay tenfold in returns.

You want to be thorough and competent and plan your content flow so that visitors have a linear path through each stage of luxury travel planning.

More importantly, you must understand exactly who you are targeting and what they need from you at each stage. Content marketing for luxury travel brands will look different depending on the type of product or service you offer.

Finally, you need to balance the needs of search engines and users. Many luxury brands have been slow to implement SEO strategies and generate traffic from search engines.

You want to be thorough and competent and plan your content flow so that visitors have a linear path through each stage of luxury travel planning.

Part of the reason for this has been the belief that luxury consumers and travelers prefer to interact in person. More prominent brands have also benefited from being around long before the digital landscape matured and were able to ride on brand recognition alone.

However, the emergence of new players in luxury travel combined with changing demographics means that luxury travel brands should utilize every tool to reach new clientele and better engage loyal users.

Here is a list of actionable steps to take when planning content for each stage of your luxury travel content marketing funnel.

List all the ways your audience will first discover your content

If you follow the advice of creating personas, these can greatly benefit this step. You will need to think about every segment of your audience and how they might first come into contact with your brand.

Remember that this isn’t the same as the fantasy stage of content marketing for luxury travel. While there will be people who first discover your brand during the fantasy stage, there will also be plenty of people coming in at the planning and buying stage.

An example of this would be a person visiting the website of a helicopter tour operator in Manhattan. The person has already been through the fantasy and planning stages and has booked most of their trip. However, one of their friends who’d been to New York previously tells them about a wonderful helicopter tour they took. On the friend’s advice, the person visits the tour operator’s website looking for information about schedules to see if they can fit the tour into their current plans.

In this example, the first time the person visits the brand’s website is during the buying stage of the luxury travel content marketing funnel. If this tour operator had done their homework when planning content, they would already account for people visiting at this stage.

The person doing the content would make it easy for people coming to the website to find their schedule and booking information. Equally, they would make it easy for people at the planning stage to see what they need and understand how these people would stumble upon their content.

Make a list of every segment you have, determine how these people will first come upon your brand, and write this down.

List the final place you want your audience to end up

Next, you need to understand what you want people to do. Are you trying to get people to make a purchase, book a meeting, or contact your brand, or are you just trying to get information for a sales call?

If you don’t know where you want people to end up, you will have difficulty mapping out how you get them there.

List the final destination on your funnel. This will almost always correspond to the buying stage, even though sales cycles will differ based on your company and the product or service you offer (treks to Mount Everest will be a bit different in selling than a stay at a five-star hotel).

Write the final destination of your funnel underneath the points you’ve listed of entry, and then proceed to the next step.

Write out everything they will need to know in between

Go through each of the starting points you’ve listed, where people will first discover your brand and then begin planning the different steps they will go through to get to the final destination.

Remember that different people will interact with your funnel for the first time at various stages of the luxury travel planning process. Some will be at the fantasy stage with potentially zero knowledge of your brand, and some will be ready to buy the first time they visit your website.

Therefore, you must be meticulous in understanding each of the segments you listed and what barriers you need to overcome when moving them down your funnel.

Write down everything you will need to cover for each of the segments you’ve listed, and make sure with each step; you are driving them further down toward a conversion while addressing any concerns and providing value.

List content that can be used to cover these topics and map everything to your funnel

Now that you have a beginning, an end, and a complete list of things to address, driving each segment toward your ultimate goal, it’s time to create your content.

The content you create will depend highly on each segment of your audience and what luxury planning stage they are at when they first come into your funnel.

For example, a person who is at the fantasy stage and has never heard of your brand will need more touch points before they reach the bottom of your funnel than a person whose at the buying stage and came to your brand based on a personal referral.

The content you create will depend highly on each segment of your audience and what luxury planning stage they are at when they first come into your funnel.

Other factors that can influence the types and amount of content you need include:

• Length of the sales cycle
• Cost of products or services
• The complexity of products or services
• How well-established your brand is

Begin going through each segment map you’ve created and write down content from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel, considering the barriers people will have and the other factors listed above.

Look for gaps between each piece of content and fill them

You should now have a list with all your different audience segments where they will first enter your funnel and where you want them to end up.

Between that, you should have a complete list of content that will take them from the starting point to their final destination. Now then, you need to review it again and look for gaps in your content.

Consider logical steps between each piece of content and whether you’ve addressed everything adequately.

The last thing you want is for there to be points between your content that don’t fully satisfy your audience’s needs leaving them to return to Google (or wherever they came from) looking for more information. This will increase the odds your audience will go with an alternative solution.

Once you’ve filled in all the gaps, it’s time to branch out your content formats.

Look for ways to add multiple content formats

Not everyone will want to read an article, watch a video, or look at images. You need to address all of your different visitors to keep them from bouncing off of your website.

Go through each piece of content you’ve listed and consider the different formats you can use to get information across.

Not everyone will want to read an article, watch a video, or look at images. You need to address all of your different visitors to keep them from bouncing off of your website.

To help you out, go through the list above of types of content that can be used for each stage of the luxury travel planning process and use these to flesh out your content. The more value you provide people and the better you address their needs, the better your return will be from your content marketing efforts.

Once you’ve figured out all the different formats you can utilize to add value to your content, there is one final yet critical point to consider.

Make sure all of your content maps to your website architecture

Before you go through and start creating a ton of content, you need to consider your website architecture and how each piece of content will fit into your website.

You don’t just want a page titled Blog or Resources with hundreds or thousands of hard-to-find articles. Instead, you want an intuitive and clean website architecture that makes it easy for people to navigate where you want them to end up.

Think of this in terms of a road trip in the United States, where the final destination for everyone is Los Angeles. Some people will start far away in New York City, and others will begin just a few towns over. Both of these people need a clearly mapped-out path to follow to get to their destination.

For roads, this is addressed through street signs that tell you where you are going and labels of the different transitions and stops along the way.

This is precisely how your website architecture and your content should work. Your content is the road people use to get to the final destination you’ve mapped out. The buttons, calls to action (CTAs), menus, categories, and other navigational tools are the signs that let people know they are going in the right direction and which turns to make next.

Make sure that everything works harmoniously to avoid confusion and have your audience potentially leave for a less confusing or complicated alternative.

Go through one last time to make sure each topic is thoroughly covered

Finally, go through one last time and make sure you have every topic adequately covered, each barrier sufficiently broken down, and everything is working perfectly together.

Content marketing for luxury travel or any other luxury industry can become quite complex depending on the product or service your business offers. So, ensure you are diligent with the planning process to avoid creating problems that do a disservice to your brand.

Content creation and how to stay authentic to your brand

Once you’ve completed mapping out your content, the production process is next. It’s critical here that you don’t take shortcuts.

For luxury brands especially, taking shortcuts during the content creation process can undermine your efforts and lead to an erosion of your brand in the eyes of your target demographic.

First, you need to take all the content you have mapped out and begin to put this content together on an editorial calendar. This is part content creation and part project management, so make sure everything has hard dates for completion.

You should then create content briefs for each piece of unique content. This means all of the videos, social posts, articles, etc. Go through every piece of content, even adding in your user-generated content and creating briefs for how you will capture this and utilize it.

Decide how you want to manage your content creation process. This is typically best done with some project management software such as:

• Trello
• ClickUp
• Asana
• Basecamp
• Jira
• Scoro

There are plenty of other options. However, these project management tools are often used at top marketing agencies like Luxury Content.

Set your content calendar up, then add everything into your project management software with dates and links to any resources needed to complete each piece of content (videos, links, social posts, images, quotes, etc.). Now, you need to source the content creators.

You can have all of this content created internally but will likely run into difficulties with your team maintaining a fresh perspective and consistently outputting quality content on time.

For this reason, it’s highly recommended that you work with an outside content creator or agency that can handle each stage of your content production process without compromising quality.

Whichever decision you make, remember that your brand’s reputation is on the line. Don’t just work with cheap writers, videographers, and graphic designers, or you will eventually suffer from brand erosion.

Amplifying your content’s reach

To maximize the effectiveness of your content, you will need to utilize various methods to amplify its reach and improve potential returns.

These are a few different methods you can utilize to reach the largest possible audience.

Remember that you don’t want to undermine your efforts by targeting the wrong demographic, so thoroughly vet any amplification medium before spending money or allowing them to post your content.

Content syndication

Content syndication allows third parties to republish the content you’ve created. Think of companies like Yahoo that publish an article and say, “Originally published on x website.”

This provides the benefit of reaching the syndicator’s audience and your own. If the audience of the syndication site is highly similar to yours, this method of content amplification and be incredibly effective.

If the audience is irrelevant, it can skew your traffic information with large quantities of poorly qualified visitors, lowering your conversion rates and eating up resources. So, choose carefully when working with a syndication platform.

Social media

For luxury travel brands, working with influencers is a no-brainer. However, you must be highly selective of the influencers you work with.

Choosing the wrong influencer can quickly backfire on you and lead to brand erosion and backlash. Ensure that any influencers you work with are niche-relevant and not just popular. Also, look at their history to ensure nothing in their past or potential future actions will return to haunt you.

Working with influencers is a no-brainer. However, you must be highly selective of the influencers you work with.

There have been several high-profile influencer partnerships that have led to inferior outcomes for the brand sponsoring them. For this reason, stick to micro-influencers with a smaller yet highly relevant following dedicated to your niche versus larger, more general influencers that may be less predictable.

You can have these influencers share your brand’s content and even work with them for original content. As with any other content amplification strategy, ensure you track results.

Advertising

Paid ads are still highly effective for reaching large numbers of relevant people. Using platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, etc., you can pay to have content put in front of billions of people worldwide.

If you opt to go the route of paid advertising, work with an expert who can maximize your budget and reach. Companies can quickly eat through their ad budget and see very few results when first getting started. Skip that by working with a professional.

Email marketing

Regardless of your brand’s size or niche, you should collect emails from current and potential clientele. The money is in the list, as is commonly said.

Your company’s email list is a potential goldmine for amplifying your content’s reach and getting people back on your website.

The best part about email marketing for content amplification is that the people on your email list already know about your brand. This makes them warm leads and ensures they trust your brand enough to provide their email. So, half of your work is already done.

Even better, you can segment these people based on the type of content they consume and where they signed up. This allows you to serve them content relevant to the luxury travel planning stage they are in.

Organic traffic

The final amplification method is the odd man out on this list. Search engines such as Google and Bing are one of the best long-term traffic amplification methods.

That said, unlike the other options, SEO is more foundational to your content creation process and isn’t quite as active a process as paying for ads or sending out emails.

From the moment you start your content marketing, you should have SEO in mind. This means creating high-quality content that addresses the specific needs of your audience, being aware of best practices, and ensuring you have both technical, on-page, and off-page covered.

If you do these things, your brand will eventually begin to rank, and your content will be served to relevant audiences.

Analyzing results and adjusting your content strategy

The final step to content marketing for luxury travel is to measure and improve upon your initial content strategy.

No strategy will be perfect from the start, and there will always be major and minor tweaks that will significantly improve your results. You should also consider that the luxury travel landscape will change; your content must reflect this.

Cities and tour destinations change, new restaurants are built, old ones go away, and just about everything you can think of will change.

You need to have a regular schedule for reviewing your content and improving or updating it.

It’s also critical that you are correctly tracking your funnels with analytics software. This can include tools such as:

• Heatmapping software (Hotjar)
• Event tracking software (Google Analytics)
• Business intelligence (Power Bi)

Ensure all your software is set up perfectly, or you risk corrupted data that can lead to inefficient and ineffective decision-making.

Look out for how well your content is performing, what kind of formats work best with your different audiences, where people are coming from, and potential gaps you may have leading people to bounce from your content.

5 Tips That Can Help Your Luxury Content Marketing Efforts

As an added benefit, here are some tips that can help you to set up your content marketing for luxury travel more effectively. I’ve added these tips specifically for their high-impact potential, so utilize each wherever possible.

Leverage the power of your brand story

Every brand has a story to tell, and if yours doesn’t, it’s likely you aren’t truly a luxury brand, in which case you should be looking for a premium brand strategy instead.

Your story is what makes your brand unique. It’s what separates you from other companies because there aren’t really competitors in the world of luxury, and no two brands are alike.

If you haven’t codified your brand story, now is the time to do so. Without understanding your story, your content will likely appear flat and generic. However, if you have a crystal clear understanding of your brand’s heritage, your content will be unique,

Strike the right balance between written and visual content

The luxury travel industry is unique because there is a healthy mix of older and younger audiences with changing demographics. While older clientele is likely to read articles and emails, don’t discount younger audiences that want video and social content or vice-versa.

We’ve already addressed the different types of content you should utilize at each luxury travel funnel stage. Mixing and matching content and filling in any gaps you might have where audiences can drop out is critical.

Remember that if you aren’t giving your potential clients what they want at every step, another brand is. So, take the time to understand your different audiences and ensure you have content tailored for them at every stage of the funnel, including post-funnel engagement.

Involve your customers with user-generated content

We’ve touched on this a few times already, but user-generated content can be one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. It’s free marketing coming from people happy with your product or service.

The trick is ensuring you are nudging your clientele to provide this UGS. That’s why I mentioned adding UGC into your flow in the content planning stage. Ensure you understand all the different points at which your audience can create and share content for you.

User-generated content can be one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. It’s free marketing coming from people happy with your product or service.

Whether it’s Tik-Tok videos showcasing how fantastic the resort is, how luxurious the first class section is, or how sumptuous the dining looks, your brand can benefit. Everything from user reviews to videos to testimonials can greatly serve your content marketing efforts.

Just ensure you guide the process and curate things so that UGC precisely reflects your brand. This may mean going through and untagging videos that don’t reflect your brand or removing content that you don’t want people to see.

For luxury travel brands, this is critical. Remember, every time your brand is mentioned, whether in your content or user-generated content, it shapes people’s opinion of your brand and either solidifies or erodes the connection you have with luxury in their minds.

Don’t lose your luxury status because you let UGS get out of hand.

Utilize informational and educational content 

For luxury travel brands that sell products, it can be incredibly tempting to publish loads of commercial content driving people to buy, buy, and BUY! However, it will eventually turn people off, like dealing with a pushy salesman in real life.

You must balance commercially driven content with informational and educational content and entertainment. Remember, people are dynamic in their needs and expectations.

This is why you spend so much time mapping out your customers and their journey through your content funnels. It’s why you must map everything to where your customers are in the luxury travel planning journey.

If you are not educating your audience, someone else is. More critically, that will be the brand that makes the sale and establishes a loyal following.

This goes for major brands with a rich heritage and newer up-and-coming luxury brands. Not everyone knows about your brand, and not everyone knows about the luxury travel industry.

As income equality increases globally and new people begin taking luxury trips, they must be educated. What better way than through your content?

Ensure you have a complete content strategy

Finally, don’t skip steps and take shortcuts. Ensure you have a fully fleshed-out content strategy based on your brand’s reality and not just what you want it to be.

This means going through each step of this guide and meticulously following through every process. Your content strategy should be the driving force behind your luxury travel brand’s content marketing efforts.

Don’t skip steps and take shortcuts. Ensure you have a fully fleshed-out content strategy based on your brand’s reality.

A truly complete content marketing strategy should include the following:

• Competitive research
• Buyer personas
• Content guidelines
• Keyword research
• Social media planning
• Video planning
• Article planning
• Content generation workflows
• Brand guidelines
• Editorial calendars

All of this is necessary to ensure you produce comprehensive content consistent with your brand and timely in production.

If you aren’t sure about your ability to create a complete and effective content strategy, we can help. This is one of many comprehensive services Luxury Content offers brands in the luxury travel space, so contact us today.

Getting The Most Out Of Content Marketing For Your Luxury Travel Brand

While luxury brands of all types have been slow to the content marketing game, now is the time to strike.

Newer demographics expect your brand to provide quality content to educate, inform, entertain, and help make purchasing decisions. However, you have a luxury brand to maintain, and your content can’t just be general or lackluster.

Make sure you are comprehensive in your content marketing efforts. Don’t skip steps that can lead to poor quality outcomes.

You will find success if you are thorough in your efforts and base your content marketing efforts on what your audience truly wants.

Devin Hargrove

Ace content marketer with a decade of proven results for small businesses to enterprise brands. Specialized in content strategy and implementation for luxury brands via distinctive and bold content that captivates readers.