With the advent of social media, Trip Advisor and a variety of other influential channels, the very definitions of PR are changing, particularly as it affects the industries of travel and fashion. Reputation management has become a much more complicated and fractured exercise requiring greater skill than ever before. And more time.
So what can you do to reach your customers and hotel guests in today’s crowded arena, with its loud and varied voices?
As a boutique PR agency focusing on the travel and hotel field, we offer our clients a suite of services that cover the gambit, selecting from those we have found to carry the most weight.
Here’s a rundown:
- Editorial coverage – Be it print or online, media exposure in the variety of online and print world, has been demonstrated to carry the most influence. The impact of pictures and text in such respected media as the New York Times, the Huffington Post and Travel and Leisure, carry enormous weight with its readers, and there is staying power that doesn’t exist with the social media. Plus links from the online stories to the property’s website are counted heavily by the search engines.
- Instagram – The visual nature of this media is very persuasive to travelers, and we make the most of it with juicy pictures. Keying into trends such as farm-to-table cuisine, and utilizing hashtags to there fullest are also beneficial. We do translate our captions to Spanish, since a group of our hotels we promote at our travel PR agency are located in Latin America.
- Facebook – This is an excellent place to display editorial coverage and special offers. Building a community on Facebook is essential because it increases loyalty to the brand, and forms alliances with allied brands. Here again, captivating pictures are vital.
- Twitter – Since we have a large following of journalists we post news to our feed, which they often pick up and run with. We also set up feeds for our clients and promote news coming out to increase their following on this everyman’s tool.
- Pinterest – Due to the pictorial nature of this format, it lends itself beautifully to stunning pictures and creative captions. Users of Pinterest tend to be extremely interactive so it’s a very effective way to capitalize on the interactive nature of this media, and build awareness.
With this group of techniques we have found we can effectively build bookings for our clients. Posting regularly – two to three times a week – is essential, so we plan them out at the beginning of the week and upload them throughout the week, always posting on #traveltuesday, #wanderlustwednesday and #beachthursday.
Trip Advisor is a channel of its own, which will be addressed in a future post.