How Travel Brands Can Use User-Generated Content

Travel brands have long been on the leading edge of tapping into reviews and social medial tools like Instagram to get their message out. These brands know that visual imagery, videos, and customer opinions are vital to getting people to travel and make reservations.

So, taking advantage of user-generated content is something a lot of travel brands are already doing. These campaigns can help build trust and also drive engagement. Research has shown that user-generated content can increase conversion rates for those customers who have seen it during the buying process.

If you aren’t creating campaigns around user-generated content right now and aren’t quite sure how to use it in your marketing, this is the post for you.

Here are a few ways to start featuring user-generated content in your email marketing campaigns to help drive more consumers to buy with you.

Competitions

Instagram is a vital tool when it comes to building user-generated content. Travel influencers are a huge part of many brands’ overall marketing efforts, and a simple hashtag from them can help drive more people to your brand.

Another way to get people involved is through social media competitions. Send out an email encouraging your followers to post captions and drive your brand’s interactions on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and even TikTok.

You’ll probably get flooded with awesome content that you can use to reach other potential customers. Not to mention, many people get a real kick being contacted by a brand to let them know you loved their photo or video. You can feature these in your emails or repost on your social channels.

Even when you aren’t doing competitions, it never hurts to dedicate time every week to scrolling through your brand name and related hashtags to see what content pops up.

Targeted reviews

The best emails today are focused on personalization. Targeting segments of your customers and giving them the information that matters to them is one way to get ahead in a busy inbox.

User-generated content can come in handy here too. To start, look at your customer data. Through browsing and eCommerce data, you can see who is buying which products, and also where your customers might be interested in traveling to next.

So, you can combine user-generated content with that geo-location to show them only the hotels or destinations or trips that line up to the places that they’re most interested in. With each of these locations, tie in reviews, testimonials, and images that your happy customers have already posted.

Seeing positive reviews about a particular hotel or destination can help drive people on the fence to make a move. Throwing in a little bit of FOMO (fear of missing out) can’t hurt either.

Loyalty programs

A huge driver of customer transactions in the travel industry are loyalty and rewards programs. So, here’s another place where you can combine user-generated content with keeping your most loyal customers on top of your rewards program.

A lot of travel brands love to send emails letting customers know they have enough points to redeem a reward. That’s a great jumping-off point. Now, why not take it a step further and integrate user-generated content into those emails.

For example, you can focus on specific customer segments and send them an email saying they have enough points for a flight to New York City. In the same email, you can include user-generated reviews of nearby hotels, tours, and restaurants that your reader will enjoy.

Even better? You can add extra bonus perks, like double points if they book these additional stays and events through you.

Don’t sleep on user-generated content

As you can see, there are plenty of ways you can start inserting user-generated content in your email campaigns. You can even build entire campaigns around contests that help consumers create more content.

The key is to be aware of what user-generated content can do for your brand. If you are looking for ways to build trust, convey authenticity, and highlight social proof from other happy customers, you won’t find a better way to do it than through user-generated content.