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This week on the newsletter, we had the pleasure of talking to the Head of PR at SEO Travel, Amelia Selby, about her top tips for getting coverage for travel clients. Amelia delves into how the sector has become increasingly challenging, making it essential to adopt innovative strategies. By following her expert advice, you can help secure impactful coverage and valuable links, ensuring your clients remain at the forefront of the market.
A couple of years ago, you could tell journalists about your client’s half-term deals, write a press release about a beautiful villa or create a simple campaign using travel search data to secure lots and lots of links.
But it’s becoming harder to stand out from the crowd of other tourism businesses, quite frankly, as more and more of them understand the power of Digital PR.
We need to be more creative, more unique and more on the beat than ever before, and these are my biggest tips for doing just that:
#1 Consume all news, not just travel.
If you only keep up to date with the tourism industry, you’ll be selling yourself short when it comes to opportunities. Our biggest hitting campaign, which got hundreds and hundreds of links, was born from us hearing murmurings in the business news that many companies were likely to keep the remote/hybrid working model post-Covid. Our ‘Workation Index’ came out well before the majority of travel publications had even cottoned on about digital nomadism so we were really able to capitalise on this. Don’t overlook what's going on in other sectors and how you can apply this to travel!
#2 Don’t just focus on travel-specific publications for coverage.
In a similar vein, I’d say that just focusing on travel-specific publications will limit your potential too, particularly if your goal is brand awareness. The majority of people who travel for leisure, your client’s customers, aren’t going to be reading Travel Weekly. Think about where they do hang out, and what they do read. House and Garden, Women’s Health, and The Wall Street Journal - these all have travel sections and, depending on who your target audience is, you don’t want to overlook them.
#3 Ride the wave of travel’s turbulence.
Travel has been turbulent in recent years - travel restrictions, airport chaos, overtourism and natural disasters to name a few - so there are always lots of opportunities for newsjacking. Publications will be quick to report on what has happened but they can’t really comment on what impact this will have on travellers, but your clients can. We’ve jumped on things like the ‘Bali Bonk Ban’, the Paris Olympics and countries opening post-Covid and by telling journalists exactly what travellers can expect and what trends our client is experiencing, we’ve secured coverage on the BBC, CNN and CNBC, to name a few.
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