Blog post by Sarah Salord, GEC PR Company Director
Top Marketing Tips for Brands Looking to Target the Family Travel Market
With the summer holidays upon us, it’s clear to see there’s a renewed focus on family travel. The pandemic unfortunately forced many families to be separated for long periods and as a result, families are now looking to make up for lost time with reunion and muti-generational trips away, both abroad and in the UK.
For travel brands looking to target the lucrative family sector, here are my top marketing tips for appealing to this every-changing demographic:
- Create multi-generational content – Think about the audience you’re reaching out to and create content tailored to their needs and content consumption habits. For example, are you looking to connect with the near retirement Baby Boomers who may prefer high-quality and detailed content, or social media savvy Millennials looking to get their information from quick online content and videos? Create a marketing plan with newsletters, emails and blog posts which target these audiences and delivers information in their preferred channel.
- Build an emotional brand connection – Understand the needs and priorities for your audience and showcase this in your marketing. For parents looking for some much-needed rest on holiday, shout about on-site experiences such as kids’ clubs or cinemas. For parents or grandparents wanting to spend quality time with their children or grandchildren, promote engaging activities they can enjoy together such as cooking classes. Tailor the marketing activity to showcase the activities available and how they will enhance the holiday for each member of the family.
- Shout about family-friendly offers and services – Incentivise families to book with your brand by promoting the family-friendly offers or events, tailoring the brand benefit to each family member. This could be a ‘kids-eat-free’ offer on a particular day of the week, helping families keep spending to a minimum, or an event catered to an age-group such as toddlers or teens. These can be promoted in a monthly newsletter and across social media channels and family-friendly groups such as Mumsnet.
- Share inspirational brand content through a monthly blog – This provides a channel to keep customers and potential customers up-to-date on new things taking place at the hotel, restaurant or destination and to showcase what makes your brand unique. Sharing content in a Blog section on the website will also help with SEO and can increase the website Google ranking, making it easier for people to find your website during the crucial research stage of the booking journey.
- Share positive experiences online – It’s important to build trust with customers through online positive reviews so encourage previous guests or clients to share their positive comments and experiences on social media, generating word-of-mouth advertising. Create a bespoke hashtag for online users to include in their posts and this will enable you to follow and find the comments easily, and to re-share across your own brand channels.
- Bring Brand Ambassadors onboard – Working with relevant and authentic brand ambassadors can be an effective tool for building a brand profile and connecting with your target audience. This could be a well-respected family-focused content creator living in the area or a high-profile and well-known TV personality. Work in partnership with the ambassador to create an engaging and effective content plan, to engage with your target audience or consumer.