The Philippines is the social media capital of the world, based on global data analytics published by We Are Social and Hootsuite. And in the Philippines, social is the domain of Millennials, those people born between 1981 and 1996. The generation after that, Gen Z, who are born between 1997 and 2012, are equally adept at the use of social media, and both generations are technology savvy.
Social media has been at the core of the everyday lives of Filipinos. It has been used as a source of information, a way to connect with family and friends that you don't always see, and a channel where most brands are able to reach their consumers.
Your presence on social media gives you access to a huge network. Any brand or organization that aims to reach a much wider network can capitalize on social media as an effective platform for brand awareness, engagement and conversion.
For example, why are brands all over social media? Off the top of my head, here are five reasons why we as travel professionals should make use of social media as a platform for our business:
Brand Recognition
Social media is a popular channel where people go to look for travel options. Travelers want answers about where they might choose to go, what to do in that particular destination and how much it will cost them. They include social media channels as a source of information, sometimes even before they start googling it.
The social media page of each brand now also serves as a website where travelers can interact, engage and build a relationship. It's where you can maximize your brand awareness initiatives as well as understand your customer behaviors.
Increase Web Traffic
If you also have a website, including links or captions that contain your website link on your social media profile page helps in increasing your website visitors.
Your website definitely needs other channels to push traffic to it. Through a social media business page, you can start building your own media that connects and complements the engaging content of your brand across all online channels.
Audience Insights
What's good about social media is that it gives you a way to measure how effective your campaigns are. There are built-in analytics that you can use to make better business decisions. These give you input on when your audience is available, what is the most opportune time for you to publish and what types of posts are engaging and converting.
Low Marketing Cost
You basically do not need to pay to create an account. Your campaigns can be organic and do not necessarily need to be boosted all the time for you to pay for sponsored post ads. You can define your budget, and the social media platform will help you decide how to make use of that budget and for what particular goal you're doing the campaign.
Targeted Audience
You can define your target market and your niche. Social media has a way of reaching a wide network and it's up to you to identify the customers that will relate strongly to your brand. The customers you want to attract, engage and convert.
Consistently igniting engagement on social media is no easy task but when done right, it can be powerful. It will drive a massive volume of traffic to your website or other media assets, allowing the brand to acquire new leads, and starting a good conversation that will generate conversions eventually.
Always remember that social media plays a huge role in each stage of your customer journey, and as a travel brand, you want to be where your customers are and to be awesome.
Successful marketing means digging deep into each social media channel and making them your workspace to bring your social media marketing to the next level!
What if there's a framework or a blueprint to help travel business owners, tour guides, travel agents, hoteliers, sales and marketing teams, and even the operations team of a travel-related business optimize their social media marketing initiatives to cover the awareness, engagement and conversion stages of the customer journey.
This will be a gem to have that will ignite a love for travel marketing. I'm currently doing the finishing touches on this passion project, I'll see you in my next post!
* Originally published on Linkedin