How Travel Agencies Can Use Instagram Ads Effectively
I will share you some tips to help your travel agency to get more attention on Instagram.
First of all, it is not an easy process and you can not get the desired results overnight.
One effective strategy is to collaborate with influencers in the travel industry who have a large following on Instagram.
By partnering with them, you can reach a wider audience and increase your agency's visibility.
1. Create Visually Stunning Content
Instagram is a highly visual platform; it's crucial to stand out with show-stopping content.
Travel agencies can use Instagram Ads to reach potential customers and show them the beauty of travel - but first things first: creating that content.
When you scroll through an Instagram feed, you’re assaulted by a huge variety of different images and videos.
For travel agencies and DMCs to break through that noise, you’ll need to consistently create visually stunning content that reflects your brand, showcases stunning destinations and experiences, and gives potential customers an idea of the vibrant cultures they can explore with you.
Show off the best of what the world has to offer on your feed.
That means uploading beautiful photographs of picturesque landscapes, exotic cityscapes, and sandy beaches.
Visiting clients should see the authenticity of what makes that destination special, from the bold colors of storefronts to the ancient ruins of a destination.
If your destination is already used to attracting a lot of visitors and followers, refocus.
Show what's new, showcase off-the-beaten-path experiences to entice those who have been tempted to travel.
Consistency is key to branding, and it’s no different on social media.
Having a cohesive and recognizable feed will help people remember your brand, its aesthetic, and why they should follow along with you.
You can use any trip as an opportunity to create 'photo shoots' to promote your brand.
If the center business is Youth Wholesaler, make sure you’re targeting young people.
You can take care of replenishing yourself against backpackers regardless of status.
Try out numerous visual formats. Videos, boomerangs, and carousels can boost your engagement rates.
If you're a little rusty with your video skills, don't worry: Instagram’s music and creative tools can help boost your video game.
Our tips help you combine photo and text to create video ads.
Artistic direction is important.
Ultimately, if everything you create for your Instagram feed is visually cohesive, potential followers won’t want to leave.
Feel free to make a dad joke.
Appealing visual content is a must, especially in the travel industry.
Studies have shown that people can derive a great deal of pleasure from simply looking at vacation images, which can make them more interested in a brand’s travel services.
You have the option to simplify your life with tools such as the Plugger for Instagram Post Generator. This resource can create Instagram post templates and Instagram Story templates from text with high quality.
2. Leverage Carousel Ads
Carousel ads are a unique ad format that Instagram has popularized.
They allow travel brands to showcase different visuals in a digital flyer.
Carousel ads are the perfect way to showcase multiple offerings at once.
Travel agencies can use carousel ads to showcase room types, various destinations, or multiple itinerary days.
Create a collection of visuals in your carousel that spans a spectrum of selections, experiences, or services a client could hire you for.
Travel agencies can display itineraries, room types, inclusions of their trip packages, meal samples, or even former clients during various stages of travel.
Because the format is so interactive, it’s recommended you plan your ads out so that the first slide has the most immediate appeal, capturing a quick tap, while the remaining slides capture a longer look.
Each image of your carousel is coupled with an individual caption, so it’s essential to post some gorgeous, explorative imagery that holds depth for a tapped-to-expand caption.
When the user swipes through a carousel, a call to action in your caption can encourage a deeper level of eventual engagement from the user.
Carousel ads typically see significantly more web traffic than static sponsored posts.
Therefore, this format is ideal for showcasing some of the multitude of experiences that come with your trips; a consistent and fulfilling, beautiful journey can occur throughout.
To personalize your clients’ experience interacting with your content in the feed, multi-image format carousel ads are an invaluable tool.
Plan your ad to be explained through a series of highlights throughout the carousel. Keep in mind the sequence of space repetition and sequencing to optimize for information retention.
If you put the same winning image first in the ad, you have more room for data on which other images in the content series were received the best.
By mixing and matching the types of visuals shown and the order in which they come into play, and by comparing calls to action to particular sequences, even more feed ad performance optimization can be gained.
3. Incorporate User-Generated Content
In your experience, what has been the most effective way of building engagement? T
urning your account into an interactive space where your followers can share their experiences and dreams they would love to see come true?
That's the first and most successful strategy used by travel agencies with an Instagram account.
By creating a branded hashtag, you encourage your clients to take a photo inspired by a specific theme and with a tag in a determined place.
The content produced will be user-generated and serve to broaden your reach.
What's more, the written content will also be a persuasive element on your behalf, helping to build trust and a feeling of community around your brand.
Consumer photographs on informative accounts are seen as authentic testimonials and go a long way in persuading others.
This strategy lowers the cost of content production, making it more feasible, and increases your clients' fidelity to your brand since your fans will reuse content or gain visibility on your behalf with their captions and tags.
Far from being an irrelevant audience strategy, showing content produced by you or your clients increases interaction rates. Go the extra mile by showing how you value the photos shared by your clients.
Feature a story and share the user-generated content with your social media following. Personalize the content with the story behind the travel.
The emotional impact of contrasting the idyllic destination with everyday life or challenging times is quite impactful and gets people emotionally involved. Share the story as written by your client to further personalize the material and show your brand's possible involvement.
Showing unique or idiosyncratic aspects of travel can also work positively. Feature images of clients hugging their nearest and dearest, or that unmissable sunset from the destination. Highlight the aesthetics or visual appeal of the photos you show, wherever possible.
Just remember to respect image copyright if you intend to share them for business. User-generated content can be a smart way to project credibility and authenticity, both crucial ingredients in the marketing of travel.
4. Target Strategically
Choosing the right target for a travel agency ad to run can determine its ultimate effectiveness.
Travel agencies can use data on the people who are most likely to go on trips and focus their ad targeting on those same demographics, interests, and behaviors.
Customer behavior can tell a travel company a lot about what is important to a potential customer when they are booking, like destinations or types of vacations. The travel company can then tailor their ads to reach people who have a high likelihood of being interested in that place or vacation type.
There is a precise targeting feature where you can set parameters based on audience age, gender, language, and location to reach those interested in travel and take vacations. Travel agencies or companies can narrow down ad targeting options, then do an A/B test on different interests, behaviors, and lookalike audiences to see what’s most effective before running a large travel ad campaign.
Lookalike audiences expand the reach of existing ad campaigns by using similar demographics to those already interested in a travel agency’s product.
Travel agencies can target lookalike audiences based on factors like website visitors, previous customer lists, and total conversion lift or desired audience sizes. Companies can tailor travel ads based on seasonal interests, like cruises in the winter or summer vacation travel in February.
Customize ad targeting options to reach people interested in travel and vacations who are more likely to convert. The more detailed the ad targeting, the better the ad results will be in the end for a travel agency.
5. Use Video Ads Effectively
Video ads are quite powerful on Instagram, offering opportunities to achieve both higher reach and stronger interest.
Using a video ad, travel agencies can develop more dynamic content that showcases an immersive travel experience.
Picturesque landscapes, exhilarating activities, and exotic cultures are better conveyed through a 5- to 30-second video that can captivate viewers.
The real objective here should be to emotionally connect a potential customer with the products or experiences being marketed.
Show ancient ruins juxtaposed with contemporary life in that location, providing viewers with an understanding of what it feels like to really "be there."
Dynamic storytelling is key, as successful video ads can help a viewer "get lost" in the content.
No time to get lost?
Compelling calls to action in video content can further boost interest and conversions, but there is no need to do any hard selling.
An effective call to action doesn’t have to be an advertisement in itself, just a gentle nudge towards the next step—finding more information or booking that next holiday. A video ad's objective is to showcase fewer features or offerings in more detail.
Viewers seeing your ad content have a higher level of organic interest in your product or destination.
That's why a video ad, which shows more, can further qualify an audience.
By showcasing a trip in 15-30 seconds, a person will either swipe past your ad or dig deeper on your website.
Subtitles or captions within videos help you reach the nearly 85% of users who watch without sound. Captions on video ads can boost video view time.
6. Offer Exclusive Deals
Promoting exclusive deals and offers on your Instagram can create a sense of 'FOMO' (fear of missing out) and encourage your followers to act now and book with you instead of your competitors.
This could be a special limited-time promotion, a unique package, or a value add that is only available to users who follow you on Instagram.
By clearly communicating your 'Instagram Exclusive' deals and offers through your posts and stories, you can create excitement and encourage engagement with your content.
Bonus tip: use a countdown function on your Instagram Stories to clearly communicate that this offer is time-based and requires quick action.
When using Instagram advertising for your travel agency, it's important to measure the success of your promotions over a set period of time and use your discoveries to influence future campaigns.
Exclusive deals on your Instagram can be developed into a series of regularly scheduled ads on your feeds that communicate savings, provide a value proposition, and feature your visually attractive travel content.
How regularly you post a new value proposition and media can be based on your target audience's shopping or travel plans. This means your travel agency needs to understand who your target audience is and when you can influence their decisions to provide a connection between your products and the planning or travel stage.
Alongside the content calendar promoting exclusive travel deals or packages, your business also needs to provide Instagram Stories when advertising.
These stories can show different angles of the destination, hotel package, or tour, provide further information or a traveler testimonial, and direct interested parties to more detailed information.
7. Partner with Influencers
One effective way for a travel agency to market its services with Instagram advertising is to partner with a social media influencer.
A travel influencer who genuinely shares a love for travel could post about their own travel experiences through your travel agency on their account.
This real, authentic content communicates to their followers the type of service your agency offers and creates valuable social proof that your business is established and trustworthy.
By partnering with the right influencer and community, your message gets extended and reaches even more ideal potential clients.
Anyone can commit to being a travel influencer online, but the best ones are those who are passionate about traveling and sharing their experiences. That, ideally, is what makes them influential. Essentially, influencers and online personalities who have an active following are putting in the work that aligns with the values of what a travel agency can help provide, without you initiating it.
Here are some insights on choosing an influencer for a social media advertisement campaign: work with those whose personal brand aligns with your target demographic, create a brief that details the project from start to finish and is clear with expectations, track engagement and keep an open line of communication, collaborate on sponsored posts or takeovers, factor influencer collaborations into your usual advertising strategies, build longer-lasting relationships with influencers, and watch transaction and session data.
8. Retarget Website Visitors
If a traveler checked out your website before but didn’t book, their interest is definitely worth re-engaging.
As they scroll through their Instagram feed, well-crafted ads for your travel agency can display images, prices, or deals for trip packages they already viewed, tempting them back to your site.
With Instagram, you can tailor the creative and messaging in your retargeting ads to the exact destinations and offers website visitors have already shown interest in.
One way to entice users to take the next step after researching trips on your website is to include an incentive in your Instagram retargeting ads.
You could use seasonal deals and discounts for a destination or travel services page the user visited, a reminder if the user researched just one part of a package but not the full trip, or deals they can only get if they book soon based on airline pricing and other market insights.
The combination of retargeting messages that will resonate best with potential travelers may vary by vertical or brand. It’s a good idea to test multiple retargeting messages in your Instagram ads, targeting different groups of users who have visited specific areas of your website. For even more control, you can also tag users when possible who have visited your website to research a trip but did not complete a booking, thus making any good retargeting campaigns trackable by including direct response tactics, such as a promo code, in the ad or promotional offer.
Be sure to measure response like clicks or email sign-ups from these campaign viewers on your website or blog to gauge their engagement.
If it is positive, count this as a response. Retargeting is super effective, especially when it comes to increasing conversions from panelists. It’s a great way to keep your travel product top of mind with people who express an interest in traveling.
9. Test Different Ad Formats
You'll often see images of dream destinations accompanied by the words 'book now.'
But if you're a travel agency, it's not just as simple as choosing the prettiest pictures and hoping for the best.
Travel advertising is one of the main reasons people use Instagram, but with the unique possibilities of Instagram ads, there are a number of different options for how you can show your ads on the platform.
While many travel and hospitality brands use a range of Instagram ad options, like Stories and static posts, customizing your ads to fit into the different types of content on Instagram, and changing things as Instagram makes particularly big updates to a format or hearing that their users' habits have changed, is one way to make sure that your ads are reaching the right people in the right way.
The best ad format for your travel Instagram ads could depend on who's already following you and engaging with you by saving or messaging you low-quality leads, or if they are one of your best customers.
The best ad format for your business could also evolve over time.
Running small, controlled tests so you have the data to make those observations about your audience's response, and additional data to make website-based decisions, will help any travel brand navigate this and adapt their social media ad strategy accordingly.
10. Include Clear Calls-to-Action
Given the 1 billion monthly users on Instagram, it makes sense that travel agencies want to leverage the platform to showcase their destinations and drive bookings.
But that's not the only way to use Instagram. The travel industry is one that can benefit a lot from Instagram advertising.
The visual nature of the platform means travel agents can show off both their destinations and their tours, and the results are amazing.
Last year, Instagram ads created a 63% increase in conversion rates, 26% growth in return on ad spend, and a 13% increase in booking rate. How do you tap into this high-performing channel?
One of the keys to successful Instagram ads is having clear calls to action.
Of course, telling people what steps they should take to book often translates to a higher booking rate.
A popular CTA in the travel industry includes "book now" or "sign up".
Develop some compelling CTAs and then track how well those particular posts convert.
With a pixel or tag placed on your website, you can track precisely how many people are clicking through on an ad and how many steps they're taking.
For example, if you're asking people to sign up for your newsletter, track the ROI on that ad by seeing if people who signed up are further along in the sales funnel (i.e., some of your subscribers book over the holidays, and you want to show the newsletter ad to a new demographic next month).
Use that data to make decisions about future posts and future actions to continue getting a high ROI on your Instagram advertising.
Do you want to learn more about the best practices for Instagram Stories and Instagram Posts?
Step-by-Step Guide for Setting Up an Instagram Account for Small Businesses
