I spent a recent afternoon at Cool Content Coming Soon, a show dedicated to the power of good content with an array of speakers from Government departments, public bodies and content agencies.

Here a four key points that were raised by speakers that have stuck with me as being important to travel companies:

Don’t think about digital content in isolation of distribution – a message needs an audience.

Company blogs, especially those targeted to the mass market, are a typical example of digital content that lacks an audience.

One way of overcoming this is to use Guest Bloggers who come with their own readership – VisitBritain does this with its fantastic Super Blog, which features 20 guest bloggers who provide expert content and come with a healthy audience.

Run a Needs Analysis of your website.

Get rid of content, pages and sections that your customer does not need (ie, the pages no one visits or have high bounce rates). This allows you  (and them) to focus on the good stuff.

For successful blogger campaigns, give bloggers something valuable in return for working with you.

For travel companies, this could mean:

• information about trends or new launches that a blogger can pass on to their audience
• access to specialists who can provide expert information about a subject or make an issue easy to understand
• access to your audience, helping the blogger increase their own readership (this is seen with the VisitBritain Super Blog)
• money, always difficult to say no to

You don’t need big production values to create content…

…but you do need a clear understanding of what your audience wants so that you can reach them effectively. Communicating the idea clearly is the most important challenge, and framing it in the correct context will help your audience accept the production values.
Note: apologies for not crediting these ideas back to their original sources. You can find a synopsis of the speakers on the Cool Content Coming Soon website.