Blog #1: Instagram- Travel and Tourism Industry

Industry Background & Opportunity

The travel industry is growing fast, and it is one of the largest and most competitive in the world. Modern customers are more likely to spend money on traveling, and 34% of millennials plan to spend more than $5,000 on upcoming vacations, according to Business Insider. Have you noticed how Instagram has become a place to share more emotional travel experiences? Instagram has quickly become one of the most influential social networks, especially when it comes to the tourism and travel industry. Instagram probably now belongs upfront if you own a tourism and travel business. In a survey conducted on Instagram, 60% of millennial travelers on social media are active on Instagram, the platform is the go-to social network for 48% of people who want to choose destinations to visit on their next getaway. 35% of them use Instagram to get inspired and discover new places. Instagram is built on interactions and inspiration from family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances: people you know, you trust, and whose opinion you are more likely to take into account when it comes to making a travel decision. Therefore, there are opportunities for the tourism industry to utilize the Instagram platform to keep growing.

Fundamental Features and Principles

Instagram has proven to be a powerful visual platform. Seeing is believing, and that couldn’t be any more accurate than it is with the travel industry. With this platform, users are able to create stimulating and breathtaking visuals that give viewers their very own taste of that experience. As Instagram continues to add features, the tourism and travel industry must evolve its content strategies or risk getting left behind. In-feed booking, carousel multi-image posts, Instagram Stories, swipe up shopping/web links, and robust advertising options have all been a boon to tourism and location-based brands, offering more ways to reach and engage travelers. Instagram’s influence on decision-making reinforces that consumers continue to have an appetite for imagery. Brands like National Geographic recognize this as well. Today, the brand has over 128 million followers on Instagram—making it the most followed brand account on the social platform. 

Strategies for Future Client Firms

Based on those fundamental principles of Instagram and opportunities for the tourism industry we have discussed above, our consulting team would like to share how we will use Instagram to promote our client firms who are in the tourism and travel industry. 

First of all, practically every travel company aims at acquiring new customers, and the more Instagram followers you have, the more potential customers you can get. If the traveling business wants to stand out from the competitors and attract more followers, pay close attention to the Instagram feed, and make it eye-catching. Our consulting team will help firms to create niche cohesive feed based on companies' focus. Having a cohesive Instagram feed is a proven way to grab the target audience's attention, turn visitors into followers, and inspire travelers. To create a cohesive Instagram feed, it does not just mean to post many photos. We may split photos into tiles to create a mosaic effect that helps to organize the feed and make it more eye-catching. No matter what helps to create beautiful visual content for the Instagram feed, whether you publish user-generated content, take your photos, or repurpose royalty-free stock photos. The main idea is to use visual content to create a good first impression on your visitors and keep your followers interested in your profile. An example is shown below:

Along with the cohesive Instagram feed, we recommend our client firms who are in the tourism and travel industry to pay attention to customer service on Instagram. Our consulting team would do analytics of customer service that the tourism company has done to provide a deep report of the current performance and offer future solutions. Customers use social media platforms like Instagram to share their customer experiences and get their requests solved. The report says that 46% of customers have used social media to connect with brands and 55% expect to get a resolution or response on social media. In the travel industry, businesses should be ready to manage a barrage of satisfied and dissatisfied customers on Instagram. In the example shown below, customers often share their pain points in the comment section, so the company has to solve their requests quickly to meet their expectations and prove potential travelers that the company is worth choosing. It’s important to provide excellent customer support on Instagram such as reading comments, analyzing direct messages, and monitoring brand mentions to solve customer requests quickly. Connect with your customers and encourage them to tag you in their travel photos. Re-posting, commenting, and liking the travel shots they spent so long deciding on will make them feel loved, as well as boosting your brand recognition. When businesses listen to their customers and answer their questions, it will stay ahead of their competitors and win more loyal customers. The customer service experience doesn’t end when they head off on their trip, it continues right throughout and hopefully afterward. Instagram allows the business to stay fresh in their minds; delighting them with new content and inspiring them to travel with the business again. 

Moreover, we would also recommend our client firms using the right hashtags. Instagram allows users to explore topics based on hashtags that they are interested in. It presents a great opportunity for businesses looking to expand their reach through Instagram. If the business knows what hashtags the target users follow actively, it may instantly reach a wide pool of target users who may not necessarily be the followers. Therefore, our consulting team would also help client firms to generate useful hashtags to attract the audience. We would consider using a couple of the most popular hashtags for likes even if they are more general rather than focusing on the niche. It is good practice to not include anything more than 3 to 5 hashtags. According to an Instagram hashtag analysis, too many irrelevant hashtags can make posts appear spammy and result in more block than quality traffic. Our team would help clients to keep their hashtags highly relevant to the topic and thus reach the highly targeted Instagram user. Our team would also use insights and analysis based on client firms' post to track the data to begin to figure out which hashtags are most effective for improving reach.

Successful Experience

Ziggy's Vacation had a hard time attracting new followers, their revenue growing slowly compared to its competitors, and performing poorly on Instagram customer services. Their management team reached to us last year to ask our consulting team for help. According to the firm's needs and problems, our team provided several recommendations to Ziggy's Vacation to promote their business. Like we stated above, we evaluated their current performance in different aspects- the use of hashtags, customer services, and niche cohesive Instagram feed. During our research, Ziggy's Vacation often uses more than ten hashtags for every post including some niche and irrelevant hashtags. Hence, it is harder for them to drive their Instagram traffic. Our consultant team did an analysis showing that the impression from hashtags is relatively low compared to the total impression the account got in the year 2018. Based on the results, we helped the company to pick 4 hashtags out of those 10 they used to use to keep their hashtags highly relevant to the topic and thus reach the highly targeted Instagram user. After the change we made, Ziggy's Vacation has generated many more impressions from the hashtags on Instagram.

Along with the problem of hashtags, customer service was another major concern for us to consider in order to implement Ziggy's Vacation Instagram account. During our research, we found out that about 72% of customers were complaining about the slow responses to questions, direct messages, or others on Instagram. They often waited for more than 10 minutes for a representative reaching to them. Based on the result we got, we have come up with several suggestions such as linking the office number to the profile, having people manage the account to reply direct messages, and setting up a daily time to respond to comments for the client to implement.

These are some examples of the hard work we did for Ziggy's Vacation. After working through those problems the client had, we met their expectation and helped to increase their account followers from 30000 to 60100 in 6 months. In addition, their customer satisfaction score on the google review has been increased from 6.8 to 8.5. More than 82% of customers mentioned how well the implementation on their Instagram account. Hence, our consultant team helped the client generate 79 million dollars in revenue in 2019, which is almost a 50% increase in revenue compared to 2018. The reason for the success we gained was to provide customizable service to our clients with our professional social media analytics to meet customers' goals.