Does your marketing reflect the diversity of your visitors? Does it capture the full range of the experiences you offer? These are two important questions every travel and tourism marketer should be asking themselves.
Whether you’re targeting families, road trippers, or travelers from France, engaging visuals that accurately represent the audience you’re trying to reach are key to making your marketing effective, impactful, and inclusive.
But how? Depending on what you’re looking for, some imagery can be hard to find and expensive to create, which means it’s likely that it doesn’t always get included in your marketing. That’s where user-generated content comes in. UGC is created every day, in huge volumes, and perfectly reflects the diversity of the people sharing it.
Diversifying your visuals with UGC means that you can cater to a specific demographic or ethnicity, appeal to people with diverse interests, and keep visitors engaged for longer. Great marketing allows your target audience to easily picture themselves traveling to your city, vacationing at your resort, or visiting your theme park.
Here are 3 ways CrowdRiff can help you diversify your imagery.
1| Access a library of visuals that are sourced directly from your visitors
With UGC, you’re fed authentic photos and videos directly from your visitors or guests, and with CrowdRiff, you can easily discover and use them. If you want to reflect your audience, what easier way is there than using the photos and videos your visitors are already sharing of their experience?
Think about it – if you’re trying to target families on summer vacation, a gallery on your website featuring authentic photos of real families building sandcastles and relaxing on the beach is more likely to persuade them to visit.
St. Eugene Golf Resort & Casino has a page dedicated to summer activities on their website, complete with a beautiful gallery full of UGC.
CrowdRiff gives you the ability to build a library full of user-generated visuals, easily find the types of imagery you need with intelligent search, and then use them in your own marketing.
2| Discover different experiences and new angles to promote your destination
With huge amounts of UGC created and shared every day, you have a massive amount of useable content flowing into your library all the time. With that, you can dig up some valuable insights into the ways visitors are exploring and enjoying your destination, which allows you to promote yourself in new and interesting ways.
You might find out that baby boomers really enjoy picnicking by the harbourfront, or millennials particularly love taking pictures with murals and art installations. You can find this information just from the sheer amount of photos you might see people take in the same spot, and then use them to target specific demographics or interests.
With CrowdRiff, you are able to tap into a wide array of research and insights about your destination that you might not have noticed otherwise.
3| Easily get rights to visuals depicting the full range of experiences you offer
The visuals in your marketing should depict the wide variety of experiences you offer in order to promote them. But, it can be costly and time consuming to commission the various photography needed to highlight them all.
Commissioning a fake wedding photoshoot to show off your resort as a prime wedding destination is a lot more work than just tapping into the visuals that your actual guests have already shared!
CrowdRiff gives you the ability to quickly and easily source and request the rights to visuals to use in your marketing, without the price tag or the legwork of manually searching and commenting.
For example, Hornblower Niagara Cruises does a great job of using a wide variety of visual UGC to promote specific activities or support targeted blog posts.
Incorporating UGC in your marketing ensures your imagery is fresh and effective, and reflects the diversity of your audience and their interests back to them. CrowdRiff allows you to discover and share beautiful and original content quickly and easily.
Header image courtesy of Bambi Corro and found on Unsplash.
