AI Marketing Tools in the Travel Industry – Here’s How to Use Them

This article on ChatGPT for travel brands comes down pretty hard on the idea of using AI tools to completely replace your current content creation strategy.

But the future is definitely not all doom and gloom.

83% of executives have shared that AI technology is a priority in their business strategy, with plenty of businesses across a range of industries already using things like AI marketing tools to yield impressive results. For example, companies that used AI as part of their sales and marketing approach saw leads increase by more than 50%, which demonstrates the power of AI tools when they’re used strategically and effectively.

Most of the hype around AI content creation at the moment has been around ChatGPT, which is one of the best AI writing tools on the market at the moment. And whilst this article features a lot of examples of how you can use AI tools for content writing like ChatGPT for a variety of marketing purposes, there are plenty more tools available that can assist with everything from data formatting to website building.

It’s important to be informed of the limitations and potential problems of using this kind of technology before you dive into it with your arms open. But with that in mind, we want to get into some of the really exciting ways that travel brands can utilise ChatGPT, and other types of AI tools, in their marketing strategy.

How Travel Companies Can Make the Most of AI Tools

Generating Content Ideas

A great way that AI content writing tools like ChatGPT can assist with content creation is to use it to come up with content ideas. You can use the tool as a kind of search engine and ask it to ‘give me ideas’ for any kind of travel topic.

The more specific you want the focus of your content, the more specific you’ll need your prompt to be. You can also use previous titles of content as inspiration for the tool and get it to produce similar or related ideas based on the content you’ve already written that is performing particularly well.

Keyword Research

From an SEO perspective, one of the most exciting potential applications of ChatGPT is its ability to do keyword research.

You can enter a search phrase, as the tool to ‘give me X keywords for…’ and then watch as it generates a list of related phrases based on internet trends and popular searches. Instead of having to trawl through a database, you’ve got a set of phrases ready to go in an instant.

There are limitations to this approach to keyword research however; you don’t get any of the search data surrounding each phrase as you do from a keyword database, and you’ve no way of knowing which phrases are going to be competitive. But if you’re looking for a list of related keywords to feature in a piece of content, this could be an incredibly useful application.

Meta Descriptions

Whether you’re building a website from scratch or optimising your landing pages for SEO, having to produce a load of unique meta descriptions can be a very dull and time-consuming task.

With ChatGPT, you can use AI content generation to automate this and spend your time proofreading and tweaking the meta descriptions. Make sure that you include the target keyword phrase in the prompt and ask the tool to write a summary that is under a specific word count.

Headlines, Taglines and Subject Lines

From the titles of blog posts to tag lines for marketing campaigns or the subject lines of emails, another way that travel marketers can use ChatGPT is for writing headlines. There are a couple of different ways you can approach this.

Firstly, you can just ask ChatGPT to ‘write me X different article headlines’ for an article based on a travel topic. Again, you can influence the responses you get by giving examples of headlines that you’d like to emulate.

If you want to take this approach further, why not give the tool an idea of the angle you’re going to take in the article? For example, if you want a piece of content based around the idea that your target destination is eco-friendly, you’ll need to ask ChatGPT to ‘write me X different blog post titles that highlight this benefit of this country’.

Marketers that want to have more of a say in the content of their headlines could instead use ChatGPT to give them phrases or idioms related to a particular topic and then base a headline around this.

Speaking of slogans and taglines, if you’re brainstorming for a new travel marketing campaign, ChatGPT can be a helpful addition to developing your ideas. You won’t have much luck asking it for a slogan point blank, but you can use it to inspire your own ideas.

For example, if you’re looking to centre a campaign around a customer’s pain points, you could ask ChatGPT something like ‘what are the disadvantages of having to book hotels for a holiday yourself?’ or ‘what are the disadvantages of travelling abroad for a weekend trip?’. The response you get might give you a new way to appeal to your target market by offering a solution to this setback.

If you want to take this approach further, consider asking ChatGPT to ‘act’ like a member of your target market and share some of their reasons for booking a trip. This can help you to develop a marketing campaign that taps into your potential customer’s desires, using language that they will relate to.

For example, your prompt for the tool might be ‘You’re a parent that wants to take their children away over the summer. Explain what you’re looking for from a trip. Use a human tone’.

The last few ideas require a much more technical approach to using ChatGPT, but it’s these kinds of methods that will yield the most valuable results.

Structuring Content

We’ve touched upon the potential problems of using ChatGPT to write all of the content for your travel brand, but a much better use that will still save you time is using the tool to structure content like blog posts instead.

Once you’ve settled on a title and a topic, you can ask ChatGPT to give you ideas for what you should talk about in the post or what headings to include. This can be particularly useful if you’re writing content about a destination and are looking for examples of places or activities to recommend, which you could generate with a prompt like ‘give me X suggestions for what to do in Alcúdia, Mallorca’.

If you’re trying to write content to convert customers, you can also give ChatGPT a marketing or copywriting framework and ask it for content suggestions based on this. You’ll need to know what your topic and angle are for this, and you’ll need to include both of these in your prompt.

For example, you might want to write marketing content promoting an exclusive, luxury tour around the Greek islands using the ‘Features-Advantages-Benefits’ framework. Your prompt would be something like: ‘Outline an article for me about a luxury cruise of the Greek islands using the Features-Advantages-Benefits framework’.

Deciding on the structure of a piece of content can become incredibly time-consuming, so using an AI tool to help with this can make a big impact on the efficiency of your marketing efforts.

Social Media Posts

If you’re responsible for your travel brand’s social media, you’ll understand the amount of time it takes to put together a regular posting schedule with unique captions for every upload, especially if you’re active over multiple platforms.

ChatGPT could make your job a whole lot easier.

You’ll need to be specific with the prompts you give it, but if you already have an image or video ready to live on Facebook or Instagram, give the tool a prompt like ‘write an Instagram caption for a photo of a safari camp in Tanzania’ and then edit the result as needed.

If you’re looking for text posts that will offer your customers value, you can ask ChatGPT for something like ‘write me a social media post about the best way to book cheap plane tickets’.

If you’re looking for more input on putting together a social media marketing strategy, the right prompt may be able to generate a list of ideas for several weeks’ worth of content. But the area we feel ChatGPT could save a lot of time is generating post captions, making it much easier for your brand to establish an active presence on social media.

Building Websites

An interesting development that has come from testing the limits of what AI tools can do is the potential to write code with it. In the early days of ChatGPT, there were plenty of examples of users getting the software to write simple code functions, and now there are specific AI tools out there which can be used to write code that forms the basis for a website.

There are limitations to this approach of course; you won’t be able to produce a particularly personalised site and you won’t have a lot of control over specific features. But if you’re just trying to build a simple site to use as a marketing tool or a case study, or need to build out your travel website by adding new pages, AI code generation could make this process much faster.

SEO Tasks

AI tools are often most useful when they’re used to automate repetitive or time-consuming tasks, and can be really useful when used as part of an SEO marketing strategy. Here are a couple of examples:

• Identifying the primary keyword for a landing page
• Localising the content of a page to change the target audience, or checking for localised spellings that may be affecting ranking
• Classify the intent behind a keyword group
• Optimising existing content by adding keyword phrases
• Creating title tags
• Identifying trending topics to create content about
• Generating FAQs and FAQ Schema markup
• Finding duplicate content
• Organising existing content titles into similar categories
• Sorting data or research into tables
• Completing basic content audits
• Dealing with redirects by creating .htaccess rewrite rules
• Constructing site analytics reports

SEO tools powered by AI have been on the market for a while now, but as content creation tools become more intuitive and technology advances, there are even more ways that marketers can use these products to assist with SEO tasks.

Writing Content

Finally, we wanted to close our list of suggestions by sharing that you absolutely can use a tool like ChatGPT to write travel content.

What you can’t do is copy and paste the content it creates straight onto your website.

If you’re going to use AI-generated content then you need to be prepared to edit it significantly so that it sounds more ‘human’, is factually accurate and also fits your brand’s tone of voice. It’s up to you to decide whether this level of editing is worth it, and to ensure that the resulting content won’t get flagged for being ‘spammy’.

Summary

The methods for using AI tools in your travel marketing strategy that we’ve highlighted here are truly only the tip of the iceberg. Websites like Future Tools show the huge variety of different AI tools that are available to help with specific tasks, so if you’re looking for more ways to use this technology in your marketing approach, this is a great place to start.

Sources

SEJ

Search Engine Land

Sam Szuchan

Shlomo Genchin

James Brockbank

Bernard Marr

Alex Banks

Aleyda Solis

Andy Gray

Ariel Levin