ICS-digital and ICS-translate’s sales team will once again be at their second home, the ExCeL London, for this year’s World Travel Market (WTM).
Our New Business Manager, Luke Kenna (me), will be flying the ICS flag at this year’s show for the third year running (excluding breaks due to the pandemic), and the whole team is incredibly excited about this year’s show and what it means for ICS and our wider goals as a business.
WTM is one of the biggest trade shows in the travel industry calendar, meaning that it is one of the best opportunities for our team to catch up with old friends and make new connections from within the industry.
The show gives us a chance to get in front of brands from across the full spectrum of the travel industry to chat about all things SEO, content, digital PR, and translation as well as keep people up-to-date with how the agency is evolving and growing.
For example, bringing brands up to speed on evolving and developing service offerings such as Creative Design, Web Development, Paid Media, and Organic Social Media Strategy.
It also presents us with a fantastic opportunity to give an overview of our experience and successes within travel and tourism.
Why is WTM important for ICS?
Given the international nature of travel and the competition across each sub-sector, we have always found that our multilingual resources and expertise in regulated markets lend themselves very well to successfully delivering measurable online growth for travel brands at a global scale.
ICS has had the pleasure of working with an eclectic mix of companies across travel and tourism including tourist boards, cruise lines, airlines, OTAs, car rental companies, accommodation platforms, hotels, and more.
Beyond our client experience, we have also invested a lot of time into collaborating with figures from the travel industry to create insightful content. We have interviewed figures such as Trust My Group’s CEO, Will Plummer, as well as Contiki’s Director of Content & Comms, Lottie Norman.
In short, the travel sector is a strong focus for us as we look to grow and expand our diverse portfolio of clients, so it is important for us to be present at events like WTM not only to grow new business opportunities, but to stay up-to-date and educated on brand strategy and trends within the sector, so that we can ensure that our offering maintains value and relevance for companies within travel and tourism.
What can we offer to travel brands and why are our services valuable?
We specialise in global SEO, multilingual content, digital PR, PPC, design & development, and translations to brands within highly regulated, competitive, and international sectors, and travel fits this mould very well. This means we know how to deliver bespoke, data-driven strategies and content that adhere to strict brand or industry policies.
One of the key areas of value we present to travel brands (both B2B & B2C) is that we can deliver SEO strategy, content, digital PR, paid media, translations, and more at an international and multilingual scale. We often support clients in 15+ multilingual markets at a time - some as much as 20-30 for digital marketing services, and some over 50 for translations and localisation.
This level of multilingual expertise and the local knowledge that we can offer is majorly important for travel brands like airlines, tourist boards, DMCs, and OTAs, to name a few. This is because of the high levels of competition, meaning that brands need to be clear, accurate, and engaging to build trust with local audiences around the world.
As we learned at Travolution, customer experience and content strategy are key for building trust with travellers, particularly in a post-Covid setting, and one thing that was discussed at Travolution was an increasing need for ‘premium content’ to cut through all of the ‘vanilla’ content that audiences are often presented with.
One theme that was discussed was how video content can provide an advantage to help brands stand out and engage target audiences, if done correctly. Here at ICS, branded video production, explainer videos, and dynamic animation are proving increasingly popular amongst clients as a way to offer something different.
In terms of customer experience, User Experience (UX) and Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) auditing/testing has been popular recently amongst travel clients.
This is important given the competitive nature of the industry. Even the smallest delays in load speed or having CTAs/links to purchase pages in the wrong positions can limit time on-site & conversions. Given all the options available, this can often mean losing a customer to a competitor.
Finally, our capacity to deliver localised keyword research, competitor analysis, content audits and more, allows us to offer such granularity in our strategies - providing unique audience, opportunity, and growth insights through data analysis and research.
This is vital for travel brands who want to find ways to compete in rankings for highly brand-relevant search terms, and drive valuable organic traffic to their key content and product pages - to maximise acquisition.
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