On Tuesday 7th November, Travel Bloggers Unite brought together an expert panel to discuss a topic that is important to all travel companies wishing to work with travel bloggers:

 
"How Travel Bloggers Can Increase Sales + Brand Visibility"

To cover this subject we put together a panel of experts from both sides of the Atlantic, from both the travel blogging community and the travel industry. All three speakers covered slightly different aspects of the topic, combining to provide a compelling message to the audience present.

1)Jaume Marin - Marketing Director, Costa Brava Tourist Board

Jaume is the marketing director of the Costa Brava tourist board, who are recognised as having organsied the best blog trip to date. With this in mind and with extensive experience of working with travel bloggers, we invited Jaume to talk about "Storytelling".

Jaume 'kicked off' his engaging talk with an example from his past as a child. He took us through his desire at wanting a particular football for Christmas one year and his subsequent delight upon receiving it.

"Story; It's a communication tool structured in an events sequence which appeal to our feelings and emotions."

Bloggers are digital ambassadors, according to Jaume, and they are the new "storytellers".

Starting with Keith Jenkins of Velvet Escape as an example of this new breed of storytellers, Jaume moved on to the now famous #InCostaBrava blog trip.

On the trip there were various instances where amazing stories were created. For the first time ever, Ferran Adria laid on canapes at his world famous, El Bulli restaurant.

'El Bulli sits on the edge of a wild cove in Spain’s Costa Brava. One flanked by gorse bushes and carpeted with sand, with the kind of untamed nature would suit the opening scenes of an Agatha Christie murder mystery."

This extract being a wonderful example of the stories which came from this trip alone. You can read the rest of the blog post here .... Inside The Travel Lab: Inside The Worlds Best Restaurant

Jaume continued to use examples of how the blog trip created stories, referring to El Celler de Can Roca and the famous artist, and friend of Salvador Dali, Antoni Pitoxt.

All of these stories helped to turn the bloggers into digital ambassadors or influences. Jaume then moved onto the engagement with the social media content and the results from the blog trip.

• 17,765,723 Twitter Impressions
• 70 posts
• Estimated 7million page views
• 20 posts in Lonely Planet alone
• 3000+ photos uploaded to the internet from the blog trip alone

Jaume ended with a quote from Brian Solis, "Engage or Die"

2)Keith Jenkins - Velvet Escape

After taking a blog trip to Alaska, Keith wrote a post about his time cruising Alaska's Inside Passage. This one post resulted directly in the booking of a cruise by a reader of Velvet Escape. This reader happened to be on their cruise at the same time as a travel writer from Frommers, who wrote about this chance meeting and hence the quote above, which relates to the influence and power of Keith's post.

With bloggers being SEO savvy (see slide 2), bloggers can often find their posts appearing higher in search results than more traditional travel sites.

Keith finished off his talk by using an example from the #InCostaBrava blog trip he went on. He tweeted about a visit to Celler can Roca, this made it into the local media and Keith wrote a subsequent blog post. A reader then contacted Keith to ask about the restaurant and as a result, booked his anniversary meal at the restaurant in Costa Brava. By all accounts, the reader wasn't from Spain and so embarked on a special journey, just to this restaurant on the back of Keith's post!

3)Janice Waugh - Solo Traveler Blog

Janice is a world renowned expert on solo travel, with an extensive business background.  So we asked her along to talk about the various ways companies can work with Travel Bloggers.

Janice started by stating a point that by 2016, advertisers will spend $77 billion marketing online.  Which is the equivalent of all television spending today!  With such a huge spend, more time and money should be given to working with travel bloggers for marketing purposes

Travel bloggers are more real (authentic) than other methods of online marketing and they garner trust & respect from the online/offline relationships that they build up amongst their readers and followers.

Janice suggested that companies should look past the blog and think about the bloggers.  Going onto say how bloggers are talent in the same way actors, dancers or musicians are talent.  She explained how bloggers are experts, are photographers, videographers, speakers, and spokespeople, before moving onto some great examples.

Blog Teams: Ogilvy PR, a worldwide PR firm created 'blog teams' comprising of a group of bloggers and in collaboration with the Mexican Tourist Board.

Speakers: Beth Whitman of Wanderlust + Lipstick partnered with luggage company Briggs & Riley who promoted Beth's products to their customers, whilst Beth recommended Briggs & Riley to her customers (Beth runs tours around the world).  This was a win win situation and helped both parties get in front of a demographic of customers that matches their products.

Spokesperson: Jeff Jung of Career Break Secrets partnered with gAdventures, a Canadian Adventure Tour company.  Seeking to generate coverage outside the traditional media outlets, they developed a unique news story around career breaks and work-life balance.  So they partnered with Jeff to embark on a week long, country wide media mission where Jeff would promote the key messages and benefits of gAdventures.  In just a week Jeff's media mission generated nearly 40 interviews in print, on radio, television and online.  In the process, the campaign generated wide coverage achieving a media reach of over 15 million impressions.

Photography: Ken Kaminesky is a Montreal based travel photographer, who has been featured in National Geographic amongst other publications.  He went to Jordan as a guest of the Jordan Tourist Board.  As well as taking some amazing photographs, Ken has a very large and engaged following on his social media channels, with his Jordan posts providing some of his best traffic to date to his blog.  The photographs + social media following provide an added value to companies.

Videography: Cailin O'Neill of Travel Yourself, Diamond Pr and Puerto Rico - Janice touched on again the added value benefit of working with a travel-video-blogger.  Cailin has vast experience in this field and utilizes it to great benefit for her clients.

Tap Into a Niche: the PlanetD partnered with American Express travel card.  AMEX provided the PlanetD with a travel card and a cash payment of some kind.  This allowed the PlanetD to market the AMEX travel card to a the adventure travel audience.  Incidentally, niche travel is expanding quicker than more mainstream travel!

Janice ended by commenting on how travel bloggers are like swiss army knives!

And Finally . . .

Our event at World Travel Market was an unbelievable success.  With a room capacity of 90 seats, we had people sat on the floor in the room.  Not mention 160+ people in the corridor outside.  To those of you who couldn't get into the room, our apologies.

Travel companies: If you would like to discuss this session in more detail then please feel free to contact:  oliver [at] travelbloggersunite.com

Travel bloggers: if you would like to make contact with TBU to see how we could help you + promote you, then send us a tweet at @tbloggersunite

Why not attend our next conference in Umbria, April 2012.  It is a great opportunity to meet travel bloggers (the majority of those mentioned above will be there), and there is also the opportunity for representatives from the travel / PR to learn more about how travel bloggers can benefit your company from a series of industry specific talks.

Early bird tickets are now available until the end of December.