Writing Clever: How to Turn One Travel Content Theme into Many Distinct Pieces

Content marketing is not a sprint but a long-haul journey. It requires you to create consistently engaging content on an ongoing basis, which means coming up with idea after idea after idea after idea – not always an easy task.

But coming up with one idea doesn’t necessarily mean only getting one piece of written travel content. In fact, if you’re only getting a single article, blog or other piece of travel content out of each idea that springs to mind, you are wasting your time. Of course, every piece you write must be original and distinctive, but this blog will explain how a single lightbulb moment can light up a whole room full of content concepts. Scroll down for our expert tips.

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Start vague
Let’s say you need some blog ideas. The first thing to do is to start as broadly as possible. At this early stages of blog content planning, you don’t want to deal in specifics, but to pick the most general theme for the publication or brand. For example, if you’re a company that offers guided food tours of Kuala Lumpur, then your broad theme would likely be ‘Food in Kuala Lumpur’. If you’re a holiday rental company based in the South of France whose target demographic is mainly families, then your broad idea may be ‘What to Do with Kids in the South of France’.

Break it down
While these wide-reaching topics will no doubt work well as general, standalone posts, you will get significantly more bang for your brainpower if you think about breaking them down into multiple derivative forms of content.

The best way to do this is to start to separate your big idea into lots of smaller parts, and you can do this simply by asking yourself questions about your target customer. Where might they be staying? What might their budget be? Who will they be travelling with? What age are they? As you consider these, you’ll naturally find yourself narrowing down your broad overarching topic into lots of different plausible offshoot pieces. But this is merely the beginning.

Target your content
The next step towards increasing your options for spin-off travel is to get more and more targeted.

Let’s take the ‘Food in Kuala Lumpur’ idea as an example. You can focus on different traveller budgets (cheap eats vs. splurge dining), traveller types (solo traveller vs. family), neighbourhoods (Bukit Bintang vs. Kuala Lumpur City Centre), dining styles (eat-in restaurants vs. street food stalls), dietary restrictions (best for vegetarian or for gluten-free travellers) and dietary preferences (tips for the sweet-toothed traveller or for meat lovers). You could address the various cultural influences on Kuala Lumpur’s food scene individually (Indian influence on Malay cuisine), give some background behind the most popular dishes (the history of nasi lemak) or create a dining hotspot guide.

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And target it again
The ‘What to Do with Kids in the South of France’ may be more niche, but same trick works just as well here. First, think of the variety of circumstances that could affect what families can do in the South of France – that should help you hone your focus. You can cover certain sub-regions, take into account the seasons or the weather (what to do with kids in summer or what to do with kids when it rains) and factor in the age of the kids in question (keeping teenagers happy or toddlers entertained) as well as their interests (high-adrenaline vs. educational).

Remember your demographic
Just don’t forget your publication or brand’s audience. If you’re a luxury travel agency, you probably won’t want a ‘cheap eats vs. splurge dining’ option, as this isn’t a relatable choice for your audience. Having said that, if it were gently re-positioned as ‘street food vs. fine dining’, with a focus on high-quality and authentic street food, rather than ‘cheap eats’, this could still hold interest for a higher net worth client. It’s about deeper delving into the idea.

So next time you find yourself struggling with an idea, think about how you can narrow it down or make it more targeted. If you can run through each and every one of these steps each time you have a broad content idea, you will soon find that your single blog post has turned into a whole month’s worth of potential travel content pieces.

So now that you’ve managed to come up with several new travel content ideas, you may be wondering how best to execute them? If so, read our post on how to take a promising idea and turn it into a winning article For more shared wisdom, follow us on Twitter; or for more client content, take a look at our recent projects.

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