Travel guides come in all shapes, sizes, and formats. There are digital travel guides that can be downloaded as ebooks, and videos can be uploaded to YouTube as a marketing strategy for your travel agency, considering there are nearly 2 billion monthly active Youtubers.
Also, advertising or displaying your travel guides in popular social networks like Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat or Twitter, can give you extra marketing mileage and can help you attract your target customers.
To be able to achieve all these, you’ll need to produce a travel guide. In this post, we’ll highlight how to create a travel guide.
Following are five (5) simple steps to create a beautiful travel guide:
Step 1: Understand Your Target Audience
The first step to take is to understand your audience. This is important because it will determine every other step outlined here. You can do this by asking questions like:
- Who are these tourists, are they locals or foreigners?
- Will they be children, teens, adults or the elderly?
- Do they understand English or will they require an interpreter?
- What is their income level, can they afford a well-produced but expensive travel guide or will they prefer a cheap one?
- Will they be requiring hotel accommodation too?
Answering questions like these can give us a better understanding of WHO you are preparing the Travel Guide for.
Step 2: Pay a visit to the Area
To be able to produce a quality travel guide, you would need to visit the area where these tourists you are producing it for will visit. Without this, it will be impossible to produce a travel guide that will convince readers to visit.
This visit will give you a firsthand experience of what the area looks like. As you travel along, you would need to take note of all the interesting features along the route like trees, mountains, rocks, hills, rivers, etc.
Step 3: Take Photos
To be able to effectively describe the things you see when you visit the area, you would need to take a lot of photographs, either from a professional camera or using your smartphone. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so the more you are able to take the better.
It is these pictures that can convince readers in America to pick up the phone, call their travel agency, arrange for visa, book a flight and hotel, and make the long journey down to Nigeria to see such beautiful places they have seen on paper. This is one of the most important steps.
Step 4: Write a Descriptive Copy
Even though a picture will say a lot about the destination, it cannot say everything there is to be said. You will still need a written copy. A well-written copy will further convince readers to take action. It may take a few edits to get a final draft.
When they start comparing the photos with places they have been to before, a well written and very descriptive copy is what will eventually convince them to come and pay a visit. This is also why you need to understand your audience as mentioned in Step #1 above. The more you know them, the more you know the kind of words that would move them to take action.
Step 5: Organize Photos and Copy (Use a template)
This is the stage where you combine the photos you have collected and the words you have written to describe the destination. To do this, you will require a computer and relevant software to help you create a modern travel guide.
Most of these softwares have templates that you can edit. This will allow you to rewrite the captions or headlines and use your own photos and written copy to customize it to your taste. You will also be able to preview it and see how it will come out in print.
Conclusion
After production, you can now publish and promote the travel guide by taking out advertisements and displaying them in places where your target audience is more likely to see them like on social media or hotel lobbies, etc.
Author Bio Amos Onwukwe is an AWAI trained Business and Ecommerce Copywriter who also covers Tech and Social Media. When not writing, he’s thinking of writing or making music. He’s been featured in Huffington Post, Dumb Little Man, Ecommerce Nation, eCommerce Insights, Understanding Ecommerce, Result First, Floship, GrowMap, Self Growth, among others. You can connect with him on Twitter: @amos_onwukwe LinkedIn: Amos Onwukwe
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