Startup Interview: Horizon Guides develops new channel for Travel Content Marketing

We asked co-founder and CEO Matt Barker of Horizon Guides a few questions to learn more about how the company is challenging traditional content marketing and creating new ways for tour operators and destinations to reach consumers.

Horizon Guides is currently equity crowdfinding – buy shares and support independent travel publishing here. (capital at risk)

There are millions of companies out there vying for a piece of the $7.2 trillion generated by travel and tourism annually. Travel brands have done everything to convert future customers from starting a blog to hiring Instagram influencers. No matter the size of the company, content marketing budgets and team bandwidth have been stretched to extreme in this new era of online competition for the customer.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m the Co-founder and CEO of Horizon Guides. We’re a small team so I have to be a jack of all trades. I’m primarily occupied with sales and partner support, but am also heavily involved in product development, and of course, the day-to-day of administering a growing business and raising investment.

Who is Horizon Guides for?

Horizon Guides is a bridge between travel businesses and consumers, and we serve both groups in different ways.

• To the consumer, we create and publish professionally-written, beautifully-produced travel guides, which are free to download from our website.
• To travel businesses, we offer a marketing product – a new way for them to reach their customers at a fraction of the usual cost.

When readers download a guide, they’re invited to opt-in to receive information from one of our partner tour operators. Their details are passed over to our partners who complete the booking.

Our partners pay us a monthly fee in exchange for a reliable stream of qualified leads – people who are proactively researching a trip and getting ready to book. So the reader gets this amazing product free of charge, and our partners get to welcome a new marketing channel to reach their target market.

What gap did you find in the travel industry that inspired you to create Horizon Guides?

Our team has been working with SME tour operators for over two decades, helping them navigate the ever changing world of digital marketing, and understand how best to use their scarce time and resources.

Digital marketing has always been a challenge for this segment. They’ve been squeezed out of SEO; PPC costs are constantly rising; and the pace of change is often overwhelming.

One of the responses has been to use “content marketing” to attract customers. But smaller businesses lack the expertise, resources and time to do this stuff properly. They rarely see measurable returns, and it creates a terrible user experience for consumers who are barraged with cheap, low-grade content at every turn.

Our solution is quite simple: we produce the content ourselves, with a level of professionalism and quality that few small businesses can achieve. And we automate the entire audience-building process, so our guides reach travelers when they’re proactively researching a trip. When a reader wants to book a trip, they can request more information from our partners, and we put them in contact.

It’s a win-win for both: our partners get a reliable stream of quality leads, and our readers get these wonderful, useful guides, all for free.

How did you build your startup?

We evolved out of a marketing consultancy where we’d been doing similar things for a small number of clients. Around 12 months ago, we realized there was much greater opportunity and scale if we just took over the entire publishing process.

We already had years in the business, so we had a massive talent pool of truly excellent, professional content creators, all the processes and technology we needed, plus – fortunately – some capital in the bank to get us off the ground.

How is your startup disrupting the travel scene today?

The market share we’re primarily targeting is the $5.9 billion that travel businesses spend on Google Adwords every year. Many small businesses are at a breaking point and are desperate for an alternative, so that’s where we see the biggest disruption opportunity.

We’re not saying we can replace Adwords (not yet anyway!). We just want to help business owners get a handle on their runaway costs; bring things back down to reality; and help them with an alternative source of leads and bookings.

How did you get your startup off the ground and gaining traction?

We’ve spent about a year testing and iterating on the product. We’ve had all sorts of hiccups and setbacks but funnily enough, traction and growth has always been less of a problem. Our sales process and message is so compelling: “we’ve got this product and it can help you cut your Adwords costs” – who wouldn’t say no to that? We’re on something like a 90% success rate with our outbound sales.

The main source of friction is commissioning and publishing the guides themselves – once they’re created, actually selling them to partners has proven to be ridiculously quite easy.

Travel Massive is about empowering change in travel. How is your startup changing the future of the industry or helping to make travel better?

We’re quite a mission-driven team! There are a number of things that keep us motivated.

The idea that there’s this massive segment of honest, hardworking, modestly-sized travel businesses who have been overlooked by the broader travel industry, and are really suffering at the moment.

These are the small tour operators who specialise in authentic experiences, usually with local, independent suppliers. In this era of ‘over tourism,’ it’s precisely the kind of business we need to support.

And that reflects in all our guides. We’ll never have a guide on all-inclusive resorts or mega cruises. We’re using our guides to celebrate a model of tourism that is culturally sensitive and environmentally responsible.

We’re also very driven by the whole question of “quality content,” the ethics of sponsorship and things like “native advertising”. Publishing in general, and digital travel publishing specifically, is in serious trouble, and we all suffer for it. The idea of creating a new business model that sustains real, quality publishing is massively important to me personally.

Do you have any tips for new entrepreneurs who want to create a successful startup?

The one thing I know we’ve benefited from is our many years being in and around the industry. The knowledge, relationships and key assets such as our database of travel writers. Other founders could probably execute without any of that, but it was important to us. That saying about “every overnight success taking 10 years” definitely applies to us… But maybe ask me again once we’ve successfully exited!

Thanks to Horizon Guides for supporting this week’s Travel Massive feature. Stay in touch with Horizon Guides by following them on Travel Massive, Facebook and Twitter or ask them about their writing assignments!