Archives for June 2020

Atlas Obscura keeps a firm divide between its independent travel journalism and its bookable trips. Now its marketers, like copywriter Nick Papa, create and support a separate content ecosystem for the touring side of the company. Nick’s biggest project is the Trips Blog, which launched at the end of last year. The goal was to go beyond the pure marketing assets, like trip landing pages and sales emails, and create editorial content that ties back to the trips in a “non-salesy” way. Nick dives into how Atlas Obscura is playing the long game, how to succeed at travel during a pandemic, and where both strategies connect to social media and newsletters.

Unlike a lot of companies that need to invest in content, Atlas Obscura started with travel journalism and then became a trip company.

It’s a huge differentiator for us as a tour operator, because exactly like you said, most companies are like, “Well, we have this cool product. Now we have to figure out how to build content around it in a way that’s not salesy.” Content is at the core, so when we launched these products, we had this built-in audience of readers. We had already built so much trust with them that they were, no questions asked, willing to go to literally the far corners of the planet with us. They knew that we knew what we were talking about, which is incredible, because before Atlas, I worked at very big travel companies. I worked at booking.com as a content editor, I have been a contractor at Kayak, and it’s the reverse, where you’re retroactively making the content to make your case. At Atlas Obscura, it just feels so much more natural and organic.