Travel has turned into a sort of religion for many people; To sell a destination or experience, Joachim Schmidt of the digital marketing agency Intensive Senses says your audience doesn’t want to know that much -- but it really wants to feel something.

“Tourists think of the product, travelers think of emotion,” Schmidt told audience at Berlin’s ITB Convention.

He argues that people do not want to know things like opening times or a list of services as much as what inspiration they can hope to find.  For the digital marketer, the best way to convey this is through stories.

“You can reach people much better with emotion than information,” he said. “You have to offer stories in order to create destinations. The goal is not to come across as advertising. The key to this is to see who your goal groups are and what will reach them.”

While people have trained themselves to look away from advertising, a story draws them in.

“We are suffering from an information overload,” Schmidt said. “It is becoming more and more complicated to reach people through traditional advertising. Pop ups, Google AdWords and banners are things that people make themselves blind to.”

But while people will go to the movie theater for fantasy and science fiction, Schmidt says its best to anchor to reality when advertising real places.

“Every good story needs a logical structure,” he said. “It has to be identifiable and inspire passion. But it also has to be realistic, something that people could actually do and that a company can actually offer.”

Stories do not necessarily have to be videos; they can be a serialized photo series on Instagram or a development of Facebook posts.

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