How to market for the travel industry

Are you ready to get your digital marketing efforts recognized within the travel industry? If so, you aren’t alone. With spring quickly approaching people are starting to research and book their yearly travel plans. This means that you need to be ready for those searching for cheap travel deals, flights, and hotels. Here are some ideas on how you can win over consumers.

Monitor search stats

Leisure travellers go on a couple of trips per year, which means they must do regular research before those vacations can be booked. Each month, search engines such as Google and Bing see millions of searches using keyword varieties pertaining to many types of travel. 

Here are some that have proven to be most popular:

• Airline tickets
• Airline reservations
• Hotel and motel reservations
• Vacation packages
• Car Rentals
• Cruises

Since most customers plan ahead when booking a trip, it’s important that you plan your digital marketing strategies well in advance. Whether you manage an airline, a luggage company, or hotel digital marketing, all efforts should be catering to months ahead, while also considering last-minute travellers. 

Understand the customer journey

While it would be great if shoppers searched for a travel-related keyword, saw your paid search ad, clicked, and immediately purchased, the reality is that each customer journey is far more complex than that. In fact, one person may have hundreds of interactions with travel brands while researching a single trip. 

Here are four key moments where you should aim to win over your customers using your chosen digital marketing strategies:

• The dream stage: This is where those who are thinking about planning a trip find ideas and inspiration on where to go and what to do. While it isn’t easy to capture conversions during the dream stage, you can make an impact that will help them to consider your product or service when it’s the booking stage. 
• The organizing stage: Once people get past the dream stage, the organization stage is where they’re in deep consideration mode. The destination has been selected and the next steps are choosing a hotel or airline to book, often based on location, cost, and timing. While there’s not much you can do to change the cost and timing as an airline, with hotel digital marketing, you can amp up your creativeness to excite shoppers about your location. 
• The booking stage: Now that customers have made their decision, they’re ready to make reservations. This would be a great time to upsell your other services. For example, if you operate a hotel, perhaps tour packages, room upgrades, dinner reservations, and/or massage packages would be options to market at this point. 
• The experience stage: Tied into the booking stage, the experience stage is where you have an opportunity to offer further interactions with your customers. Whether this is a further chance to upsell a service, offering a discount for a later time, or waiting until the service has been performed and asking for a review, the experience should never go overlooked. 

After two years of limited travel through a global pandemic, people are thinking more and more about how they will be using up their vacation time. By understanding the above key moments you can influence the customer journey and increase your digital marketing conversions.

Target the right audience

The demographics of your target audience should be a strong consideration in your digital marketing efforts. Whether your product and/or service caters to families, seniors, or women versus men, things like age and income are also very important. For example, if your hotel wants to promote family travel, we recommend targeting women between the ages of 35 to 49. This is because they’re often the ones doing most of the research and booking. Also, be sure to write your ads or other hotel digital marketing efforts from the perspective of the buyer person to create emotion that will encourage clicks and conversions. 

Is your business ready to welcome travellers again? Drop a comment below to share your plan with us.