Sergio Alvarez is a Performance Marketing Expert, Digital Attribute Leader, CEO and Founder of AI Media Group .
Marketing in the tourism industry is complex. While 90% of travel industry consumers conduct their research online, only 82% will complete a booking through the same digital channel. Although websites like Booking.com and TripAdvisor have millions of visitors each month, hotel websites account for two-thirds of all bookings. It's fragmented and perhaps out of reach for the average travel industry marketer.
Why bother with cross-channel marketing when orders should go through your website anyway? Because this direct command path is not direct at all and all these intermediate paths are the real key to success.
Understand your customer journey
In a $1.2 trillion industry, 63% of the travel market is online; And while this percentage continues to grow each year, the vast majority of customer research is delivered across multiple digital and physical channels. Your customers will use all these channels when booking. The first step to understanding how this happens is to be in their line of sight.
Your marketing strategies can range from social media and paid advertising (such as Google Ads) to earned media (such as PR events). Data is crucial when planning how to execute your marketing mix, and if used correctly, it can give you an edge over your competitors beyond what you can get through other channels. Using properly attributed data from digital channels like paid search, paid social media, broadcast TV and programmatic can help you understand exactly where and how your customers are engaging with your digital marketing efforts.
Recent data shows an even spread between consumers who spend less than a week researching their trip before booking and those who spend weeks or months. However, the two groups share a common denominator: searches are mostly conducted over the Internet, with many digital touchpoints between the start of the search and the end of the discussion. Understanding the power of digital marketing in the travel industry can help you meet your prospects and convert their bookings at each of these digital touchpoints.
Multiple channels, multiple approaches
When using multi-channel marketing, it's important to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. For example, most social media interactions are driven by images, while search engine results (and thus many forms of paid marketing) are driven by the words users use to conduct their research. Each method must be approached separately to achieve maximum benefit and coverage.
Because social media marketing relies on visual content, brands should focus on creating engaging videos and images that are consistent with their brand messages and easy to share. It is very important to interact with users by responding quickly and personally to comments and messages On the other hand, personalization is essential for email campaigns. Be sure to use the buyer's name and mention past purchases or interactions with your brand. When creating effective SEM campaigns, it is important to identify the keywords that users are searching for and create appropriate ads for those keywords.
In my experience, one of the most effective strategies when integrating multiple channels is to assign experts to each phase of the campaign and ensure that all involved groups work closely together and focus on common goals. While marketing skills can be outsourced, training people within your company by investing in continuing education and professional development is also an option.
Fragmentation and Unified Attribution
Each marketing channel should have its own specific strategy based on how that channel drives traffic and engagement, beware of the silo effect. Maintaining a consistent and clear strategy for each channel is one thing, but separating them and their goals is another and more dangerous.
There will always be some overlap between different marketing channels, but this must be carefully and consciously managed to achieve common goals. Your social media posts may get a lot of attention, but does that make them the most valuable channel for funding? Is it really the source of booking conversion or do other channels play an equal role?
Unified attribution is an effective way to answer this question. You'll never know what's working and what's not if you don't measure individual impact, repetition, and all the ways your strategy leads to potential conversions. Unified attribution means tracking and analyzing the entire customer journey to determine the impact of each marketing channel on overall business results. This means moving beyond the last click feature, which only considers the last marketing contact before conversion. Here are some best practices to keep in mind.
• Define your goals and key performance indicators. Before you start tracking your recognition, you need to know what you're trying to achieve. Define key performance indicators (KPIs) and set measurable goals for each marketing channel.
• Follow up on all touch points. To get a complete picture of how your marketing channels are performing, you need to track all touchpoints along the customer journey. This includes everything from social media engagement to website visits and email opens to conversions.
• Use multi-sensory attribution model. Instead of relying solely on last-click attribution, use a multi-touch attribution model that considers all touchpoints in the customer journey. There are several models to choose from, including linear, temporal, and positional.
• Analyze and correct. Once you have data across all touchpoints and using a multi-sensory attribution model, analyze the data and adjust your marketing strategies accordingly. Identify the channels that drive the most conversions and allocate resources accordingly
Multi-channel standing ovation
Marketing in the travel industry is no small feat. However, you can harness the power of omnichannel marketing if you understand the customer journey and their touchpoints. Once you've done that, decide which channels and tactics you'll use to reach those touchpoints, and make sure each of your channels work toward your overall goals with a single feature.
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