How Travel Advertisers Should Approach an Evolving Media Landscape

By Kym Insana, Founder & President, AlwaysOn Digital

There have never been more media touchpoints for advertisers to reach consumers. This is a definite positive, but it’s also overwhelming. The explosion in engagement options means that advertisers have unlimited options, but also a need to make decisions that will drive performance and get a return on investment.

This is true across all verticals, but it’s especially true in travel. In fact, it has an even larger impact for mid-sized DMOs, which can’t afford a spray-and-pray approach across infinite channels.

For these advertisers, a sound plan and strategy are critical for approaching and winning in this new media landscape. Here’s one way to approach it.

Define your audience

DMOs and tourism boards would probably love to get their message in front of everyone, but most are savvy enough to know that not every consumer is interested in their locality. Travel advertisers need to do some strategic work deciding who they want to visit. This will be a theme throughout every step of this process, because it’s the most important thing a DMO can do right now.

This process includes using demographic and behavioral insights to identify prospects based on interests and the financial insights to identify prospects who have the capacity to travel. Given a choice, most DMOs would prefer visitors who spend more, as opposed to a greater number of visitors who spend very little.

Define your target market

When building a plan, it’s equally important to define the geographic locations you’d like to target. Consumers across the country and around the world are available, but most DMOs should only focus on a few clearly defined markets. For mid-market destinations, it makes sense to target potential visitors in 7 to 10 markets, with an emphasis on those that are easy enough to get to.

This may seem like travel marketing 101, but again, the allure of infinite scale can make marketers forget the basics. Brands can easily spend all of their budget on banner ads with mass reach, but that’s not the most effective strategy.

The audience preparation done in the previous step comes into play here. All travel advertisers are looking for visitors. So this requires finding markets where the consumers seeing the ads are only going to visit, rather than move to a destination. Travel brands want consumers who are happy with where they live, but are willing to travel for a new experience. They want people who will spend in restaurants, local businesses, and, of course, hotels.

Keep revenue in mind

This may feel basic, but travel advertisers need to think holistically when defining a market. Travel DMOs get money from hotel taxes. So along with increasing revenues to the communities, their efforts need to focus on driving hotel bookings.

This once again requires going a bit deeper into the audience that is likely to respond to an ad. While many travellers share characteristics, there is a difference between a hotel-going audience and one more likely to rent an Airbnb. When you can make these distinctions, the result is a more tightly targeted campaign that is likely to have greater performance.

Get creative and test

Thus far we haven’t even touched on creative, which is one of the most important components of destination marketing. When you have a beautiful location, show it off! But the reason creative comes at the end of this process is that the audience is more important than ever. With all of the media channels available, DMOs need to keep tight plans that reach their target audience, in the right markets, and of course, with the right message.

Once that’s in place, DMOs can experiment, trying out different audience factors or creative formats. But the bones of the plan remain the same. To get the best performance in an era of unlimited choices, it’s best to start by narrowing things down as much as possible.