This is a guest blog written by Daniel Stephenson, Senior Director of Category Development at Specific Media. In this article he talks about the online visibility.
Despite concerns about the economic climate leading to a decline in holiday bookings for destinations outside of the UK, early indications show that the market is faring well. Inflation, VAT and job worries may have all increased this year, but so has the number of people booking holidays online. A recent IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index clearly indicated that the travel industry is doing its best trade online, with the sector seeing a 31% year on year increase in January of this year.
Wherever holiday makers choose to go, the Internet is now their first port of call for both researching and booking travel. The evolution of the Internet from useful resource to vital, mainstream tool has led to a migration from the high street to online, with everything from weekly food shops to wedding gifts being purchased online every day.
A recent study by TGI confirms that consumer habits are no different within the travel industry, with the Internet now the most popular research tool for consumers. This poses a challenge for traditional travel agents, once the only authority on holiday bookings, as they are now forced to compete with the limitless knowledge and instant access to information provided by the world-wide web. With face-to-face consumer interaction diminishing, savvy travel agents and tour operators must ensure that their online offering is as informative, engaging and accessible as possible.
The difficulty comes in making your offering stand out from the competition. How can agents catch the attention of consumers as they scour the web in search of their next getaway? With people now looking across many sites for the best deal, rather than selecting one agent to do business with, the stakes are high. Visibility is key to ensuring that your brand maintains and grows its market share, but to attract the attention of digital consumers, you must first be able to identify those most likely to be interested in your offering.
Understanding consumer interests is vital. For some holiday makers, the purchase cycle is a very simple one. But for many more, the process of deciding to book a holiday, investigating and researching, comparing prices and finally making a booking can be a long and drawn out process. This is why smart travel marketers are turning to audience addressable advertising to communicate with those showing interest in travel-related content.
Once viewed as a mysterious 'black box' technology, audience addressable advertising is the equivalent of looking at the travel stickers on a holiday maker's suitcase and using the information to deduce their travel preferences. If you saw a bag on a luggage carousel covered in stickers from Rome, Florence and Venice, it would be reasonable to assume the owner may likely be interested in a European city break. In reality, the techniques and analysis are more sophisticated than that, in Specific Media's case, utilising proprietary targeting technologies developed over more than a decade to determine what products and services a consumer is most likely to be interested in. However, the principle, based on wholly anonymous information about a user's browsing habits, remains the same - understanding and targeting users based on their interests helps grow businesses.
At Specific Media, we use this approach to not only identify users already showing interest in a brand, but also to seek out potential customers for brands that they didn't know were there, targeting these users throughout the purchase funnel to drive brand awareness and ultimately sales.
Waiting until a user is on a travel website before advertising them a holiday package is tantamount to trying to sell a plane ticket in the airport departure lounge. Instead, Specific Media looks further up the purchase funnel, analysing online media consumption for clues relating to user intent. If for example, a user is looking at swimwear, visiting travel review sites and checking weather forecasts for foreign destinations, these are often indicators that they may be in-market for a holiday. By spotting users early and serving them relevant adverts while still in the early stages of the decision making process, Specific Media is able to help savvy travel marketers put themselves front of potential customers.
TripAdvisor's recent Travel Trends Survey indicated that 66% of Britons were planning to take a long haul trip this year. The aforementioned TGI study suggests that nearly half of these people will be looking online to inform their decision. By making effective use of audience addressable advertising, marketers can make sure they connect with the most relevant online consumers, at the optimum points along their path to purchase.
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