How to master the travel marketing game

By James Harrison

Marketing yourself in the world of travel feels a bit unusual for many in the industry. Putting yourself and your business on display to flaunt its prowess is somewhat out of the travel skillset, so when you do decide to market your business the problem is that you don’t know where to start.

If you do decide to put some effort and money into marketing you may be stuck with some of your first choices: Who do I want to attract? Where should I invest my money? How do I achieve the highest possible conversion rates with my clients?

These questions are important because when you do decide to start selling your product, you want it done effectively.

To achieve this, you need to get your hands on the best quality data that you can to gear you towards your ideal client. This data is the crucial detail that leads you to maximise sales and ensure that your marketing dollars work hardest for your strategy.

An Aussie company that specialises in this is Audience360, a leading provider of 1st party audience data with transparent data from trusted brands around Australia.

Audience360 knows how to engage travellers best. Its data partnership with Webjet.com.au, Australia’s largest online travel agency, means that it has access to data that reaches over 2.8 million travellers per month searching and booking flights, accommodations, car rentals, and other travel services online.

Of this data, 310,000+ domestic flights, 57,000+ hotels, 56,000+ packages, 14,900+ international flights and more are looked at per month.

This allows agents, brands, wholesalers, airlines, accommodation partners, car rentals, experience operators, destinations and anyone else in the travel marketing game to reach their target audience.

With this highly intricate level of detail that the data Audience360 sources and provides, travel marketers don’t have to rely on a ‘spray and pray’ technique that wastes ad dollars. Instead, Audience360 helps best engage travellers through a marketing strategy with some of the highest conversion rates in travel marketing.

For example, Audience360 helped an Aussie nationally represented hotel chain that was looking to reach domestic travellers to drive online bookings via their website. The key measurement of success here was a significant return on advertiser spend (ROAS).

During the pandemic, the hotel chain was conscious of increasing brand recall and consideration of the brand within a core segment of travellers.

Audience360’s approach was to leverage its exclusive 1st party deterministic audience to target travellers who were in the consideration and action phases when looking to travel.

A core component of the strategy was to deliver targeted advertising across key audiences based on their airport of origin and desired destination. Strategies included segmenting and ranking users based on NSW and QLD as destinations and weighting delivery based on Brisbane, NSW, Gold Coast Sunshine Coast and Tropical North Queensland as part of a greater strategy.

This resulted in a return on advertiser spend of 15:1 and beat the target of a return on advertiser spend of 10:1 – all during the COVID-related border closures.

It’s through utilising a relevant data set that allowed the hotel chain to know what the traveller needed next, without them needing to ask for it. In this case, it was a hotel room in the destination the traveller had just booked a flight to.

By utilising Audience360’s incredibly valuable data, travel marketers can not only find their perfect clientele but can reach them at the right time with consumer appropriate content. The data is here to show those in the industry that converting clients and selling travel products doesn’t have to be the hard part of your job.

To find out more about Audience360 and how it can help your business click HERE.

Featured Image: iStock/lechatnoir

Advertise with us

Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au

Audience360 travel marketing