How Online Marketing Is Changing Travel

Advertisers no longer interrupt consumers—they complement them. This extends to the travel industry and beyond.

The growth of online marketing, personalized marketing and mobile app use has changed the way travel companies do business. While TV ads and billboards are still relevant, online marketing rules these days.

Just ask Frank Vertolli and Ryan Fitzgerald, co-founders of Net Conversion, a digital marketing and analytics company. Or Evan Schwartz, CEO of ActionX, a mobile app and cross-screen retargeting company.

While online marketing is nothing new, Vertolli, Fitzgerald and Schwartz—who serve a variety of travel companies—all agree that it has reached a new level over the past 12-18 months. The digital marketing world is extremely competitive now, and the best companies have learned that it’s not just about following consumers around (or retargeting them) while they search the Internet—it’s about being as relevant as possible to targeted consumers.

“The days of interruptive advertising…that’s not how it’s done anymore,” Vertolli said. “Now I think relevance is the new criteria. You don’t want to interrupt consumers; you want to complement them with ads that are specific to them. If you want to stand out from the noise, it used to be screaming louder. Have a funnier commercial or a more insane offer. Now it’s relevance. Be as relevant as possible to that user and they will reward you with attention to your ad. With the travel industry, as with everywhere else, targeting is key. The stakes just keep getting higher.”

Personalized advertising has taken on a new meaning these days. Hotel companies, airlines, OTAs, tour operators—you name it—enlist the help of companies like Net Conversion and ActionX to learn as much as possible about potential customers as possible. Based on which keywords travelers use when searching, travel companies can tap into travelers’ mindsets (for example, a budget-oriented traveler will use words such as “cheap hotels” or “deals”). They’ll then retarget travelers using, for example, banner ads. Every page the traveler goes to, there’s that same ad or company flashing on the screen.

Different types of ads will cater to different types of travelers. Business travelers will generally see a more straightforward advertising approach, Vertolli said (quick-hit details like rate, destination, proximity, cost, what’s covered, etc.), while leisure travelers will generally see ads that “pull more emotional strings.”

Video marketing has really taken off, especially when it comes to leisure travel. Post a 30-second YouTube clip of travelers enjoying that luxurious hotel stay or a complimentary outdoor activity and watch the interest skyrocket, Fitzgerald said.

“Travel is such an experiential thing,” Vertolli said. “Nothing can tell the story as much as video does. Now with Internet you can have a more specific video with a more specific audience.”

There are even a few tricks of the trade when video marketing. Ever notice some travel ads show people enjoying themselves but don’t show their faces? There’s a reason for that.

While people want to see other people like them enjoying travel, showing the back of people’s heads in ads “is better because then you can imagine it's you and your family,” Vertolli said.

Beyond that, as Fitzgerald noted, online video marketing is much more measurable than TV ads with the use of analytics, which can be helpful when you need to present your results to an important chairman or investor.

Online video advertising is also leading to fewer 3D and virtual tours of such things as hotel rooms. Why have a 3D or virtual tour when you can show the real experience with video? Vertolli said virtual tours used to be popular because they used less bandwidth, but, given bandwidth isn’t as much of an issue anymore as Internet speeds increase, 3D and virtual tours are waning across the Internet.

Of course, people access the Internet in many different ways today. Schwartz’s company, ActionX, specializes in mobile app advertising, which is mighty useful for travel companies these days.

Schwartz said companies simply focused on getting travelers to download their apps. Now, companies want more.

When developing ActionX, “We heard the same thing from our e-commerce and travel clients, which was, ‘Thanks for driving all these app downloads, but we need revenue,’” Schwartz said. “It’s a big focus area for a lot of brands because they spend a lot of money building their apps and their audiences are just naturally going to mobile.”

Schwartz said ActionX not only uses personalized ads to drive business for travel companies, but it also makes sure these ads are rich in content (photography, deals, etc.), “making the ad itself shoppable.”

“It’s not just a little tiny rectangle,” Schwartz said. “You are getting a lot of content before you click into the app so you can start shopping right away.”

Schwartz, Vertolli and Fitzgerald all gave kudos to the travel industry for building some of the best apps out there.

It makes sense for the travel industry to be leaders in mobile app development, too. Travelers are naturally mobile people and they sometimes need to book on the go.

It makes sense for the travel industry to be leaders in mobile app development, too. Travelers are naturally mobile people and they sometimes need to book on the go. The competition among marketers during these moments can be fierce, however.

“You need to find (the traveler) right away because they are going to book something in, say, 15 minutes,” Schwartz said.

One only has to look at the business ActionX is drawing from the travel industry to understand the level of demand from the segment.

“For our business, we’ve seen a lot of growth in the travel category,” Schwartz said. “That’s why we’ve built a multi-screen platform (cross-screen retargeting) to reach people across the whole purchase journey,” from the desktop to the tablet to the smartphone.

“Mobile is exploding,” Fitzgerald said. “Either last year or this year was kind of the tipping point.”

But mobile app marketing still has plenty of room to grow, Fitzgerald and Vertolli said. While some companies have made the booking experience practical and easy on a mobile phone, the grand majority still has yet to come around. It can still be painstaking for travelers to book everything on a mobile app. Many companies are developing apps to at least provide travelers with a phone number to call when they want to book on the go.    

Of course, the highly publicized introduction of Apple Pay this week may change everything, as Fitzgerald noted.

“Basically what that means is you can book a hotel through your phone with your fingerprint without using any credit card information,” Fitzgerald said. “That, for me, is even easier than a phone call.”

Given the direct and specific approach marketers can make now via online targeting—and the ever-evolving tools they have at their disposal—less time and money is being wasted on advertising, which means the sky’s the limit for travel business.

In fact, online marketing may simply be standard across the globe soon.

“In five years, nobody’s going to say ‘digital marketing’ and nobody’s going to say ‘online marketing,’” Fitzgerald said. “People are going to say ‘marketing’ and that’s it because there won’t be any differentiation anymore.”

Source: Travel Agent Central