Digital Marketing Strategies For the Travel Industry

The purchase path for today’s leisure travellers is becoming increasingly complex. Consumers have more options than ever before and are taking longer to make decisions. To engage today’s travellers and stand out from the competition, digital marketing in the travel industry needs to be dynamic, personalized, and timely. 

Programmatic advertising offers many opportunities for travel and tourism marketers. Digital marketing strategies like multi-channel campaigns and dynamic retargeting allow you to reach leisure travellers with the right message at the right time across multiple touchpoints and devices.

Ready to take flight? Read on to learn how you can drive better results and take your travel campaigns to new heights with these digital marketing strategies.

Programmatic Targeting Tactics to Help You Fly High 

Programmatic buying isn’t just efficient—it leads to more sophisticated and targeted campaigns. Below is a list of five travel industry targeting tactics to help you reach the right audience with precision.

1. Seasonal Targeting

Campaign timing is important because of the seasonal nature of travel bookings. Demand for travel services and offerings fluctuates based on the weather, events like festivals, sports competitions (for example, the Olympics and FIFA World Cup), and school holidays. 

It’s also important to consider how far in advance travellers are booking their adventures. An American Express Travel survey found that 54% of people like to plan trips three to six months in advance, and Expedia Group reports that the average traveller takes about 71 days of research and planning before booking a trip. With so many travellers thinking about their vacation plans months in advance, catching their attention early is key.

Travel peaks also differ by location. For example, December to April is the peak season for enjoying the beaches in Mexico, while the US travel high season is historically June through August.

Based on data from campaigns in StackAdapt, digital ad spend, site visits, and engagement are highest from May to June. This is likely because advertisers target travellers before and during the summer, with June being the most popular month. The second highest period for travel digital ad spend is September to November, which coincides with travellers planning their winter vacations to sunnier destinations. 

Your campaign objectives will also impact timing. Your objective could be advertising ahead of the peak season and taking advantage of existing travel intent to increase sales. Or it could be building awareness for off-season travel ideas, such as visiting a ski town in the summer when it’s more affordable and hiking instead of hitting the slopes. 

To determine seasonal campaign timing, look to industry and historical data to zero in on the times that have worked best (and worst) for travel marketers. The benefit of programmatic advertising is that you can continually optimize to find the campaign timing that works for you, ensuring every ad dollar delivers the most value.

2. Travel Intent Targeting

Intent-based targeting is a more granular form of targeting that allows you to identify individuals showing interest in travel. Custom audience segments use machine learning to target individuals looking for flights, hotels, and activities based on the content they’re consuming, such as travel blogs, reviews of attractions, and flight comparison sites. 

You can also identify individuals engaging with related content, such as research about neighbouring destinations, content about a competitor’s offerings or services, or reviews. Leveraging intent-based targeting can help you optimize ad spend and drive more qualified traffic.

3. Route Targeting

Travellers are more likely to click on ads showing relevant routes to exciting destinations. Include personalized messaging that mentions their location or the distance to reach a destination they’ve shown interest in to encourage them to click through. 

Additionally, you could leverage data about a potential traveller’s geographic location and show them ads with the most convenient departures. 

For example, you can advertise flights to Las Vegas from two different locations, highlighting where the user is coming from. Both ads are for the same flight aggregator site, but the messaging and creatives could differ based on who’s viewing them and where they’re located.

4. Targeting With Private Marketplace Deals

Private marketplace (PMP) deals enable publishers to sell premium inventory directly to select buyers. After search and social, PMP deals are among the most popular ad choices for digital marketing for the travel industry. 

Online travel agencies are highly-influential resources for travellers when making destination decisions. A PMP deal that displays your ads on a bundling site, like Expedia, can help your brand connect with consumers as they start mapping out their trip.

Leverage your programmatic platform’s deal packages to capture vertical-specific inventory most suited to your brand or campaign. Whether you aim to snag that above-the-fold placement or ensure an exact audience match with a curated list of travel publishers, PMPs can help you get there.

5. Dynamic Retargeting

Leveraging retargeting allows you to deliver ads to people based on their previous, intent-based actions online. This is an important tactic for re-engaging travellers who have previously shown interest in your services. By re-engaging them, you can move them down the funnel toward a conversion. Dynamically retarget individuals with personalized native or display ad content based on their previous website engagement or activity. If someone has browsed through your travel offerings, continue to remind them of what they’re interested in (or missing by not booking a trip or stay) throughout their online journey.

3 Channels to Use in Digital Marketing for the Travel Industry

Programmatic allows you to connect with travellers using a multi-channel approach. Here are some ways you can target travellers with video, audio, and display advertising.

1. Bring Travel to Life With Video

Travel is an emotional experience. Leveraging programmatic channels that tap into that emotion is a great way to capture the interest of your target audience. 

Video is particularly effective for travel marketers because it’s an engaging and immersive medium that uses visual cues to engage with customers. 

Digital marketers in the travel industry can use video advertising to engage potential travellers with storytelling that showcases the full breadth of experiences available to them, from getaways at boutique hotels to resorts located on tropical beaches. 

You could also repurpose your video campaign on connected TV (CTV), which provides a natural, full-screen experience and holds a viewer’s attention longer than linear TV ads. CTV ads are served in a lean-back environment where the audience is already engaged. When streaming CTV, viewers understand and accept that ads are part of the viewing experience. Knowing this, they’re more receptive to them. These benefits, combined with CTV’s precision targeting and premium inventory, are just part of why we’re seeing CTV overtake linear ad spend.

2. Influence Travellers With Programmatic Audio

EMARKETER forecasts that digital audio will grow 6.8% in 2024 to reach $7.12 billion USD. This growth will continue—with average annual growth rates above 5% expected until 2026—as more people embrace digital audio. 

Programmatic audio automates the selling and insertion of ads into audio content, such as music or podcasts on Spotify. Ads reach your audience through various devices, including desktop, mobile, and tablet. Another benefit is you can buy targeted ads from all the major audio publishers using one platform.

In digital marketing for the travel industry, audio ads can be leveraged to inspire, influence  and inform listeners about destinations, hotels, or experiences. Data shows that compared to other forms of advertising, digital audio ads are more likely to engage listeners, help them remember specific details, and increase their emotional response. This can lead to stronger brand awareness and recall, which is important when travellers take months to book a trip.

3. Collect Data With Interactive Display Ads

An interactive display ad can help collect valuable data about your ideal customer. For example, you can use a discovery ad to ask the user what the weather is like where they are, encouraging them to interact with the ad they’ve seen. This helps travel marketers figure out what type of vacation they might prefer.

Even if the viewer clicks all the weather options, you can still gauge interest in certain locations based on the conversion events. This example would be ideal to include in a retargeting campaign once the target market is familiar with your brand.

With dynamic countdown ads, you can ensure your audience is aware of your travel sales and promotions or remind them about upcoming holiday breaks. This creates a sense of urgency for your audience, encouraging them to perform a specific action, like research or book an upcoming trip before the sale is over.

Measuring the Impact of Digital Marketing Campaigns in the Travel and Tourism Industry

Finally, once you start running ads, you want to understand their effect on conversions. Here are two ways to do that:

1. Measure Awareness and Consideration With Brand Lift Studies

Brand lift studies allow marketers to demonstrate the impact of their ad spend beyond standard metrics like reach, frequency, and cost per impression. 

By conducting a travel and tourism lift study, marketers can measure travellers’ awareness of particular travel services, destinations or attractions, and gauge the likelihood of them making a booking.

For example, let’s say you’re a travel agency running a campaign to promote your new luxury European tour packages. A brand lift study can measure if your target audience’s awareness of these new touring offerings has increased after exposure to your ads and if they’re now more likely to book a vacation. These detailed insights can help you refine your ad targeting and messaging, improving the overall effectiveness of your advertising spend.

2. Use Data to Connect Travellers to Campaigns

Travel marketers can also understand the impact of their travel campaigns with a number of measurement tools. At StackAdapt, you can look at Destination Visitation Measurement to get insights on your campaign.

Similar to footfall attribution, when a user is exposed to your campaign and subsequently visits your destination, one of StackAdapt’s trusted visitation data collection partners uses location data to:

• Attribute overall visitation and lift (US only) to your campaigns.
• Identify where travellers visit your destination from at the country, state, and city level to determine your top origin markets.
• Understand how visitors spent time at your destination (for example, what restaurants, attractions, national parks, and museums they visited during their stay).
• Access insights from ongoing campaigns to optimize and increase campaign performance.

Using this information, travel marketers can understand how successful their campaigns were at driving visits to their destination and gain insights to help improve their overall travel marketing strategy.

For a more holistic view of your campaign’s effectiveness, travel marketers can also pair this with StackAdapt’s Economic Impact Report solution, which provides insights on where and how much your audience spends during their trip.

Digital Marketing for Travel Takes Off With Programmatic

Programmatic advertising is a highly-effective way to reach your target demographic throughout their travel-buying journey. Understanding the right targeting tactics and ad formats to leverage for your campaigns can help you attract more travellers and ultimately drive direct bookings.

Want to run exceptional programmatic travel campaigns? Request a demo to learn more about StackAdapt.