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In the ever-competitive world of travel, effective advertising is key to standing out and capturing the interest of potential customers and place your advertisement on those location your potential customers are online. This blog delves into strategies and approaches to enhance the impact of your advertising efforts and explain the importance to lead visitors to a well-optimized landing page. We will explore the importance of strategic align advertising campaigns, the power of marketing repetition, and the strategic choices between push and pull advertising.
Creating a Winning Combination of Ad and Landing Page
The foundation of a successful advertising campaign for a travel organization lies in the synergy between a compelling advertisement and a high-converting landing page. To outperform competitors, it's crucial to first establish a landing page that effectively resonates with your target audience and converts visitors into leads. Once the landing page proves its effectiveness, investing in advertising becomes the next logical step.
The second step is to create matching ads, where on your landing pages you can discuss all the benefits of your USP and company that have value to your customer, in an add you want to zoom on one USP / Benefit at the time, to make sure the ads are easy to understand.
The ultimate goal is to maximize the amount of money spent on acquiring a lead while maintaining a return on investment with your set profit margin and or the maximum capacity of your travel business. This is achievable by focusing on creating the best possible combination of ad and landing page, ensuring a high conversion rate. The primary objective of any advertising campaign is to influence the purchasing decisions of your target audience, guiding them through a customer journey, starting with taking action based on the advertisement.
Once you have created a starting set up, refine and improve with A/B tests. For your ads, but also for your landing pages.
The Power of Marketing Repetition and Targeting
Effective advertising requires putting the audience at the center of your strategy, focusing on personas, top products and well defined niched products. If you lack a strategy, your marketing isn’t an investment. It’s a gamble But if you use your set strategy and focus on the well defined persona's with your top products and then experiment, optimize and repeat. Magic can occur.
The first step is to make your campaign in line with your strategy. What are the goals you need to achieve. How can you do this the in best possible way, which key messages and images and videos are you going to use. Set up measuring system to find out what works and continue with experimenting, optimizing, your ads in as well copy, visuals and audiences to improve your ROI and stop campaigns that don't work. But you need some minimum budgets for your campaigns to learn if they work or not, and keep your audiences and markets tight.
Power of marketing lies in repetition : this is a big element of building trust. The more people see your advertisement, the more familiar they get with your brand, the bigger the change you create a preference for your company, experiences or destination. Which can only be done by having big budgets or small audiences.
Narrowing your focus is crucial; targeting too broadly, such as entire continents or large countries, may dilute your message and reduce the frequency at which your audience encounters your ads. Instead, opt for niche interests and smaller target markets to ensure higher visibility and engagement. Aligning your campaign with your overall strategy, defining clear goals, and utilizing key messages, images, and videos will enhance your campaign's effectiveness.
Push vs Pull Advertising Strategies
In advertising, two predominant strategies exist: push and pull advertising. Push advertising involves presenting ads to users without their explicit request, potentially disrupting their current activity. Examples include ads on websites or social media platforms. On the other hand, pull advertising delivers ads to users actively searching for related topics, providing immediate value and relevance.
For travel organizations, push advertising can be highly effective for promoting new products or destinations, especially on platforms like Facebook, where the vast audience and targeting capabilities can be leveraged to reach niche markets. Structuring campaigns around target markets and personas, and focusing on the "Inspire" aspect of the Inspire, Help, Proof, & Sell framework, enhances the impact of push advertisements.
Example;
Objective is;
More Nature lovers from Chicago should know about my nature experience (because data says that seems to work)
I'm creating an add in a campaign Inspire Nature Lovers in Chicago
An in there I will make a rotating add with my 3 best nature experiences.
I'm going to have a different CTA as A/B test it to learn more about which CTA works best
Or
Goal: Improve product awareness to interactional audience
- Define which products (look at your top experiences)
- Make a campaign that shows experiences to personas in defined target markets
- Make clusters of experiences that fit in the interests group (travel + food lovers, food experiences - make sure you have good arguments why people should do that interests group in your destination and emphasize (rotating) in each ad on one of your USP's
Structure:
Campaign ; Markets + Persona
Ad groups ; Topic clustered experiences (nature experience, cultural etc)
Ads variations of the ads and or different experiences
You can increase the change of showing your ads to the right customers with retargeting solutions. Retargeting emerges as a highly effective advertising strategy, showing ads to individuals who have already interacted with your brand or visited your website. This targeted approach ensures that your ads are seen by an audience with a demonstrated interest, increasing the likelihood of conversion and enhancing the overall efficiency of your advertising spend.
Only one add -> One message - Landing page needs to be in sync with that.
Make sure to brand you company name with your message, you create a "recall" for your company. --> Don't only show your name at the end. And be clever, a brand name hangs longer if its connected with a story.
Size Matters ! - Bigger Ad's work better, brand within first 2 seconds, repeat !
Start with small test:
Go with what works
On same time do new tests to identify new things that work
Keep monitoring if what works still works.
You need to invest at least 500 usd to be able to learn (for example 5 months 100 usd) - Think about the lenght it takes from dreaming to buying or repeat - this sales cycle needs support the whole way.
Display Advertising and the environment
When you are a travel company, its rewarding to think where you advertise, the more targeted you advertise, the more effective your ads are but also better for the environment, because your ads are not displayed at places where they have no value. Especially advertising on low quality websites that are purely made for advertising has a bigger impact on the environment then advertising on high quality websites according to a Scope3 and Ebiquity report about the impact of digital advertising on the environment
Online Pull Advertising
Examples of pull advertising are for example Google Ads where you bid to advertise on Keywords people type in Google. Instead of interrupting them you are serving them with an advertisement that matches what they are searching for. The change that you create direct value for the searchers is much higher then when you are using a push strategy.
Starting with Google Ads
Google has the possibility to advertise visuals on their partner network. But they also have the possibility to advertise only in their search engine (pull). These are adds that work with bidding for keyword combinations.
When starting with keyword ads, focus first on people who are at the latest part of the sales funnel, scoop people away from your competitors by bidding on very focused keywords. Like for example "best holiday deals Greece" or "holiday homes 6 persons in Seattle" the volume of theses searches might be much lower, but people already choose a type of holiday, or destination, you don't have to convince them anymore of that, you can go right to show why you have the best product offer.
Another good strategy is to look in your google analytics find which landing pages have a good conversion and Use search console to identify which keywords people find that page. Advertise for those combinations to get more people on those winning pages.
Note that google also displays your campaign on normal website instead of only the search engines. It wise when you start start with Google Ads, that first focus on the ads in the search engine. Turning display ads of.
When setting up your campaign you set them up by your target audience
For example;
Family Travelers from Germany
In your ad group you separate what you sell for example cultural family tours to Italy.
In your ad you make a specific ad; Family Culture Tours Italy, Dive into the fascinating live of the Florence, Medici Family and their arts.
Focus on narrow keywords - Family cultural tours Italy, family cultural tours Florence etc, but don't go to wide like for example holiday Italy, or even family tour Italy. Focus first on people who already know what they want and you have a fantastic offer for.
Youtube works also on people searching which is a very interesting advertising channel, too, though creating a good ad is a bit more difficult, but is getting easier with the help of AI.
Pay per Click
There a several payments models to pay for your online advertising. A popular model is pay per click, where you only pay if someone is clicking on your advertisement. This model works excellent if you know how much a click is worth. If you pay less for a click, then you make a return on your spending. However most of the time, the models are more complex than it initially looks and you need to have a thorough understanding on how customers get to a booking and the amount of times they need to visit your website before they book.
Important steps to take to make sure your travel campaigns will have a return on investment are to enable conversion tracking of your website and to link your Google Ads with your Google Analytics.
If you are unclear about the value of a click, focus on very narrow audiences and or specific keywords that people use that are very close to a booking. For example a "kayak tour with a family in the Olympic peninsula" vs kayak tour in the USA.
Make sure you have at least a budget of 5 dollars a day to be able to say anything relevant about the outcome of your advertising. Otherwise the numbers become small to analyze.
Pay per Action / Conversion
Another advertising model that is frequently used in online marketing is a pay per action or per conversion model. In this model you pay per check out, the download of your travel brochure a newsletter sign up or any other kind of action you defined. This is handy when you know how much you can pay per action. To use this model you need to be able to share if to the advertising network if a conversion happened. This works through a piece of code on your website.
