With so much targeting data being provided to travel marketers, it can be difficult to separate the useful from the worthless. This makes it hard to focus on a powerful strategy.
Three ways to promote and protect your travel brand
Old but effective methods are fine to use, such as buying third-party views, retargeting, and selecting strategic advertisement placement. However, these methods can limit your reach potential without protecting your brand from wasted content.
For more search engine–related promotion tips, see Search Engines and Trip Planning: 4 Things Travel Brands Need to Know.
Thankfully, there are several tips you can follow to give your ROI a nice boost! Here are our top three:
1. Stay safe and make it easy
Keeping your brand safe is becoming increasingly more important for online advertisers. Negative brand associations can be deadly for advertising in the travel industry. Most advertisers tend to avoid content that includes firearms or profanity, but the travel niche has its own things to avoid. For example, a cruise line doesn’t want word to get out about their food-borne illness.
This is one of the reasons that travel marketers need to look into our pre-made Safe for Travel category that handles content for you. This category is designed to automatically ignore a variety of bad travel content, including bad travel stories, lost luggage, sex tourism, tourism environment damage, expensive travel prices, and more.
2. Take advantage of the weather
Apart from the obvious peaks during Christmas and spring break, there are many weather patterns to take advantage of including extreme colds and extensive heat. Nothing makes a consumer want to say “get me away from here” like horrible weather.
This should always be used to your advantage. Technology can be leveraged to target viewers in specific weather zones in real time. All unpleasant weather conditions should be targeted and taken advantage of in real time with your creative messages and media buying.
3. Context is king
Imagine being able to display an appealing ad on your competitor’s website. We can’t help you accomplish this, but we can help you with the next best thing.
By using custom categories, travel brands have the ability to target web content that is directly pertaining to their competitors. These are great placements for listing the advantages of using your services and the disadvantages of using another service. When trying to create a positive image of your brand, context is a very powerful tool.
Using pre-built categories to your advantage is a very low-cost way to keep your brand safe while meeting all of your performance goals. Those who think creatively about where and how they advertise get much better value for their money and effort than those who don’t.
There are a lot of categories that you would think don’t relate to the travel industry, but always remember that any type of content can be spun to fit into a topic or niche. The example of using categories that your consumers are in gives you a perfect idea of how this can be done effectively. It is important to put some deep thought into your decisions so as not to waste money.
