Your customer has traveled a long way to get to your destination. Not only physically, but also emotionally through the buyer’s customer journey. What is the customer journey? Simply put, it’s the number of experiences and brand touchpoints that have to happen for your customer.
Fun Fact #1: It takes 28-62 brand touchpoints for someone to make a purchase.
From awareness to advocacy, here are the four stages of the marketing customer journey for ALL travelers. That’s right! Every single person who books a vacation goes through these stages. Sometimes it takes years, sometimes it takes hours. It all depends on the traveler’s current needs and how much marketing support they receive to help them on their journey.
This guide also includes recommendations on which digital advertising placements to run ads, depending on where your audience is on their journey and how to measure each stage. If you’ve ever wondered where you should advertise your destination and when, this blog post is for you.
1) The Awareness Stage: The Official Introduction
The first stage of the journey is critical and so often missed. A traveler can’t dream of visiting a destination they’ve never heard of. And they won’t directly book a hotel they can’t Google. It’s imperative that a potential traveler knows you exist.
Digital Advertising Placements for Awareness
To introduce an audience to your destination consider these advertising placements, depending on audience demographics. For example, if the average age of your guest is 45-to-55-years-old, I wouldn’t recommend advertising on TikTok. Here’s a list of digital advertising placements that will spark brand awareness:
- Display ads, especially on travel publishers and travel related content
- Connected TV
- Influencer sponsored content
- Snapchat
- TikTok
- YouTube
How to Measure Awareness
You’ve been running ads, but how do you know if you’ve reached people? Here are four key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure awareness advertising campaigns:
- Estimated ad recall lift (available on Facebook)
- Impressions
- Frequency
- Reach
2) The Consideration Stage: I’d Like to Learn More
Now that your audience is aware that you exist, it’s time to walk with them through the consideration stage. How do you know if someone is in this stage? They’re engaging with your brand. Engagement is a powerful thing to measure because it helps you identify the people who are interested.
Digital Advertising Placements for Consideration
Consideration can be tricky because you want to serve people ads that draw their attention and inspire action. These advertising placements help give travelers a bit more context, while also providing a clear CTA:
- Bing search ads
- Facebook, especially boosted posts optimized for engagement
- Influencer sponsored content
- Native placements
- YouTube
- Google search Ads
How to Measure Consideration
Engagement is the number one way to know if someone is considering you. Here are nine KPIs to measure a traveler’s interest in your destination:
- Ad comments
- Email sign ups
- Followers
- Messages
- Reactions
- Shares/repins
- Video views
- Website visits, pay close attention to session durations and bounce rate
- Website downloads
3) The Conversion Stage: Booked and Ready to Go
Success! Your audience has discovered who you are, they were curious enough to learn more and now they’re ready to book.
Digital Advertising for Conversions
To reach an audience that are most likely book, consider running conversion-optimized campaigns on these effective platforms:
- Facebook retargeting ads
- Google search ads
- Bing search ads
- Email, not an advertising placement, but a highly valuable audience that is more likely to convert
How to Measure Conversions
Depending on how people book with your destination, sometimes the actual booking happens offline, an analytics nightmare, amirite? In those cases, identify which online conversions happen right before a person books. Here are four sample conversions you could measure:
- Contact form submissions
- Clicks-to-call
- Checking availability
- Bookings
4) The Advocacy Stage: I Think I Love You
Your audience has reached their final destination! Bookings might be your business goal, but the coveted advocacy stage should be your ultimate marketing objective. Once travelers have reached this stage, they will be generating awareness for you among their networks.
Fun Fact #2: Word of mouth is still the most impactful form of marketing, with 92% of consumers believing a recommendation from friends and family over any ad.
Digital Marketing for Advocacy
To help engage with your travelers and increase advocacy, focus on the following:
- Make hashtags and social media profiles easy for guests to find (e.g. a sign in their room, printed on wristbands)
- Comment and engage with tagged social media posts
- Provide a referral program
- Repurpose user-generated content (UGC)
- Respond to reviews (e.g. Google, TripAdvisor)
- Send an email thanking them for their visit
- Send them an email on a key date (birthday, anniversary, last visit) and let them know you’re celebrating them
How to Measure Advocacy
How do you know if people are advocating on your behalf? By monitoring and measuring these four areas:
- Social media tagged posts
- Hashtag usage
- Reviews
- Repeat visits
A campaign’s success relies on a marketer’s ability to respect and support their audience’s journey. As a travel marketing consultant, I want to help make your visitors’ marketing journey memorable. If you love the topic of customer journeys as much as I do, let’s geek out together.
