How to make your travel marketing personal

We Brits love our travel. And by travel we really mean holidays. After a couple of years where holidays were curtailed due to that pandemic, it seems we value them even more than ever. In fact, some recent research from Easyjet suggests that holidays are a necessity, with 70% of people surveyed saying they will prioritise holiday spend over other household spend, even in a cost of living crisis, with 64% of us saying we plan to go abroad this year.

Be confident but cautious

I was at an ABTA travel event recently and this positivity was definitely felt in the room, with travel companies reporting bookings to be up and at the highest level since 2019. However, we need to be careful that this optimism doesn’t lead to complacency. Cost of living is not a level playing field. While it is true that as much as 40% of the population, mainly older people with solid pensions, are not impacted, many more of us are and have to be very conscious of what we spend and how we spend it. We might value our holidays, but we are not going to be booking them without shopping around and considering options.

In addition, competition has increased. Not only is it much easier to book and plan a holiday without anyone else being involved – just carry out good research and book direct – there are also many more intermediaries willing to help. The days of the big, high street travel agencies sweeping up all bookings may be over but online agencies, one-man experts and smaller bespoke companies are doing very well by being relevant and targeted in their approach.

Another interesting thing that came out of the event was the increase in content-based marketing, SEO and PPC, and ensuring that you were top of mind when people were searching for flights, places, adventures or experiences. The need to be engaging, to share experiences and tell great stories about the potential trip were all discussed and are indeed all worthy.

The opportunity for personalisation

However, less was discussed about outbound marketing, about how to find the right audience for your niche and how to engage them with personalised, tailored messages. And that seems to me to be an opportunity. For me, there are two sides to personalisation. The first is who you want to be personal with (and why) and the second is what the personal content should be.

On the who, this isn’t just as simple as building a profile. In your database, there is a generic profile, but there are also hundreds and hundreds of mini profiles. Each of us is unique – even if we don’t want to be sometimes. To treat everyone like the individual they are should be our aim. That isn’t always possible. Our advice is to look at the profiles of your customers and to pick a few combination of variables that create distinction; that might be age band, family make up, trip type (long/short/near/far), and spend for example, and create content that matches the combinations.

By creating these audience combinations, you not only get an understanding of group size and make up of these sub-groups, but in addition, these profiles can be used to find more exact lookalikes and therefore target better for outbound recruitment (as well as online).

Once we have the who, the what falls out from that. By analysing who is in your sub-groups, what trips they have bought and what they like to do, the content type can be determined. However, that is where the really important side of content, creative and storytelling comes in. And what is more powerful when telling a story than knowing who you are telling it to?

The power of social listening

One area we have found to be very useful in content creation is social listening. Once groups have been created, selecting a sample and then monitoring on social media can help to understand what type of trips are being discussed and also in what way, what tone and what the hooks can be. This can then be used to tailor and target content appropriately.

Personalisation can be as simple as getting someone’s name, age band and gender correct (you would be amazed how many times that one is missed) but it can also become quite precise and targeted quickly if used wisely. And it also doesn’t need a lot of computing power or a full underlying SCV to be executed. As ever, our advice is to start small. Doing something is better than doing nothing.

And remember, a holiday is a personal choice. So you should get personal when influencing that choice.

Image: Natalya Zaritskaya via Unsplash