Digital Marketing for Travel: How to Unlock Multi-channel Strategies

The challenges

The travel sector is facing a wide range of external challenges at the moment: the cost of living is influencing people’s holiday choices; global conflicts are impacting travel plans and holiday destinations; there’s an 'attention recession' due to constant ads on multiple devices, making it hard to reach people at the right time; and of course, there’s the ever-present threat of competition, with new players disrupting the market, and technological advancements such as generative AI and other verticals competing for customer spend. 

Internally, marketing departments are likely to be facing challenges as well. Budgets are always under pressure, combined with the need to justify every pound spent. Teams often work in silos with their own budgets, objectives and strategies, which doesn’t always lead to a customer-first approach across marketing activities. Campaign measurement remains incredibly difficult, thanks to the opacity of walled garden reporting and the difficulties in joining the dots across channels and attribution effectively. And finally, the continued evolution of legislation like GDPR, PECR and cookie policies can cause delays and concerns when launching new campaigns. 

With these challenges in mind, let’s take a look how implementing a smart data strategy can deliver a customer-first multi-channel approach to help increase customer acquisition.   

Maximising first party data

The first party data you hold on your existing customers is your greatest asset when it comes to new customer acquisition. This is where you should look first for insights that will help you find more individuals with similar interests and behaviours.  

Firstly, interrogate your own CRM data. This will tell you who your most valuable customers are; where the most popular destinations are; which packages deliver the highest margins, and more. While there will be gaps, data partners can help deliver powerful insights. Once you have a keen view of your ideal customer segments, you can profile them.  

Utilising a data partner enables you to match your customer records to your own data assets, containing hundreds of variables per record, including life stages, hobbies, sports, affluence, family structure and many more.

Finally, take a look at what your web analytics are telling you: what channels are customers using to visit your site; what devices are they using to browse and book holidays; what referring URLs are they coming from? These insights are vital in helping to build a multi-channel strategy.

From first party to third party data activation 

There are multiple ways you can leverage your first party data across multiple digital channels: 

Load your first party audience into different digital channels and let the in-platform algorithms go to work and find look-a-like audiences. The downside is that you can’t be sure if the same users are seeing your brand across different walled gardens.

From the customer profiling you've done, you can use in-platform selections to refine your target audience such as age, affluence, and location.

You can select specific audiences using data platforms which are integrated within your digital marketing ecosystem to further refine audience selections based on your first party data.

You can work with trusted data partners, like Sagacity, that first identify an addressable audience to target and then deploy that audience across multiple digital channels.     

Employing a multi-channel approach 

People are engaging with media in more ways than ever before, whether that’s streaming content on connected TVs or scrolling through social feeds and browsing websites. To stay relevant and top-of-mind, you must meet the audience wherever they are, across multiple touchpoints. 

There are plenty of channels to choose from: email, connected TV, display, digital out of home (DooH), paid social and more. You don’t have to select them all at once. Instead, consider testing a dual approach, ideally with channels that give you the greatest chance of tracking performance as accurately as possible.  

Consider your creative

Creative is critical for a multi-channel campaign. Your visual messaging must cut through the noise – according to Nielsen, 47% of campaign performance comes down to ad creative. Effective creative execution ensures your message doesn’t just reach your audience, it resonates with them. 

You will need to consider: 

• Consistent branding, unified messaging and a coherent visual style across all channels
• A clear, compelling value proposition
• A deep understanding of what drives your audience to act
• A clear call to action

And of course, anything you do must also be optimised for mobile. According to Navan, more than 70% of travel sector website traffic comes from mobile devices, although desktop still accounts for around 50% of bookings.

Bringing it all together

As you will be focusing on the customer experience across multiple channels, you’ll need to break down silos and bring different stakeholders together. Lean on your agency, data partners, and internal staff to collaborate. It’s also helpful to get buy-in from the C-suite to act as sponsor for the activity, which will also help drive collaboration.

Strategically, it makes sense to start relatively small: there’s no need to take big risks. Instead try it for a one-off campaign or perhaps test a specific region. Try testing across two channels rather than four or five all at once. You can always add additional channels in the future.

You should also be creative in managing costs. Reassign existing budget, look at reducing budget spent on PPC brand terms, or reduce your re-targeting budget to free up capital. Run some campaign hygiene: up to 30% of paid site traffic could be coming from bots. By reviewing referring URLs, you can block bot clicks which reduces ad wastage. Plan collaboratively and give yourself plenty of time to get it right.   

Measurement is key

There are a few ways to measure success. Web analytics is a good place to start but, as you know, each platform will tell its own story with different platforms all claiming the same booking. Meta results look better in Meta than they do in GA4. Don’t use last click as your single point of truth. Incrementality testing is a good way to understand the uplift a campaign has generated.

With the reduction in cookies and opaque platform measurement, more companies are moving to econometric models to show the true impact of different channels. However, this takes time and quite a lot of investment. And wherever possible, work with partners that provide sound measurement methodologies, and ideally can match back to addressable audiences.

Outcomes and benefits

When all the above is employed correctly, the results can be impressive – indeed, for one client, we saw a 14% incremental uplift in bookings thanks to increasing brand exposures across direct mail, email, Facebook ad impressions, and display ad impressions.

A successful multi-channel marketing campaign will not only reach prospective holiday makers wherever they are using the most relevant channels, but also improve the effectiveness and performance of your campaigns, especially if you ensure that you measure effectively and don’t waste budget.

By ensuring strategy, data, creative, and channel are working in harmony, your multi-channel marketing campaigns can deliver their full potential: maximising reach, optimising engagement, and driving real results.