How to "touch" your customers more effectively
Travellers are in “perpetual travel planning mode”, with their constant investment in the holiday process creating ample opportunities for the industry to impact their purchasing decisions.
The insights were delivered to the Travel DAZE conference in Sydney by Stuart Stacy of ADARA earlier this week, where he advised attendees to take a multi-touch approach to reaching their clients.
“It’s not about the first touch or the last touch, it’s about the right touch,” he said. “There are opportunities to reach customers at multiple points in the sales funnel.”
When travellers are in search of information and inspiration, they can be reached via channels such as TripAdvisor and Facebook. As they get deeper into planning to mode, the best way could be via meta search sites for example as they seek out the best deals. And then when they are in the booking stage, the opportunities to reach them are via retailers, be they online or traditional.
“There are plenty of points in the funnel to engage with your audience,” Stacy stressed. “When I’m travelling, I’m already thinking about where my next holiday is.”
With many media channels available in the current landscape, Stacy conceded that it can be challenging to get a unified message across.
But it is nonetheless “critical” to be able to engage and influence you audience. Data can be an invaluable tool in doing this, with travel particularly well placed in this area thanks to its highly “connectable, collectible, predictable and scalable” nature.
Data can be collected from online interactions, thanks to the growing number of people using the internet to plan and book travel, with mobile also playing an important role.
The fact that many travel purchases lead to others is also something that can be leveraged by the industry. For example once a customer has booked a flight, they then look for a hotel or a rental car.
Meanwhile, loyalty data can be used to predict trends and patterns.
“That data can be leveraged to engage with audience at multiple touch points,” Stacy said.
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