Did you know using a narrow approach to marketing stifles your campaigns’ ability to grow your business? A much more fruitful methodology is to use multiple touchpoints and regularly evaluate each how each component of your marketing campaign contributes to your overall sales results. Let’s explore how this works.

The way online media and marketing has traditionally been evaluated is by equating the last touch point – for example an ad – a consumer experienced before they bought a trip, hotel room or flight with the sale’s success.

But that’s not quite true and doesn’t really reflect the way people book travel because people don’t see a single ad and then buy the product it’s selling. What’s key in achieving sales is trust, brand recognition and the ability to meet consumer needs.

This means it’s important to offer consumers multiple touch points to experience your brand and travel products. This gives your business as many opportunities as possible to interact with prospective travellers while they research the market and the opportunities available to them.

Multiple Marketing

It’s useful to explore case studies to show how this works. In one example, a high-end retail brand sought to achieve online product sales with significant ROAS, drive traffic to its site and increase brand recall among an elite audience.

As a result, a comprehensive and successful marketing plan requires many different parts. A key one is deterministic data. This is factual and transparent information about how consumers are searching for travel products, based on information about how consumers who are in the market are searching for travel products.

Branding work is also critical. Facebook, Google and free-to-air TV advertising are great vehicles for this. Consumers can get to know your brand when you display advertising across top social media platforms, search engines and on popular TV shows.

The right mix of the different media you need to drive sales requires a deep understanding of your consumers and their typical path to purchase. The more data you have about them, the more you understand how they come into contact with your brand and other travel vendors, and the more you know about how they search for your business and businesses like yours, is the best way to support sales.

Be aware, however, this process is constantly evolving. People’s behaviours and media consumption changes all the time, as evidenced from the gradual migration from analogue to digital media over the last decade. This means it’s essential to understand how people’s media use and consumption shifts over time and tweak your marketing program accordingly.

Taking this approach, and working with partners that have real and verifiable deterministic data, is the key to driving the best outcomes for your business.