With so many content and review site options in the travel space, there’s a likelihood people shopping for and booking travel might not even encounter certain brands’ products.
This creates an opportunity for travel brands to proactively reach out and find travelers at these critical stages to showcase their offerings and cultivate relationships with customers.
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Speaking at the Phocuswright Europe conference last month, Facebook head of global travel strategy at Nikhilesh Ponde says the technologies and capabilities available today allow travel brands and customers to work together to create a more seamless travel experience.
He says the three things Facebook travel partners want most are to drive growth - particularly via mobile - as well as to reach customers directly and to differentiate their brand.
To address these issues, Ponde says a people-based marketing approach can help drive business.
What is people-based marketing?
Ponde says people-based marketing is targeting people on the platforms where they’re already spending time in meaningful and creative ways. “In a mobile-first world, it’s critical to rethink how we reach people."
“We all know and we’re all aware that people spend more and more time of mobile devices today, yet when we look at the media mix of ad spend in the travel industry, we don’t see this awareness reflected in how marketers are choosing to reach their customers.”
A statistic from IDC, for example, predicts that this year 14% of travel ad spend in Europe will be devoted to mobile devices. However, customers spend 25% of their time on mobile. “That’s a huge gap,” Ponde says. “As marketers, we need to rebalance our priorities aggressively toward mobile.”
Understanding behaviors
In order to reach people on mobile, marketers must also understand their behaviors. “Mobile hasn’t just changed people’s behaviors; it continues to do so every day as mobile devices become further embedded in our daily lives,” Ponde says.
In a mobile-first world, it’s critical to rethink how we reach people.
Nikhilesh Ponde - Facebook
People engage with just a few apps on a daily basis, with 78% of users’ time spent on three apps that are typically in the social, video and messaging categories. More than two billion people log onto Facebook every month, and more than 800 million use Instagram. For messaging, six of the top 10 most downloaded apps are mobile messaging ones.
Ponde says Facebook has repeatedly seen that not only do people prefer to communicate with businesses through messaging apps, but they also prefer to shop with businesses who are available to them through these platforms.
“This is highly relevant to our industry which, at the end of the day, is about hospitality and serving travelers,” he says. “Platforms like Messenger and WhatsApp enable travel brands to have authentic, one-on-one and persistent conversations with consumers through the channels they prefer and stay relevant to them throughout their trip.”
Ponde says he believes this preference for messaging businesses is just one manifestation of an underlying change in customer expectations. People want businesses available on demand, and in turn businesses need to adopt open architectures to make products available on the platforms consumers use.
Brands have the potential to reach customers at enormous scale by using these platforms, and Ponde says Facebook is building advertising solutions such as dynamic ads for travel and its Trip Consideration option to reach high-intent travelers across the customer journey.
The Facebook solution
Ponde says one of the big consequences of how people engage on Facebook is that the platform has a lot of travel intent. As people shop, they signal interest and intent to Facebook to the actions they take, and each action generates an intent signal.
Our current distribution channels cannot communicate the full value of what you have to offer, but video can do this beautifully.
Nikhilesh Ponde - Facebook
Travel brands that partner with Facebook can layer in what they know about their customers, and Facebook’s machine learning algorithms combine what the platform knows about people with a brand’s information to connect products to the right people.
“What this approach means is that instead of waiting for people to come to your site or search for your product, your product starts searching for the right people on our platform,” he says. “By doing this, we can provide a more level playing field for all travel advertisers, including those who have traditionally been at a disadvantage to the digital natives.”
Ponde says the approach also makes personalization more meaningful and becomes an automated process. Upselling and cross-selling, too, becomes more seamless.
Video and beyond
“Another key element of people-based marketing is speaking to customers in the format they prefer, and increasingly this is video,” Ponde says.
Cisco predicts that by 2021, 78% of all mobile data traffic will come from video, and 79% of people would rather watch a video to learn about a product than read text on a page.
The challenge the travel industry faces is that people shop based on price, even though people don’t necessarily want the cheapest options.
“It’s because our current distribution channels cannot communicate the full value of what you have to offer, but video can do this beautifully,” Ponde says. “It’s an immersive way for you to differentiate your brand by communicating the full richness of your products and services.”
Instagram stories is a format that’s seen massive adoption, he continues, with nearly 300 million people using it every day.
“When you think about the future, expect to see even more immersive experiences,” he says. Facebook is doing work with augmented reality and 3D images, which Ponde thinks “is highly relevant to marketers in the travel industry to showcase experiences, destinations and products.”