NB: This is a guest post by Ed Stevenson, European managing director of Marin Software, a search marketing specialist in the travel industry.
With some of the worst of the recession looking to be behind us, perhaps the travel industry is benefitting from an increase in consumer confidence.
With the staycation on the wane, the industry is expecting more to be spent on holidays in 2011 than the past couple of years. As a result, travel companies need to make sure that they are capitalising on this by ramping up their investments in advertising and marketing budgets.
Recent research has revealed that search is going to be the most important marketing channel for brands moving forward with 66% of client side decision makers believing this to be the case. The same number also confirmed that search spend will grow over the next 12 months.
Search is clearly a priority. The problem that travel businesses have is that their search campaigns are already highly complex and increasing in complexity as the search engines innovate.
More often than not their marketing experts are continually bogged down in archaic technologies like Excel, rather than getting on with the job of effective search marketing.
They have to manage thousands, if not millions of keywords, whilst taking into account the travel buying cycle to remain visible at the research, comparison and final decision stages, with 36% of consumers making a final decision one month after their initial search.
Additionally the search engines are constantly innovating with new features, as the battle heats up between Google and Microsoft to gain share of search volumes.
Furthermore, we haven’t even mentioned the advent of cost-perclick (CPC) advertising on Facebook and Twitter which search marketers need to take responsibility for.
These innovations create another challenge for search marketers, with a recent example being the launch of Google Instant.
When I first heard of the update, my immediate inclination was that consumers would react to the changes with shorter, more concise enquiries as the engine would provide them with the results they were looking for in a shorter space of time.
For travel companies in particular, this means that consumers will only need to search for the destination with, at most, a suffix of ‘flights or hotel’ – and they will already have seven relevant answers shown to them on the page, without needing to elaborate further.
In fact, this trend can be seen in recent research from Marin Software on the impact Google Instant has had on the paid search industry. It revealed that paid search ads for shorter queries have benefitted more than those for longer queries since the launch of Google Instant.
This just goes to show the versatility of paid search and the challenges it poses to advertisers. Google is going to be constantly updating its tools in this fashion and, in order to compete, Microsoft will be following suit.
There’s plenty more innovation to come and, with search budgets set to rise even further, this is undoubtedly going to become even more complicated
So, how do travel companies deal with these increasing complexities?
Well number one, they need to automate elements of their campaign management in order to prevent staff getting tied up in the granularity of campaigns.
This way they can focus on optimising their campaigns for the seasonal nature and buying cycle of the travel industry, developing new channels like CPC advertising on Facebook and Twitter as well as exploiting new innovations by the search engines.
Also, it is important for travel companies to integrate their search campaigns with data from other channels. For example airlines need to integrate aircraft occupancy levels into their search campaigns to inform seasonality trends.
Data such as TV advertising schedules, call centre volumes, affiliate sales and much more needs to be synced in order to understand the impact of search on each stage of the buying cycle.
If this data hub is created then you can start to effectively attribute sales across channels to better optimise future campaigns.
Secondly marketers need to understand budgets for performance marketing channels such as search and Facebook, as well as other upcoming channels like Twitter, is that budgets are incremental.
Budget for new performance channels, such as Facebook, should not be taken from other performance channels, like search, if those budgets are already sweating for you. If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.
Budgets should be additional budget, either as “fat” from other channels or through online budget increases. Otherwise you could find the performance of your existing campaigns is impacted negatively.
As 2011 approaches, consumers will likely use the post-Christmas lull to book up their summer holidays for next year.
The travel companies who ensure their search strategy is both manageable and efficient are going to be the ones to give themselves a real competitive advantage over their rivals and benefit the most from a return to consumer confidence.
NB: This is a guest post by Ed Stevenson, European managing director of Marin Software, a search marketing specialist in the travel industry.