Beyond demographic data, a wealth of insights hides in travel intent
When marketers seek to understand and predict consumer behaviour, they often turn to demographic data, and with good reason. Understanding a consumer’s age, income, location, and lifestyle details can help to paint a picture of their interests and likely behaviour. As more data has become more accessible to marketers, such insights have come to be accepted as the foundation of much targeted marketing. But marketers, especially those who are promoting travel, who rely primarily on demographic data are overlooking a potentially far more important element: travel intent.
When you make a travel purchase there are infinite possibilities to choose from including where to go, how to get there, where to stay and what to experience when you finally arrive at your destination. Travel intent is the recording of these signals that consumers give as they are researching what to travel experience to undertake. It’s the key that helps answer the question of when your messaging is most likely to make an impact. You could say the magic behind the performance of advertising for travel brands—it’s a universal lens through which to understand consumer behaviour in ways that are often superior to basic demographic details. Without them you are totally blind to which message will be relevant to the traveler you are potentially going to advertise to.
To give you an example, if you’re a luxury Bali hotel specialising in spa retreats, it’s great to understand that someone has an interest in high-end beauty products or ‘Likes’ a local spa on Facebook. But if you are able to discern that they are going to travel to Bali in the next two months, then you have an immediate benefit in reaching out. You know to advertise to the travelers who are interested in Spa retreats and Bali rather than those that are considering health retreats in Europe or Japan. Powerful marketing is all about reaching out to people in moments of their life when relevant adverts can help influence their decision.
To leverage this travel-intent data most effectively, marketers must ensure that they are accessing not only intent data that they collect, but combining it and adding the reach of travel insights from proven partners who can add a third dimension to the data. It will also be essential to use a platform or work with a partner that can provide this information in real time.
There are lots of players in the mobile space that are collecting geo-location data, and Facebook can do this, getting data based on location patterns (for example, if someone travels to Hong Kong every Christmas). If someone is in the proximity of a five-star luxury hotel for two weeks, a good data partner may be able to assess whether this is someone who would be interested in another high-end offering.
An ideal approach is one that can offer a view into, and use of, the full funnel—from the earliest stages of a travelers search down to his or her actual booking—and access the data in real time. Sixty or 90 days in advance of a trip, when people are weighing their options, marketers can narrow down the decision-making process and provide content and offers from their top three locations, which you may not get from a simple Google search. In addition to transaction data, banner clicks and search terms on sites used to book travel globally (think the Agoda’s and Booking.com’s of the world) are also great signals of intent.
Think of it as a triangle, with demographics and lifestyle as the points at the base. But at the top of the triangle, perhaps the most important, is travel intent. You can’t identify the customer based only on the bottom two points, but with all three you have a near-complete clear and strong picture of the traveler.
The power of travel intent will only grow in the future. Technology is moving towards allowing us to predict when and where someone might travel to, or when they could— based on data from digital personal assistants like Siri. In the not too distant future marketers will also be able to gain traveler insights at scale from wearable data: there’s a high likelihood that someday we’ll be able to make the connection between an individual’s Fitbit stats showing that they’re training for a marathon and that they have been searching for a flight to an adventure sport destination.
Wherever the technology goes, understanding when and where a consumer is planning to travel will continue to give marketers an edge.
The post Beyond demographic data, a wealth of insights hides in travel intent appeared first on Digital Market Asia.
