Alexandra Radugina
Senior Marketing Manager

The bank holiday presents travel peak opportunities, so marketing campaigns must include several things to maximise this occasion.

Bank holidays are times when people take a break and enjoy. For many of them, this means a long weekend and a great opportunity to travel. For businesses, it means a huge travel peak opportunity and thus, a good moment to refine marketing campaigns to reach more customers.

There are many ways you can leverage bank holidays into your marketing, let us find out how.

1. First, understand your customer persona

Targeting the right people at the right time is what makes a marketing campaign effective. How can you plan a marketing campaign if you have no idea who your customers are? To target adequately, you must understand what your audience craves and who your ideal customers are.

Online travel services are a tough business: prices are low, and competition is high. How can you differentiate? Understand your clients. Beyond knowing their age or gender, you need to understand given these demographic’s information what drives them when they choose a destination, book a flight, a hotel, what they want, what they don’t want, and finally where they go for information when making such decisions.

The Whichit Analytics Dashboard gives you a perfect overview of your audience and their preferences.

True multi-channel marketing is all about using the right blend of channels to get the right messages to the right people at the right times.
 

2. Targeted Campaigns & Retargeting

What you should keep in mind is that your aim is to generate qualified leads. Your marketing campaign is not only about generating activity but about generating contact information to develop relationships with your customers and retarget later if needed. You need targeted marketing campaigns toward your ideal customers and it must contain lead generation. That is the process of effective travel marketing.

Click the example to see how wonderful it really is! >>>

Email Marketing

Your email database is extremely valuable. Your website should always have the ability to collect emails. Once people subscribe, even if they are not using your services, you will be able to approach them with emails saying when it will be the right time for them to travel!

Social Media

Social media is important for travel marketers. During or after their trip, your customers will share their experience with their friends and family or followers, and you will be able to take advantage of this. While using social media you should always track and manage your strategy by using social media tools that allows you to get useful statistics like ‘Facebook Insights’ or ‘Twitter Analytics’.

Share your knowledge

These days, content marketing is important and highly interesting for customers. Indeed, your website or even your email marketing must be significant for your audience. Your customers must find information quickly that is relevant to their needs, travel wise: make their journey easier to plan, and they will be thankful! Therefore, you must share your knowledge while sharing your offers.

You can also share your knowledge by writing articles for local magazines and papers.

Reviews & check-ins

Trip Advisor states that 93% of users find reviews important when deciding where they want to stay and 53% of people would not book a hotel without checking out the reviews first. Nowadays, people love reviews and you shouldn’t neglect this. Create an identifiable section for your clients to leave reviews on your website, since it could increase your brand awareness and generate content about your brand. Besides, it’s always good having people telling the world that you are doing a good job!

3. Personalized holiday offers

We previously mentioned the importance of knowing your clients. For example, according to Binge travel industry, 41% of people looking for family holidays are aged between 35 to 49 and in 2016 in the category of the family holidays,  69% were taking a road trip while only 26% where travelling to an international destination. What these statistics say is that customers are different, thus, so are their needs. Then, you must personalize your holiday offers in order to offer them exactly what they’re looking for.

4. Interactive Content Marketing (content, quiz, trivia, competitions) to generate User Generated Content, to Create Stories

The digital journey of booking a personal trip, from the idea of where to travel, all the way to the final purchase can be a very long, complicated process. Make it fun and easy for your clients by using interactive content!
For example, if they are struggling to choose a destination, create a quiz for them, then offer them a purchase coupon code linked to the destination matching their desires!

On your website, create content to learn about your client’s preferences and target them more accurately in the future.

Then, to develop customer loyalty and enlarge your client database, create a contest about the best holiday photos on your Facebook page!

Using interactive content will help you achieve a better ROI and collect meaningful, actionable data about your customers’ preferences. This is win-win for you and your clients.