Today’s trav­el­ers enjoy more choice than ever, with numer­ous ways to search for and book their jour­neys. How do you do the best pos­si­ble job of cater­ing to trav­el­ers’ needs from a search per­spec­tive, at every search-led stage in the buy­ing cycle? It’s all about being there every time there’s a touch­point.

Why Is The Travel Sector Different?

Most experts agree the best way to dri­ve loy­al­ty in the trav­el sec­tor is to deliv­er the best pos­si­ble user expe­ri­ence, infor­ma­tion, and updates – not just dur­ing the inves­ti­ga­tion and book­ing process, but also before, dur­ing, and after the trip itself. Accord­ing to John Wal­lace from VP Busi­ness Con­sult­ing:

“Cus­tomer recog­ni­tion across the grow­ing num­ber of pos­si­ble channels/interaction points is extreme­ly impor­tant, not only for opti­mis­ing mar­ket­ing strategies/tactics for each cus­tomer, but also for enabling the trav­el provider to cor­rect­ly val­ue both the absolute and rel­a­tive finan­cial val­ue each cus­tomer brings to its busi­ness.”

In oth­er words, to do a prop­er job of trav­el mar­ket­ing, you need to inter­act with a prospect at every pos­si­ble touch­point.

The trav­el indus­try buy­ing cycle comes with a large num­ber of touch­points, begin­ning very ear­ly in the process when some­one decides they want to book a trip and end­ing at the stage when they final­ly return home. It’s clear you need to con­sis­tent­ly rein­force your brand promise across every cus­tomer touch­point.

Focus­ing on search, the ques­tions becomes, how do you make sure you reach peo­ple at every pos­si­ble stage from a search per­spec­tive?

How To Hit Search-Related Travel Industry Touchpoints

Peo­ple typ­i­cal­ly search for infor­ma­tion in dif­fer­ent ways depend­ing on what stage they’re at in the buy­ing process. They might use your brand name, car­ry out a des­ti­na­tion search or a flight search in the ear­ly stages, mov­ing onto more spe­cif­ic search queries the far­ther they get down the sales fun­nel.

This means the tar­get audi­ence can use any num­ber of rel­e­vant key terms, includ­ing more gener­ic head terms as well as long-tail search queries to find what they want. Most peo­ple use a com­bi­na­tion, which means it’s your job to har­ness the search ele­ment of the buy­ing cycle at mul­ti­ple touch­points, remain­ing vis­i­ble through­out the process and keep­ing your brand right at the front of users’ minds.

How To Make Sure You’re Visible To Searchers At Every Touchpoint?

What should you do to ensure you don’t miss a cru­cial touch­point along the trav­el indus­try sales fun­nel? As with so much in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, you need to under­stand what your user is look­ing for and cre­ate the best con­tent to answer it.

Touchpoint: Search queries based on destination

Type of con­tent need­ed: Imag­ine that thou­sands of users a month search Google for “hol­i­days to Spain”. It makes sense to write con­tent that goes into detail about hol­i­days to Spain, look­ing at all the dif­fer­ent angles that the user might be inter­est­ed in. This could include the dif­fer­ent des­ti­na­tion air­ports to choose from, regions, cities, resorts, weath­er, attrac­tions, nightlife… you get the pic­ture.

Touchpoint: Long-tail searches that go into deeper detail

Type of con­tent need­ed: If a good num­ber of users search using the long-tail term “Buy the cheap­est direct flight to Barcelona in Novem­ber 2014”, their inten­tion is as clear as a bell. Google’s Hum­ming­bird update means it’s eas­i­er to make plain Eng­lish, con­ver­sa­tion­al search queries, and peo­ple are doing it more and more often.

Can you deliv­er a piece of con­tent that direct­ly ful­fills their needs? If so, and assum­ing you do a good enough job of it, your con­tent should be reward­ed by search engines in response to the query, and your brand will appear in front of peo­ple at the exact point they’ve made a clear buy­ing sig­nal.

Touchpoint: Search queries based on price

Type of con­tent need­ed: Because trav­el is often bought on price and the price dif­fer­ences in the indus­try can be sub­tle, pop­u­lar price-led search­es like “cheap­est Europe flights” or “low cost hol­i­days in Scot­land” deserve appro­pri­ate con­tent. You might talk about your flight prices as a whole, why they’re such good val­ue, what added value/extras you deliv­er above and beyond great pric­ing, why you’re the [best / most effi­cient / reli­able / trust­wor­thy / knowl­edge­able], and so on.

How To Prioritize?

As you can imag­ine, the touch­point poten­tial is end­less for search, nev­er mind for all the oth­er online and offline touch­points. You might decide to pri­or­i­tize the con­tent you cre­ate to ful­fill search­es that are fur­ther down the sales fun­nel, toward the buy­ing end, rather than in the ear­ly stages where it’s much more of a chal­lenge to com­pete for pop­u­lar, high-lev­el head terms.

Never Create Content For Content’s Sake

There’s a caveat, of course. It’s no good just writ­ing con­tent for con­tent’s sake, just so it’ll be picked up by search engines.

While it’s impor­tant to take search engines and search term pop­u­lar­i­ty into account, it’s more impor­tant to put peo­ple first. Gen­uine rel­e­vance and real val­ue are vital.