4 Top Tips for Travel Marketers

As travel marketers aim to support their audiences’ aspirational trip planning, ask:

• What distinguishes your offerings from the others? 
• What’s unique about your destinations? 
• Who are your audiences and how will you earn their affinity?

Creating amazing advertising experiences to support these goals can devour valuable time that could otherwise fuel more impactful initiatives. Without an efficient strategy to incorporate agility, manage campaigns, and efficiently scale ad creatives, you’re at risk of falling behind. 

Luckily, cutting-edge solutions to expedite processes and boost efficiencies are well within reach. Explore how to not just flourish in this market, but soar for the long haul. 

Here are four key benefits travel marketers find through an enhanced and optimized workflow: 

1. Plans change. Don’t fret! Leverage Smartly’s real time features including Weather-Based Targeting and Geo-API Integration. Picture users in colder regions instantly seeing enticing ads for warm getaways — Smartly's weather-triggered ads resonate with immediate weather-based desires, making ads more relevant and engaging. 
2. Give them an offer they can’t refuse. Stay relevant and delight customers on the fly with real and right time offers based on audiences location, as well as their environmental experiences. The Geo-API also allows brands to target inbound and outbound airports, tailoring messages for travelers at crucial stages.
3. Ditch the excess baggage and carry on with what’s working -  Smartly’s Predictive Budget Allocation is another powerful AI powered tool for travel marketers.  With PBA’s real-time capability, you ensure that your budget aligns precisely with your campaign goals, resulting in reduced Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and increased conversions. What sets PBA  apart is its continuous learning capacity, making it an indispensable tool for advertisers striving for optimal budget allocation and peak performance in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
   
4. Jet set faster.  Smartly’s Generative AI for Text/Image Variations helps travel marketers ensure ad creatives remain fresh to prevent ad fatigue. Swiftly generate multiple ad versions by incorporating diverse headlines and images, employing AI-driven testing to identify the best-performing combinations for engagement and conversions.

TUI Takes Creative To New Heights Using Templates
When TUI, a global travel operator, aimed to reach new customers but faced the challenge of manually creating various video combinations, they partnered with Smartly to innovate their creative processes. 

Smartly Creative Services team helped TUI to create custom templates for different video ads variations and automatically generated 100 versions of video ads from TUI’s original video assets. TUI then A/B tested all the hypotheses and applied learning to the rest of their campaigns.

First, Smartly’s Creative Services team crafted video templates for each variation: a 10-second video with a landscape intro, a 6-second video with a landscape intro, and a 6-second video with a persona intro. After creating the templates, Smartly automatically matched them with TUI’s original video assets. Smartly’s solution generated all possible combinations, resulting in more than 100 versions of the video ad. 

Learning that their audience favored longer videos, they unveiled a treasure trove of significant cost savings and a stronger campaign impact: The cost per initiate checkout dropped by 72%, and the cost per purchase decreased by 36%.

The brand enabled creative stakeholders with tools for more rapid templating and production at scale, freeing up their time to focus on what matters most: The creative concepts and stories that captivate their audience’s attention.

Visit our travel marketers’ resource center to learn more about how to elevate your brand’s creative advertising process.