How To Reach New Potential Guests in 2018
As a tourism destination, one question should dominate your marketing strategy more than any other in 2018: How can we best reach new, potential guests? And in a market that’s becoming evermore mobile first — in a world in which at least 28% of people’s time is spent on mobile devices — the answer has become decidedly simple: Targeting.
Unfortunately, however, launching highly targeted campaigns has classically resulted in lower reach. In this article, you’ll learn how at komoot, we can guarantee the best of both worlds: enormous reach and precise targeting. And how best to use this know-how to your destination’s advantage in 2018.
To begin, it’s important to understand the two principles of effective targeting that make komoot the market leader:
- Right place, right time: Reaching new potential guests at the most effective time — the dream phase
- Targeting and reach: Hitting only those interested in specific sports/activities your destination accommodates
Right place, right time: When to try and reach potential guests
To most effectively advertize a tourism destination, your ad needs to be visible during a period called the dream phase, the stage of the destination sales funnel when individuals are most open to inspiration on new places to visit. Guests can enter the dream phase at any time, and it’s vital that your ad is present in the types of publishers that potential guests are often using during the dream phase, such as komoot.
Classically, the dream phase has been dominated by the print industry, with people flicking through brochures, travel or hobby magazines to figure out where to go next. Today, however, people are doing this less and less. In fact, in 2016 less than 4% of potential guests’ time was spent browsing printed media, meaning new approaches are required. The outdated nature of this old-school concept becomes even more apparent when you look at print’s ability to target specific market groups. If you are a mountain bike destination and you want to target relevant individuals in southern Germany, for example, Mountainbike Magazine’s own figures quote their Germany-wide circulation as a little over 50,000. At komoot, we can target 64,000 mountain bikers in Bavaria alone.
Using Komoot’s Sponsored Collections to Build More Effective Campaigns
Many tourism destinations still invest heavily in older marketing strategies that were once relatively successful. Many pump marketing budgets into SEO or SEM-first approaches, for example, where people searching for specific terms (such as ‘Hiking in Allgäu’) will be shown destination-based adverts. And while this approach does guarantee exposure, these people have already made up their mind. They have already decided where they are going to go; they are not looking for something new.
For destinations who opt for Google AdWords-based strategies, the same concept applies. Only people searching for concrete terms such as ‘Hotels in Algäu’ will see specific campaigns. On mobile, these users will simply head to their preferred booking app and reserve their accommodation in their chosen region, completely ignoring your efforts to get them interested in your destination. Static on-page advertising is equally outdated: People see this as an unwanted distraction — an annoyance they widely ignore, if they don’t get rid of it with an ad blocker in the first place.
More importantly, none of these old school approaches effectively reach potential guests during that ever-important dream phase. With komoot’s Sponsored Collections, however, you can better roll out your advertisement in an engaging manner when potential guests are still open for inspiration on their next holiday destination — when they’re in the dream phase.
Targeting and reach: How to hit only the those interesting in your content
Now you understand the importance of displaying your advert to potential guests at the correct moment when they’re ready to consume inspiration content, it’s time to consider whom you display it to. That’s where the real targeting comes in. For example, if you want to reach people interested in gentle hikes with overnight stays, you are going to want to target hikers in your core target markets, which in this case would most likely be Hessen and North Rhine Westphalia (in Germany, at least). In komoot, this can be done at the push of a button, and we can do it in accordance with the total reach necessary to hit your goals.
Determining Total Reach
Which brings us onto the final important question in the equation: How many people can you actually reach? Here, the answer is all about Monthly Active Users, something we already discussed in detail here. In the article, we elaborate on komoot’s MAU statistics and monthly visitor numbers and explain exactly what this all means for your tourism destination.
MAU numbers are important to understand because they represent total possible reach. How you dissect this group and which people you target is a highly campaign-specific decision. Being aware of these numbers will help you develop a detailed marketing plan for 2018, however, and allow you to make informed decisions about the total reach you can expect from the publisher.
Click here to see komoot’s reach for specific sports in specific regions.
Where to go from here?
The reach and type of targeting of your Sponsored Collection is highly dependant on you, your product and your target market. The flexibility offered at komoot means we can tailor packages to every single tourism destination, and we can publish your advertizing campaign in a manner that means it will reach only guests in the dream phase — and not waste marketing budgets reaching individuals who have already made up their minds about where they are going to go in 2018.
If you have any questions about how komoot’s data-driven Sponsored Collections can play a leading role in your destination’s marketing strategy for 2018, contact Iris for an overview of options.
