Power On Series: The Marketing Funnel and Your New Traveler Personas

Power On Series: The Marketing Funnel and Your New Traveler Personas

This excerpt is from our recently published guide, Power On – Marketing for What’s Next. The complete guide offers actionable digital marketing strategies to prepare you for what’s next for hotels, resorts, & vacation rentals. You can check in daily for the next section or you can download the full version here.

Before we dive into some hands-on strategies to help you guide your short-term marketing efforts, let’s take a look at the marketing funnel. We feel there are sections of this funnel to focus on over others as you think about engaging your prospective travelers in the near future.

Let’s review what we know about traveler behavior in normal times:

  • Buyers don’t book on the first click
  • 94% use multiple devices
  • 80+ day planning cycle
  • Visit 21+ different websites during the research phase.

Those were the stats before home quarantines were enacted. Times have changed quickly. You’re now looking at a couple new traveler profiles until we return to a more normal cycle for travel planning.

You have a traveler that is using this time to daydream about their next destination. They’re using time at home to research more options and uncover more bucket list places of interest. This traveler isn’t booking right now, but they are narrowing their options for when they’re able.

The drop in your organic and/or paid traffic is largely due to another traveler profile. While getting away is on their mind, they’re not researching or planning – they have other things on their mind right now. They’re not to a point yet where it’s an option. But those able among this group, and when the time becomes right, will have a very short window of research. They’ll find a destination and go with less shopping.

Regardless of traveler type we know they’ll go through some form of the typical traveler marketing funnel and they’ll do it across many devices.

As we put ourselves in the minds of people thinking about upcoming travel and how they’ll approach their search, there are areas of this funnel we feel deserve more time and small amounts of budget right now. 

In our next post in this series we’re going to start laying out some actionable marketing strategies you can implement now to dominate the Search and Awareness phase. We feel this phase needs more of your time right now.