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During the pandemic, the travel industry faced unprecedented challenges, as consumers canceled their vacations to shelter in place. Since COVID restrictions have been lifted, the industry has experienced a surge of pent-up demand from travelers eager to get back on the road and in the skies.
To capitalize on this trend, travel and hospitality companies are advertising heavily. In fact, the U.S. travel industry is now the fastest-growing sector of the economy in terms of digital advertising. According to a recent report by MediaPost, travel ad sales are projected to reach a whopping $4.57 billion in 2024.
In order to thrive in this saturated landscape, your team needs to make every dollar of your advertising budget go further. In this post, we’ll share how Invoca’s conversation intelligence AI solution helps travel and hospitality companies spend their marketing dollars smarter and reduce acquisition costs.
As you know, marketing attribution is crucial for effectively spending your marketing dollars. It allows you to understand how much revenue each campaign generates, so you can make data-driven decisions about where to put your money. At a time when you’re investing more money in digital ads than ever before, it’s essential that you have an ironclad attribution model in place to justify your investment.
However, many travel and hospitality marketers are missing a key piece of attribution data — phone call conversions. Because these purchases can be expensive and complex, 63% of travelers will call at some point during their buying journey. By speaking with a travel company over the phone, customers can receive personalized assistance, clarification on intricate details, and expert recommendations.
If you’re not tracking call conversions, you could be significantly underreporting your ROI. As a result, you could be cutting spend from your highest-performing campaigns without even knowing it! This can be a costly mistake in today’s competitive digital advertising climate.
In the next section, I’ll cover how travel marketers use Invoca’s AI to get closed-loop attribution and spend their ad dollars more effectively.
To uncover the blind spot from phone call conversions, leading travel marketers use Invoca’s conversation intelligence AI. Invoca allows marketers to track which channels, campaigns, webpages, and digital ads are driving phone calls to your business. But unlike some call tracking competitors, it doesn’t just tell you that a phone call occurred — it also uses AI to analyze the conversations. This allows you to determine how many of the phone calls your campaigns drove were actually leads and conversions.
You can also capture other insights from conversations, such as which travel package the caller inquired about, if they mentioned a recent promotion, and if they experienced any barriers to purchase.
Watch the video below to see how it works:
Now that we’ve covered the basics of Invoca’s solution, we’ll dive into its benefits for travel and hospitality marketing teams.
If you’re like most travel and hospitality marketers, you’re investing heavily in digital advertising. But to justify your spending, you need to prove the impact of your campaigns to leadership. If you aren’t including phone calls in your metrics, chances are that you’re selling yourself short by underreporting your conversions.
Invoca’s call attribution helps you calculate your true return on investment from each campaign. It can show you if you’re wasting ad spend on ineffective keywords or underreporting your most important KPIs. Just take the example below, where Invoca showed a company that their cost per acquisition was 50% lower than they originally thought, once they accounted for call conversions. Imagine getting to share that good news with your leadership team!
Search advertising is among the most competitive channels for travel marketers. Search ad spend in the travel industry is projected to reach $3.92 billion in 2024, making up 57.7% of the market.
A strong bidding strategy is key for achieving your search marketing goals in today’s landscape, whether you’re aiming to maximize conversions, decrease your CPA, or increase your ROI. However, if you’re only using online conversions to inform your bidding strategy — and neglecting phone call conversions — you could be making the wrong optimization decisions.
Search marketers can solve this all-to-common issue with Invoca’s no-code Google Ads integration. The integration automatically feeds Invoca’s call attribution data into Google Ads, so you can see the phone call conversions your campaigns, search keywords, and ads drive alongside your online conversions.
You can also use Invoca’s data to inform Google’s Smart Bidding algorithm. This lets Google’s AI do the work for you, automatically making the right bids to drive more phone call conversions at a lower cost. It’s an easy way to scale campaigns and squeeze more returns from your ad dollars.
A strong retargeting strategy can help you maximize the effectiveness of your ad dollars. It’s much easier to sell to a consumer who is already “warm” than trying to start from scratch with someone who has never heard of your brand.
But your retargeting strategy is only as good as the data you use to inform it. If you’re blasting consumers over and over again with the same irrelevant ads, you won’t earn their business, you’ll just annoy them — and waste your ad dollars. With Invoca, you can use conversation insights to retarget callers who didn’t make a purchase over the phone. Since you know which travel packages they mentioned, you can serve them relevant ads tailored to their interests.
For example, if you’re a resort and a caller mentioned they were interested in a honeymoon suite, you could serve them ads promoting that package. If they expressed a hesitation about the price, you could offer them a special discount code. This would be far more likely to pique their interest than a generic ad for your resort and it would keep you top-of-mind as they continued their research.
Sometimes, even after you purchase a product, you still get bombarded with ads for it across your social feeds. These kinds of advertising experiences are not only annoying — they’re a waste of marketing dollars. This problem is especially prevalent when customers buy over the phone since it can be difficult to tie the full omnichannel journey together.
With conversation intelligence, you can avoid these kinds of missteps. The solution automatically detects when someone makes a purchase from you over the phone, so you can improve your suppression. If a caller purchases a travel package over the phone, you can ensure they don’t see any more ads for it. This reduces wasted ad budget and creates a better experience for the customer.
Conversation intelligence is just one of many artificial intelligence technologies that travel marketers are adopting. A new report predicts that, in 2024, 32% of all travel industry revenue will be influenced by AI in some capacity. Other AI innovations in the travel industry include sentiment analysis, predictive segmentation, and AI-powered booking assistants.
While AI offers immense potential to streamline operations and enhance personalization, it’s crucial to strike the right balance between automation and the human touch. The human touch has long been an integral element of the hospitality industry, helping brands provide warmth, empathy, and lasting memories for travelers. Companies that strike the right equilibrium between AI and human interaction will be the most successful in the coming years.
Want to learn more about how Invoca can help you generate more revenue from your travel marketing campaigns? Check out these resources:
