Purchasing travel – the changing customer journey

March 7, 2014

This is a guest post by Ed Maule of Siren Communications

Recently I had the opportunity to hear from two of Google’s travel experts, who, despite all the bad press, still take the top spot when it comes to online search, optimisation, ecommerce and digital marketing. According to the most recent data, 90% of consumers move between devices to reach their purchasing goal. The internet is now the number one source of travel planning information; interestingly, online and offline buyers spend an almost equal amount of time researching online. So even if your customers are not buying their holiday on the web, they’re almost certainly spending time researching all the options available to them.

With this shift in consumer habits, there has been an interesting development of the customer journey. According to Google, there are now five stages:

Dreaming -> Planning -> Booking -> Experiencing -> Sharing

There is no timeframe to this process – consumers are always dreaming of their next trip and there is data to show that 86% of smartphone owners share photos on social media whilst still on holiday. It’s important to think of these stages in a continual circle – the process never stops.

Travel bloggers – a source of inspiring content

Inspiration is a vital aspect of the customer journey and, more often than not, for travel this is provided in the form of images and video. The challenge is to generate exciting and aspirational content that evokes emotion, tells a story and encourages a response.

This is where a travel blogger comes in. If chosen correctly, bloggers can reach a specific audience with inspiring content associated with a brand – it’s important that the right blogger is matched with company values, brand story and target audience. Recently, Siren Communications ran a blogger outreach project for Celebrity Cruises – the primary objective was to showcase the destinations visited by ships throughout Europe. Siren researched the market and approached a variety of bloggers based on writing style, audience demographics, photography/video production and social media influence.

The social media interaction with Celebrity Cruises shows the importance of choosing the right bloggers – photos/videos were uploaded to a variety of social platforms and used in subsequent blog posts. The result is a selection of online content associated with a brand which inspires and excites a target audience. Matching the right travel blogger to the right brand can help inspire readers to enter the ‘dreaming’ stage of the travel customer journey. Companies must then guide customers through the other stages – ensuring information regarding products is available across multiple channels; encouraging research, planning and conversion.

Celebrity Cruises #destinationbloggers social media highlights