The travel industry is a diverse sector of the economy. Hotel chains and rental car companies compete both nationally (think Holiday Inn or Hertz) and regionally (boutique hotels and local car rentals). Whether a hotel chain is national or smaller, it cannot survive focusing only on its local area.
There are many ways in which companies in the travel industry can use Pay Per Call to their advantage, both regionally and nationally.
Vary Your Numbers
This point cannot be emphasized strongly enough. When using a Pay Per Call campaign, the best way to accurately track your marketing efforts is by using different phone numbers. Consider, for example, a boutique hotel on the beach in Florida. Between October and April this hotel is going to be very busy as residents of the Northeast, Midwest, and Northwest look to escape the drudges of winter.
Unlike its larger, national competitors, this boutique hotel won’t have the marketing dollars to blanket these regions of the country with ads. However, with different phone numbers attached to ads that show up online and on mobile devices for each region, the company will get a better idea of which region generates the most quality leads and bookings. This makes it easy to adjust marketing spend in each region and zero in on areas that generate the best leads, increasing return on investment.
Another option to consider is assigning a different 1-800 number to various marketing campaigns. For example, direct mailers that go out to previous visitors should contain a different call-back number than mobile ads featured on apps. Likewise, desktop web ads should have a different number than mobile ads in order to identify successful campaigns.
Read More: What You Miss When You Don’t Add Phone Numbers to Your Ads
Use the Data to Adjust Seasonally
The data collected from number tracking can help companies in the travel industry adjust to seasonal changes. That same boutique hotel in Florida isn’t going to be quite as busy in the summer months when warm weather blankets the whole of the country. Number tracking presents the opportunity to make creative adjustments as the seasons change.
Just because it is summer doesn’t mean business will slow to a crawl. That Florida beachfront property still has allure to regional residents throughout the Gulf Coast looking to escape the intense heat of a Southern summer with a relaxing weekend at the beach. Now is the time for the hotel to use its phone tracking data to vary its approach.
Rather than running bulk campaigns, the hotel can run separate campaigns for Gulf Coast consumers and consumers in its northern target markets. Using different phone numbers, ads can go out to those target rich areas in the north advertising special rates on rooms to entice them to pay a visit to the beach in the summer. At the same time, Gulf Coast consumers would see regular advertising with normal prices attached.
Tracking phone numbers is all about narrowing down target markets, focusing on areas with high quality leads, and adjusting campaign approaches to ensure marketing dollars are spent effectively year round.