The best media for travel/tourism

There are so many media alternatives available for travel/tourism marketing, it makes me wonder - what if I had to recommend just one? Would I go with the high impact of TV, the niche approach of travel magazines, behaviorally targeted banner ads, e-blasts, SEO? Well, for my money I would go with sponsored search listings or pay-per-click advertising (PPC).

As it turns out, this apparent oversimplification is not really too far off the mark for some clients. Many of our tourism clients such as smaller resorts or outfitters don't have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on a mix of travel shows, print publications and online ads. They may have $5,000 or less to spend on advertising in a given year. For those clients, I would seriously consider putting all my eggs in the PPC basket.

In this and in following articles, I will explain why PPC is arguably the best media buy going for travel/tourism marketers.

First of all, look at your cost per inquiry. The cost per inquiry (CPI) is the cost of your media purchase divided by the number of people who respond to your ad in that medium. To even begin to measure this cost in most traditional media would require a fairly sophisticated system in place to determine which ads are generating which inquiries. For example, you may use tracking telephone numbers or fake extension numbers, or you may purchase several web domains to track web hits generated by specific ads or publications.

Assuming you can get across the tracking hurdle, you are probably in for a bit of a shock. The pure and simple fact is that most traditional media such as magazines and TV do not usually generate as many inquiries as you might like to think. Now, before I get any publishers out there too upset, let me add that you shouldn't necessarily measure the worth of advertising purely by your cost per inquiry. However, when every nickel you spend on advertising counts, cost per inquiry is very close to the bottom line.

To make matters worse (for print publishers anyway) the number of inquiries from travel magazines appears to have dramatically dropped over the last couple years. As a result, the CPI has risen sharply. In 2009, the travel magazine CPI for one of our tourism clients rose to $5.67 - more than four times the previous year. Average CPI for banner ads was more stable, but was still relatively high at about $3.50 per inquiry. Meanwhile, our CPI for a google adwords campaign came in at $1.06.

Needless to say, the client agreed to double the adwords budget for the following year!

Watch for my next posts which will dig deeper into the benefits of PPC advertising.