Elevating Travel Marketing: Where Creativity Takes Flight

In the world of travel marketing, constant change is the norm—rapid price shifts, unpredictable weather, and the challenge of reaching diverse global audiences across languages and terrains. Handling ad creatives at scale for various platforms feels like you’re orchestrating an elaborate eight-course meal solo, praying that nothing gets burnt in the process.

Sound familiar?
In today’s competitive landscape, travel marketers find themselves juggling an ever-growing list of responsibilities and expected to do so at a rapid pace. This intense workload devours valuable time that could otherwise fuel more impactful initiatives. Without an efficient strategy to incorporate agility, manage campaigns, and efficiently scale ad creatives, you’re at risk of falling behind. 

Luckily, cutting-edge solutions to expedite processes and boost efficiencies are well within reach. Explore how to not just flourish in this market, but soar for the long haul.

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Revolutionizing How the Travel Industry Advertises

At the forefront of revolutionizing travel marketing, Smartly stands as a beacon of change. 

When TUI, a global travel operator, aimed to reach new customers in the Netherlands and Belgium but faced the challenge of manually creating various video combinations, they partnered with Smartly to innovate creative processes for a new approach. 

First, Smartly’s Creative Services team crafted video templates for each variation: a 10-second video with a landscape intro, a 6-second video with a landscape intro, and a 6-second video with a persona intro. After creating the templates, Smartly automatically matched them with TUI’s original video assets. Smartly’s solution generated all possible combinations, resulting in more than 100 versions of the video ad. 

TUI then leveraged the insights to optimize their campaign. Learning that their audience favored longer videos, they unveiled a treasure trove: the cost per initiate checkout dropped by 72%, and the cost per purchase decreased by 36%.

The brand navigated video ad production challenges by enabling their creative stakeholders with tools for more rapid templating and production at scale, freeing up their time to focus on what matters most: The creative concepts and stories that captivate their audience’s attention.

The result? Significant cost savings and a stronger campaign impact.
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How can your brand jet set past the competition to create more engaging advertising impressions? ‍

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1. Keep Pace with the Market by Reducing Bottlenecks‍

In a market where prices and inventory change overnight, Smartly enables brands to make real-time campaign changes that go live in hours, not days. 

Imagine a situation where the price of a flight drops unexpectedly. Smartly allows for immediate updates to the ad content, ensuring that potential travelers are promptly engaged with the revised and enticing deal. 

This agility in adjusting campaigns in real-time significantly reduces the delay between market changes and the reflection of those changes in advertising, offering brands a competitive edge in capturing audience attention and capitalizing on evolving opportunities.

2. Create Ultra-Specific Dynamic Ad Creatives 

Creatives drive 70% of ad performance, making it the heartbeat of successful campaigns, especially in the travel industry's dynamic landscape. Smartly's all-in-one toolkit is revolutionizing travel marketing by simplifying ad creation, empowering brands to enhance efficiency on a large scale.

• Creative Templates: Craft personalized ad variations seamlessly. Whether showcasing family-friendly amenities at a hotel chain or targeting couples with romantic getaways, Smartly's tools generate creatives tailored perfectly to different audience preferences.
  
  Martine van der Lee, Director of Social Media at KLM, highlighted, "Adding video to our creative mix was essential, but personalizing and scaling videos for performance-driven campaigns was a challenge. Smartly’s Video Templates make it effortless to create inspiring dynamic videos for each KLM destination we fly from."
  
  
• Geo-API Integration and Weather-Based Targeting: Picture users in colder regions instantly seeing enticing ads for warm getaways—Smartly's weather-triggered ads resonate with immediate weather-based desires, making ads more relevant and engaging. The Geo-API also allows brands to target inbound and outbound airports, tailoring messages for travelers at crucial stages.

• Creator Connect for Cross-Platform: Collaborating with influencers and creators can amplify a campaign's reach. Smartly's Creator Connect empowers brands to engage with influencers across platforms, ensuring consistent branding while enabling tailored content creation for varied audiences.

• GenAI for Text/Image Variations: Ad creatives remain fresh to prevent ad fatigue. Smartly’s Gen AI swiftly generates multiple ad versions by incorporating diverse headlines and images, employing AI-driven testing to identify the best-performing combinations for engagement and conversions.

3. Boost Efficiency: Create, Launch, and Optimize on One Platform

You can also reclaim valuable time with Smartly’s next generation media automation tool, Smartly Workspaces, allowing for cross-account campaign creation and bulk management. The platform offers tailored environments, empowering travel brands to manage ads for specific regions efficiently and effectively. 

With Smartly Workspaces, marketers are able to simply build, edit, and manage multiple campaigns in a single Workspace and can launch those campaigns all at the same time. By cloning your campaigns and adsets, and utilizing autosave and re-unable templates when creating new campaigns, you can get tasks done in minutes that normally take days.

Smartly’s Predictive Budget Allocation is another powerful tool for travel marketers. This cutting-edge technology hinges on data-driven decision-making and seamless automation to streamline budget allocation. It boasts a real-time adaptive capability, ensuring that your budget aligns precisely with your campaign goals, resulting in reduced Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and increased conversions. What sets it apart is its continuous learning capacity, making it an indispensable tool for advertisers striving for optimal budget allocation and peak performance in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

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Automation: The Future of Travel Marketing 

In the ever-evolving landscape of travel marketing, Smartly emerges as the ultimate co-pilot, allowing marketers to soar above challenges and automate their advertising efforts. By harnessing its suite of tools, travel marketers can put their campaigns on autopilot, focus on what truly matters—delivering exceptional travel experiences.

‍Ready to take flight? Automate your campaigns and let Smartly navigate your journey ahead.