We’re all guilty of it, especially those of us in northern climates around this time of year: daydreaming of someplace sunnier, far away. For most of us, it’s the same place every time. A hot beach. A favorite national park. Maybe even our hometown with family members.
With psychographic targeting, it is easier than ever for digital marketers to tap into daydreams which manifest into behaviors on Facebook (and other channels) which advertisers can identify to slice, dice and sling ads to. You might like a ski resort in Vail or tag your photos from Yellowstone or Glacier National Park, both clear signals that you hold travel intentions. In this edition of the Psychographic Targeting Hot House we’ll go head-first into the travel vertical and explore ways to target people who have a deep affinity for something (or someone) that requires them to leave home – people whose butts may be parked in the office chair but whose minds are somewhere else.
The Transplants
Transplants are easy to spot… in real life and online. In real life, they’re caught without a snowbrush during their first winter up north (a bad situation, trust us). Online, their hometown says Miami and their education says “The U” but their current city says “I got a job in a cold-weather state and I need to get south…FAST!”
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Suppose you’re a travel agency that specializes in professional sports vacations. Use a transplant’s devotion to their team to lure them home:
No matter where your transplants are from, the key targeting segment to include is people whose Life Event puts them away from their hometown via Demographics > Life Events: Away from hometown. It’s also important to recognize: we used multiple AND operators to join the Life Event to subsequent targeting layers. This ensures you will target people who are away from home AND who match your affinities, school or sports team in the examples above.
The Lovers
Just below people away from their hometown is another targeting category rich with possibility for potential travel: People in long distance relationships. The 3.4 million users Facebook identifies as having their hearts stretched from city to city are always high-intenders in the travel market, and there are so many ways savvy marketers can help them get back to loving arms or take a getaway that lets them have an extended stretch of time together.
And then there are the couples about to put rings on their left hand fingers and looking to plan their honeymoon:
The possibilities here are almost endless. No matter what travel vertical you find yourself in – airfare, rental cars, places to stay, places to eat, attractions, vacation packages, business travel, leisure travel, family travel – there are myriad targeting segments you can tap into.
The Theme Park Families
Families and theme parks go together like tourists and fanny packs, so it’s no surprise to find nearly endless options for targeting families whose kids are begging for a vacation (or parents that likely really need one). Notice in the example below: we layered in exclusion targeting to remove people who recently returned from a trip. Adding this here (and to any of your travel targeting) will help ensure you don’t pay to serve ads to people who are no longer in the market.
We can reach back to the previous examples to further segment this audience by families in cold winter climates who might be looking to get away over the holidays or during spring break. Or, take the Hawaiian and cruise interests from The Lovers examples and swap out the newly engaged for the families we’re targeting here. See what we mean by endless possibilities?!
The Adventurers
So much of psychographic targeting revolves around not just who you can target, but how you can mix targeting segments together to achieve prime, focused audiences. Because people travel for so many reasons, this becomes increasingly evident – and increasingly useful – as you get deeper into the possibilities. The segments highlighted here have nothing to do with travel on their own. Until…
… you pair them with behaviors that signal travel intent:
To market upscale services, layer on behaviors and income qualifiers. Be sure to add them as their own segments so you’re narrowing your audience, not broadening it:
Once you have your audiences sliced and diced, careful not to punt on the last mile of targeting: creative! These carefully tailored audiences scream for specialized, vertical creative, that hits the mark and pulls at these travel day-dreamers hearts and souls (and the CTR will prove it!).
Okay – stop daydreaming and start targeting!
