More than 60% of travelers are using mobile apps while traveling, presenting a tremendous opportunity for travel retail advertisers. Understanding travelers’ behavior is equally important to consider when developing efficient and hyper-personalized digital advertising strategies. Therefore, it is imperative for brands to develop a tailored digital strategy for this space, separate to the way they would target the everyday shopper.

Personalization is a must

Brands should start by focusing on scalable, one-to-one advertising when targeting mobile devices. The device language setting, network carrier and even the make and model of the device can be used to tailor mobile ads and deliver messages that are meaningful, relevant, and that leave a lasting impression to set brands apart from competitors and can achieve a click through rate that is triple that of non-personalized campaigns!

Incentivize brand messages with user-friendly engagements

It’s important to anticipate the needs of travelers when looking at their mobile devices. Given many travelers will be roaming, it’s wise to avoid using heavy creative ad formats. Airports are naturally a high-stress environment, so keeping the creative user-friendly and intuitive, like a coupon to redeem in-store with clear directions to the nearest store, will be more effective and useful for the user.

Get the context right, focus on location and timing

Mobile devices are extremely personal for users, so it’s imperative that brands avoid being intrusive or irrelevant. Geolocation enables brands to use more precise location data when targeting travelers, ensuring campaigns are reaching intended audiences, rather than simply those nearby. Most leisure travelers make plans after having already arrived at their destinations and reach for their mobile devices to research and book activities. Marketers must take into consideration that mobile, therefore, is the only digital channel by which brands can deliver ads with contextual location data.

Measure and track campaign performances & get the most out of your media spend

Travel retail advertisers must insist on real-time visibility into their campaign performances to get the most of ad spend budgets. Advertisers with full control on their campaign data can optimize their ad spending in real-time while the campaign is ongoing. Having post-campaign insights available means brands can re-target and engage with mobile users with sequential messaging or follow-up offers. Furthermore, centralizing all reporting on a unified platform to calculate the return on advertising spend (ROAS) from impression to conversion enables advertisers to know best how to optimize their mobile ad budgets.

Travel retail advertisers can take simple steps, including using mobile device IDs and obtaining campaign metrics in real time and moving to 100% in-app advertising, brands can drive even more traffic from the airport gate into stores and measure the success of their campaigns in real time.

The full article was published by the Moodie Davitt Report, find the complete e-zine here, or download the PDF of the article.