How Singapore's travel marketers can leverage social media

According to Singapore's Department for Statistics, there has been a boom in travel spending. The average monthly household spending on flights, hotels, and package holidays in 2012/13 has greatly increased – in fact, households now spend over 700% more on flights than they did in 2007/08.

As increasingly affluent Singaporeans are willing to splurge more on travel, this presents huge opportunities for travel marketers. But one thing they must take into consideration when drawing up their marketing plans – approximately one-fifth of travellers worldwide turn to social media platforms for their travel planning, with Facebook being used most often, according to eMarketer 2013.

What we also know is that an overwhelming 95% of people use Facebook for travel-related activities prior to going on vacation, while 42% of stories on a user's timeline are travel-related. As these statistics demonstrate without a doubt, there's a deep connection between travel and social.

Marketers first need to figure out what their marketing objectives are, whether it's growing awareness, driving sales, or ensuring customer retention, but the key is to have a presence at every stage of the customer journey.

Technology now allows companies to tailor the travel experience to a degree never before possible, so the first thing travel marketers should think about is personalised targeting at scale – how they can reach specific audiences with customised messages.

For instance, leading hotel and leisure company Starwood shared at Web in Travel last year that they had used a targeted approach on Facebook to encourage people in Singapore as well as the rest of the Asia-Pacific region to book a holiday directly though a Starwood website.

Based on available data, Starwood then created custom clusters and used them to tailor its ad creative to various audience segments. Using the Starwood Travel Exclusives Facebook Page as the campaign's home, each ad featured travel deals with a short booking window to create a sense of urgency and drive people to take action.

Travel is Facebook's most shared topic and it continues to receive the highest engagement from users. This creates social opportunities for travel firms, from online travel operators to tourism boards, to be part of this conversation and to engage users, which can help them drive strong, measurable business results.

The steady, continued growth of digital and mobile consumption has produced a new generation of traveler in Singapore, so travel marketers will ultimately need to evolve along with them as well.