Part 1 – Targeting Travel Influencers Segment: Habits, Interests, and Conversation

With summer just around the corner, Americans are ready and planning their summer vacations. According to a survey conducted by Forbes Advisory, an astounding 49% of Americans plan to travel more in 2023. Now is a prime time for travel marketers to find ways to engage consumers and get their brands and destinations to the forefront of their minds. According to research from the International Trade Administration, the U.S. travel and tourism industry generated $1.9 trillion in economic output. As travel restrictions ease, consumers are increasingly embracing the chance to reconnect with distant family and friends by ramping up their travel plans. This begs the question: how do you get the most mileage out of your marketing? For one, reaching the right audience is key. According to Engagement Labs research, the average adult engages in 3 travel-oriented brand conversations each week. This figure grows 50% higher when you isolate affluent adults – a common targeting criteria for travel marketers. What if we go a step further and isolate those everyday influencers who are fully engaged in the travel industry and sought out by others for their advice? These everyday travel influencers report engaging in 9 travel brand-related conversations each week – triple the average adult! Due to our partnership with Dstillery, marketers can directly target these travel influencers and many other influencer/advocate segments. But we can offer more than just targeting these segments, there is a lot more to explore about these powerful audiences. Leveraging the latest TotalSocial Profiler data, we can start to build out an image of travel influencers. While they generally align with the general population in terms of age and gender, they are more educated. Travel influencers are also extremely heavy media users.  For instance, travel influencers are avid audiobook/podcast listeners with Audible usage being 2.8x higher than the average adult. This segment also frequents music platforms such as Apple Music (2.2x), Sirius XM (1.9x), Amazon Music (1.8x), and iHeart Radio (1.7x). Marketers understand that access to audience segments with data about issues, demographic and behavior that matter most to travel influencers can help their campaign goals. Exploration of the most impactful conversations among travel influencers show us that in addition to travel/vacations, the economy and inflation are also at the forefront in their daily lives. Our data reveals that travel influencers are 64% more likely than the average adult to engage in daily conversations about the overall state of the economy. This is important to keep in mind when designing messaging to reach travel influencers.

Most Impactful Daily Conversation Among Travel Influencers

  Marketers can leverage Dstillery, our digital activation partner, to reach powerful audience segments and make media buying more efficient and impactful. Additionally, Engagement Labs offers influencer segments, including Travel Influencers, that can be accessed through Dstillery and major platforms such as LiveRamp and Adobe Audience Manager.

Tips for Travel Marketing Success 

Here are five tips to help you elevate your travel marketing game and make your brand stand out in a crowded space.

1. Target travel influencers: Identifying and targeting travel influencers, who engage in 9 travel brand-related conversations each week, can help travel marketers reach an influential audience and increase brand awareness.
2. Consider media consumption habits: Travel influencers are heavy media users, with podcast and music streaming services being popular among them. Travel marketers can create more effective campaigns by considering these media consumption habits.
3. Focus on economic topics: In addition to travel and vacations, the economy and inflation are important topics for travel influencers. Travel marketers should consider these topics when designing messaging to reach this influential audience.
4. Tap into digital word-of-mouth audiences at scale: Digital activation data segments such as the TotalSocial Profiler data, can help travel marketers directly target influential travel segments, including travel influencers. This can make media buying more efficient and impactful.
5. Leverage influencer and brand advocate segments: Engagement Labs offers a variety of influencer and brand advocate segments that travel marketers can leverage to increase brand awareness and engagement.

In conclusion, targeting travel influencers can be a powerful strategy for travel marketers looking to increase brand awareness and engagement. By leveraging data on their habits, interests, and conversations, marketers can design more effective campaigns that resonate with this influential audience. With the help of digital activation partners like Dstillery and influencer segments from Engagement Labs, travel marketers can reach these powerful audience segments and make their media buying more efficient and impactful. We invite you to contact Engagement Labs to learn more about our many influencer and brand advocate segments as well as our partnership with Dstillery. 

How Social Data Can Drive Business Outcomes and Optimize Marketing Strategies

The advertising industry has evolved significantly over the years, with the emergence of new technologies and trends. While social influence and word-of-mouth marketing continue to play a significant role in the industry, influencing consumer decision-making and driving sales. AdAge reported that the US ad industry grew by 7.5% in 2021, with total ad spending reaching $259 billion. The report also notes that digital ad spending now accounts for more than half of all ad spending in the US. To keep up with ever changing landscape, brands and agencies continually look to improve the accuracy of advertising models by incorporating data such as social data to further understand, attribute and correlate consumer conversations to predict business results by leveraging analytics and machine learning to derive actionable insights. Incorporating social influence data into these models can be crucial, especially as we know social conversations can directly and indirectly impact consumer purchases.

What is Social Influence?

Social influence is unique in two ways: the data sets available to us and our experience in incorporating social data into marketing models. Engagement Labs has the most extensive ongoing measures of word-of-mouth (WOM) about brands dating back more than a decade. Our offline data is a key component of our TotalSocial data and analytics platform, which is crucial for modelers. We have developed a data transformation and scoring method that applies to our WOM data and to social listening data from social media, blogs, forums, and other sources. These methods allow brands to distill wide-ranging data into eight distinct metrics that are highly predictive of brand outcomes. Social data can directly drive consumer purchases, but it can also work indirectly in combination with other marketing activities. Understanding this two-step process is vital to successfully incorporating social influence data into models. We have learned that a substantial part of the impact of paid media is a result of WOM.  

The Current State of Social Influence

According to McKinsey, consumer conversations about brands have a significant impact on the purchase decisions of other consumers. McKinsey estimates that word-of-mouth is the primary factor behind 20% to 50% of all purchasing decisions. This shows the immense power of social influence in driving sales and improving marketing ROI. IDC, on the other hand, predicts that by 2025, worldwide spending on AI systems will reach $97.9 billion, up from $37.5 billion in 2019. This shows the increasing adoption of AI technologies in various industries, including advertising.  

Impact of Social Influence on Consumer Decision Making

Extensive research shows that both real-life and social media conversations are critical pathways for consumers in their purchase journey. Our research, as we have reported in the MIT Sloan Management Review, reveals that conversations on average drive about 20% of sales. Social influence, both offline and online, is very substantial and should not be overlooked by brands. While this is the average, our research shows that each brand has its social DNA. The way social influence works for one brand can be quite different from the way it works for another, even for brands in the same category. Understanding what drives a brand and how big the opportunity to drive incremental sales is key to maximize performance. Doing so can potentially unlock and demonstrate tens of millions of dollars in incremental sales.

How to Incorporate Social Influence Data into Predictive Modeling

Discovering and obtaining streams of quality data and know-how for incorporating social data into both new and pre-existing models is key. Experience to integrate it with brand and/or media data that reflects and best represents the most important KPIs to reveal the metrics that drive business outcomes. Then, for brands who have their analytics programs, Engagement Labs can work alongside their modeling team to help them incorporate social influence data (online and offline) to strengthen the predictive power of their models. Here are a few recommendations for brands and businesses on how social influence data can impact their marketing and sales strategies: Integrate word-of-mouth to predict sales. Social influence is a crucial component to test when constructing forecasting models. By incorporating offline and online conversations about brands into predictive models, businesses can gain insights into how social influence impacts their sales. Gain insight into the mechanisms driving sales improvement. Quantifying marketing’s amplification via social influence is essential for calculating marketing’s full ROI. Businesses can identify the marketing activities that drive the most word-of-mouth conversations and optimize their marketing strategies accordingly. Pinpoint the consumers most likely to talk about and recommend your brand. By identifying the groups most prone to talk about and recommend a brand, businesses can prioritize target market and audience segments to optimize their marketing strategies. Gain new insights into competitors. TotalSocial reveals the extent to which positive or negative conversations about other brands in the marketplace impact your brand sales. Businesses can gain valuable insights into their competitors and optimize their marketing strategies to stay ahead of the competition.   Social influence and word-of-mouth marketing continue to play a significant role in the marketing and advertising industries. By leveraging emerging technologies like generative AI and combining it with Engagement Labs’ TotalSocial data and analytics platform, brands and businesses can gain a better understanding of social influence and how it impacts their marketing and sales strategies. This, in turn, can help businesses optimize their marketing strategies, improve marketing ROI, and drive business outcomes.

The potency of consumer conversations and word of mouth in shaping product performance has been a long-recognized fact by marketers. In the current digital age and managing through a downturn, marketers and business leaders face new challenges due to the constantly evolving landscape. The emergence of new tools such as ChatGPT and alike that utilizes artificial intelligence to engage in natural language conversations, and the increasing significance of digital advertising make it crucial to comprehend the power of consumer conversations. Engagement Labs recently conducted a study on the Most Loved Brands in America, which underlines the importance of engaging with customers and providing a positive brand experience. To succeed in today’s cutthroat environment, brands need to prioritize establishing strong relationships with their customers and consistently delivering positive experiences. This entails investing in unique marketing strategies that cater to both social media and real-world conversations.  

The Most Loved Brands in America

One example of the power of consumer conversations is the success of the most loved brand in America. Engagement Labs most recent study found that Trader Joe’s and American Family Insurance are the most loved brands in America in offline and online respectively. These brands have consistently shown their ability to engage with their audience and deliver a positive brand experience. They have successfully managed to cultivate loyal customer bases that continue to support them through their purchases and recommendations. Happy customers are more likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family, which can lead to more sales through word of mouth. Our findings have profound implications for marketing strategy. Consumer conversations, both in social media and in real life, drive nearly one-fifth of all sales. Even more importantly, offline and online word-of-mouth leads sales by up to 4 weeks. Social performance is a reliable predictor of sales, and a critical data point for marketers as they plan how to stage their marketing for product launches and promotions. Engagement Labs emphasizes the importance of understanding and leveraging these conversations to drive business growth, “Brands that can deliver a consistently positive experience and build deep relationships with their customers will succeed in today’s competitive landscape.” The Most Loved Brand Award is given to brands with the highest net sentiment scores online and offline. Offline data collected and analyzed from more than 37,000 surveyed and demographically balanced to US Census for ages 13 to 69 through the use of sample quotas and weighting for age, gender, educational attainment, race, ethnicity, and geography. While online conversations are measured using social listening.  

Real-Life Conversations vs. Social Media Conversations

Marketers devote ever larger portions of their efforts in social media, but real-life conversations matter as much as and often more than those on social media. Face-to-face and voice-to-voice drive half of the impact consumer conversations have on consumer purchases. Social media influences the other half. However, social media and real-life conversations are very different, and one is a poor predictor of the other. Social media conversations are the visible tip of an iceberg of total conversation but provide almost no indication of the size and shape of the often hidden offline conversation that exists below the surface. It’s also important to note that social media conversations are often just the visible tip of an iceberg of total conversation. Offline conversations, which can be more difficult to track, can have a significant impact on consumer behavior. Therefore, while it’s tempting to think a strong marketing performance on social media will create similar results with real-world conversations, marketers must invest in and plan unique marketing strategies for each.  

The Amplifying Effect of Word of Mouth

Consumer conversations are a key factor in the success of advertising. A quarter of the impact of advertising on sales “passes through” word of mouth, both online and offline. In other words, advertising prompts or reminds people to talk about brands, and those conversations often lead to purchase. Word-of-mouth does the tough work of persuasion in a way that a paid message cannot. As expected, our data show the main driver of consumer talk, both offline and online, is TV. But radio is also a surprisingly strong driver of conversations. And while media drive both offline and online conversations, online is more responsive to media efforts. To get more out of their marketing budgets, advertisers must plan for the amplification of advertising through WOM.  

The Risk of Ignoring Word of Mouth and Under-Valuing Social Influence

Ignoring the impact of word of mouth can have adverse consequences for brands. Underestimating or overlooking the impact of social influence can negatively impact a brand’s bottom line. Marketers need to understand that all marketing should be designed to encourage conversations and recommendations, as a way to amplify the impact of marketing expenditures and drive purchases. Consumers are making purchasing decisions while talking with other consumers, whether that’s at the water cooler, at social events, or while chatting with friends on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. Brands that prioritize customer service and experience are more likely to see positive word of mouth, which can lead to increased sales and brand loyalty. It’s important for marketers to encourage and incentivize happy customers to share their positive experiences with friends and family.  

Consumer Conversations: A Powerful Tool for Brand Success

Every day, consumers are faced with countless choices when it comes to purchasing products and services. With so many options available, how can a brand stand out and gain the attention and loyalty of consumers? One answer lies in the power of consumer conversations. According to Engagement Labs’ data and analytics, these consumer conversations drive 19% of all purchases. This has been evidenced in Engagement Labs articles published in the Journal of Advertising Research and the MIT Sloan Management Review written with Dr. Koen Pauwels. So, what does this mean for marketers and businesses? It means that word of mouth should not be ignored in the marketing mix – it should be a key component of any marketing strategy. In conclusion, word of mouth is a powerful tool for brand success. By focusing on customer service and experience, advertising, and encouraging positive conversations, brands can harness the power of consumer conversations to drive sales and gain.