From cosmetics to confectionery, travel retail marketers operate in a uniquely challenging sector, filled with millions of travellers filtering in and out of airports and other duty-free zones daily.
With limited time to capture these travellers’ attention, draw them into retailer stores and convert them into customers, the travel retail marketing strategy becomes critical, combining digital channels with an in-store experience to drive sales. How many of these travellers rush right past duty-free shops, nose in their phones as they navigate to their departure gate? How can the travel retail marketing strategy break through, connecting brands with these potential customers?
Travel retail has continuously evolved since its inception in the 1940s, although the goal has remained the same—for global brands to engage their existing customer base and entice new shoppers by serving as a highly visible, high-traffic physical ‘window shopping’ retail space that also offers a compelling sales incentive.
While this year is delivering a strong post-pandemic rebound for aviation, with the IATA predicting global airline traffic to exceed 4.7 billion passengers (surpassing 2019’s pre-pandemic industry peak!), travel retail brands cannot merely assume this growth will translate to a sales or market share increase. Instead, a well-rounded travel retail marketing strategy is necessary for brands to convert travellers into customers.
While social media accounts for just piece of a travel retail brand’s overall strategy, Gladcloud offers a hyper-local social media marketing solution tailored specifically to travel retail, with proven performance that connects global brands with duty-free retailers to reach the right customer with the right brand message in the right travel segment.
Understanding the Travel Retail Customer Journey
Following the travel retail customer journey is not quite as linear as packing a suitcase, getting to the airport, and heading off to a new destination. Mapping the customer journey entails building a complex web of digital and physical touchpoints that connects a shopper with a brand, from initial awareness to product purchase to building loyalty through post-purchase experiences.
That said, for travel retail, the customer journey can, at the most basic level, be broken down into three travel segments:
- Pre-Travel / Pre-Trip
- During Travel / In-Trip
- Post-Travel / Post-Trip
The relevance of each of these travel segments will vary by product category, as overviewed in the Moodie Davitt Report graphic below, which is intended to give a high-level view of these differences. Travel retail brands must have a strong understanding of where they lie along these trip segments to craft a marketing strategy that maximises offline and online channel performance.
Pre-travel marketing employs a broad awareness approach, reaching consumers with awareness or pre-order campaigns well before they are physically in an airport with proximity to duty-free shops. While digital channels allow for specific audience targeting and tracking, current data privacy standards make it harder to accurately target consumers. The sunsetting of third-party cookies means that the likes of Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers are no longer tracking consumers’ browsing behaviour, limiting the precise audience segmentation that the digital marketing industry has come to rely on. For marketers, these limitations reduce campaign effectiveness, in a competitive landscape where media spend must be efficient and effective to make an impact.
The in-trip/during-travel segment is key for driving foot traffic and product sales, and depending on industry or product, these sales will likely skew more toward either outbound travel or inbound travel. Reaching the travel retail customer here certainly still includes digital channels (especially when activating Gladcloud’s platform!), though this is the travel segment to focus on offline and O+O marketing: in-store experiences, displays and activations. There is endless creativity in travel retail marketing to engage travellers with attention-grabbing brand activations, and successful activations will have some form of data collection to further market and remarket these customers.
Engaging with the customer post-travel is the opportunity to build brand loyalty and customer retention. Brands and travel retailers can leverage first-party data to continually communicate with their customers, encouraging brand advocacy and future sales.
Across the board, marketing to consumers in these travel segments is further complicated by the need to reach incredibly diverse audiences, in terms of nationality, language, destination, and other target audience details. Additionally, a brand message / (inter)national campaign that is not tailored to a specifically relevant locality misses out on cost efficiencies and campaign effectiveness. This is where Gladcloud’s platform can transform a brand’s travel retail social media strategy.
The Gladcloud Travel Retail Solution
Gladcloud provides a multi-faceted B2B2C channel partner marketing solution for social media, empowering brands to leverage retail partner social channels to reach consumers with a customised message that is hyper-locally targeted to the retail partners’ specific location—with the ability to run campaigns at massive scale.
We partner with a company’s travel retail digital marketing team to create a branded Retail Partner Portal where duty-free retailers can connect to the platform, allowing our tech-solution to run brand ads from duty-free retailer pages. We then take an existing brand ad and programmatically customise it so that each duty-free retailer’s channel shows an ad relevant to their locality, such as calling out the airport name (“Shop Now at London Heathrow!”) and clicking through directly to the retailer website. Each ad is then geo-targeted around each airport, effectively reaching these social media users during travel with a relevant message and call-to-action.
With these campaigns serving at dozens (or even hundreds!) of airports across the globe, we achieve scale and efficiency in retailer partner marketing that would otherwise be unavailable to the brand marketing team.
Our pre-travel solution uses the same base strategy, but with an increased radius to target the wider region around a retailer to initiate brand awareness before the travellers arrive at the airport. We then overlay additional targeted segments to reach users likely to travel soon, along with overlaying any additional audience segments relevant to the brand (such as “luxury shopper” interests).
These campaigns can easily be further customised and targeted for language preferences, with the ability to run multiple languages for each location, and different languages by location across a campaign.
Duty-free retailers can see their campaign activity from the white-labeled retail partner portal, while we also provide an enterprise reporting dashboard for internal stakeholders that includes retailer onboarding activity, in-depth campaign reporting for relevant KPIs, and results that can filter by region.
This precision marketing technique delivers significant cost efficiencies in media spend when compared to standard brand campaigns, allowing campaigns to reach more people, deliver more website traffic, and ultimately serve as a catalyst to drive sales.
Our platform works across all travel retail sectors:
Fragrance & Cosmetics
Confectionery & Food
Luxury Goods
Wines & Spirits
Electronics
If you’re ready to elevate your travel retail marketing strategy with Gladcloud’s customised, localised, effective, and efficient solution, contact us today.
