How to Target Tourists Through Paid Ads

The tourism industry is rich and exciting, full of cultural knowledge, shared experiences, and career-building opportunities for marketers.

It’s true. The tourism industry we know today was largely created by advertisers. Before the 1920s, travel was a luxury only available to the wealthy. However, with the introduction of paid vacation time in the 1930s, travel became part of regular American life.

Advertisers were quick to jump on this trend, and Americans began seeing tourist ads show up in their favorite print magazines and newspapers, making travel one of the most sought-after experiences of modern life.

These days, travel is more widely available than ever before. With high-speed trains, planes, and boats, you can travel anywhere in the world in a day’s time.

However, modern consumers aren’t looking in print magazines to find travel inspiration. These days, if you want to talk to your biggest customers, you need to do it online.

10 Ways to Target Tourists With Paid Ads

Creating high-performing tourist ads is not always as easy as it seems. Of course, beautiful beaches and breathtaking views catch people’s attention, but it takes more than pretty pictures to win them over completely.

What’s more, competition in this space is higher than ever before. If you want to outperform your competitors, you need to stand out.

1. Use Geographic Targeting

The tricky part about creating great tourist ads is that your target audience is often worldwide.

You could serve ads to every country in the world, but that’s going to eat up a lot of your budget.

Instead, try delivering your ads to specific locations where you know similar audiences are likely to be. This is called geographic targeting, and it helps you define where your ads will be seen to maximize your marketing budget.

For example, you can target other tourism sites in your city or country to grab the attention of tourists already in your area. Or, you could even set a larger radius to encourage people driving by who may not know about your destination just yet.

It’s also good to remember that while you can target your tourist ads to specific places, you can exclude locations you know your target audience won’t be as well. For example, you may not want to target the local university on summer break as most students won’t be there.

Discover the Palm Beaches in Florida used this technique in their impressive “Friends Trust Friends” campaign.

By targeting a 30-mile radius around the town of Royal Palm Beach, they targeted both locals and residents, alongside a lucrative out-of-market tourist market. This results in a 23-percent increase in overnight stays for the brand.