Smart group travel and meetings marketers avoid five common pitfalls
One simple mistake can derail your entire marketing plan.
There are a lot of ways to go about promoting a destination or attraction. But when it comes to attracting highly desirable tour and meeting groups, the methods you use to market to market to leisure travelers likely won’t work.
Here are the most common mistakes we see tourism marketers making — and suggestions on what to do instead.
Reaching the Wrong People
If your core marketing habits often revolve around paid search or social media promotion, you’re probably not reaching the decision makers who can actually bring you groups and meetings business. That’s because these professionals are difficult identify and target on consumer marketing channels.
The net result? Money spent promoting group travel and meetings on Google or Meta is money wasted.
Instead of blowing your budget on the big platforms, focus on advertising with media outlets like The Group Travel Leader or Small Market Meetings. Our audiences include thousands of the most influential travel planners who can actually bring you business.
Using Misguided Price Benchmarks
You already know about CPM — the “cost per thousand” figure used to calculate the price effectiveness of an ad buy. But did you know that your traditional CPM benchmarks could lead you astray in the groups and meetings market?
The CMP in consumer advertising tends to be very low, because acquiring a general consumer audience isn’t very difficult. Highly specialized audiences, though, like tour operators and meeting planners, are much more difficult to develop. They require years’ worth of hard work and investment. And those expenses drive CPM higher.
Instead of trying to use your conventional CPM benchmarks to price group advertising, you need to recalculate for this specialized audience. Well-priced trade advertising often costs 2x-6x more per thousand, but the potential returns far outweigh the higher price.
Using Irrelevant Creative
This is one of the biggest mistakes we see: Too many tourism marketers use ad creative that isn’t relevant to group travel and meetings audiences.
The images and words in your ads should speak to the needs and interests of your target audience. And the needs of tour operators and meeting planners are very different than the needs of the individuals and families responding to your consumer ads.
If you’re going to invest in marketing to group and meeting planners, it’s worth crafting new artwork that will resonate with them. Your stock ads featuring smiling kids or hiking couples aren’t going to get the job done.
Ignoring Print
You may have heard that print media is dead. But rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
True, daily newspapers and weekly lifestyle magazines are struggling. But special interest magazines and trade publications still have strong followings, because many people enjoy sitting down to read well crafted publications that are tailored to their passions or professions.
So, while digital advertising should absolutely be part of your group travel and meetings marketing portfolio, don’t overlook the power of print. It’s more trusted and more remembered than digital and can actually make your online campaigns more effective.
Giving Up Too Soon
It’s a common pattern: A destination decides to start pursuing the group travel or meetings market. They invest in it for a couple years, decide they’re not seeing the returns they want and then abandon the strategy.
When this happens, it’s because marketing executives aren’t aware of the very long buying cycles involved in group travel and meetings. Consumers who see your ad today may book a trip tomorrow and arrive next month. But most tour and meeting planners work at least a year in advance — and often more. Which means that the ads you run today are likely to bring new business three years from now.
If you’re investing in these markets, don’t quit too soon. Advertising for two years and then walking away is the worst strategy possible, because you’re giving up on your investment right before it starts paying off.
