SaaS Travel Marketing

Software as a Service platforms, connected apps, and SaaS partners have helped to revolutionize modern travel.

It’s easy to say that the travel industry couldn’t have evolved without the amazing travel products and services which the cloud has enabled. This new technology and strong global travel demand is driving the ambition of so many travel business entrepreneurs.

And travel agencies, nice service providers, and tour operators have a good selection of digital business platforms they might choose from, but they’re not sure which will serve them best. Finding, evaluating and trialing the right platform, as you’ll read hear, is essential to building their successful business.

SaaS Travel marketing campaigns can sell your SaaS travel platform via massive reach, impacting prospects, growing engagement and loyalty, increasing spend, building brand, reducing price sensitivity and turning travelers into promoters of agencies and tours.

Fighting for Visibility: Competing Against Market Leaders

The largest and popular SaaS travel business solutions target the corporate travel departments, so SMB users don’t ever see those alternative platforms. Although they’re interested in capturing your market too, you have an opportunity to use SaaS marketing strategy to keep your audience.

You’re passionate about your product, perfecting it, and growing its value. Now you must be passionate about marketing it to the exact audience who will become your long-time subscription customers.

Unless you put together a winning marketing strategy, they can easily make your product and company invisible.
If you don’t maximize your visibility and value offer, they win easily.

The lesson is simple in technology marketing — you tell your audience what value they’re receiving and the price they should be paying. The real marketing message is the unique personalized value they can’t get anywhere else and what they should pay for it. Your content communicates the price.

SaaS Software Opportunity Now and in the Next Ten Years

Our global travel industry is exploding in complexity. Some of that is due to products like yours, while economic and lifestyle factors have grown the breadth of consumer demand.

Enter technology and service is a whole new thing. And what a revenue opportunity you have in front of you.
Statista reports that:

in-app purchase (IAP) revenue in the Travel market — US$114.30m in 2022.
paid app revenue in the Travel market — US$99.61m in 2022.
advertising revenue in the Travel market — US$833.40m in 2022.

This means there are endless numbers of new revenue sources that you haven’t considered, and digital marketing can open you up to those SaaS Travel revenue streams.

SaaS Travel software makes bookings, payments, trip itinerary planning, tour organization, communications and much more easy, manageable and reliable. Yet travel business entrepreneurs and owners may not understand the full value, or are resistant to adopting new platforms. You could say they don’t have expectations because no one has reached them with any sort of impact (except for the wise market leaders such as TravelPerk who get to control the message and dominate their view).

It’s time to build your winning edge, get your message out, and capture a big piece of this massive software market.

An All In One Travel Business Platform

SaaS marketing platforms are a business foundation for travel entrepreneurs. There are apps and platforms with a cluster of digital customer service features that help agents and operators sell their unique services. Without that software, travel companies won’t be able to compete in today’s competitive travel markets. Travelers do have expectations — they want perfection. Travel entrepreneurs have an ear open for the right solution.

B2C travel websites and apps raised expectations for flawless travel planning, real-time services and seamless travel experiences. B2B providers have captured nices in the business travel segment, but customer loyalty is hard to keep. Many of these travel services (perhaps yours too), aren’t differentiated and switching is oh so easy for travelers and agencies.

Safety, Peace of Mind, and Financial Security

Given travel is long-distance and international, travelers have many concerns and rely on travel agents, hotels, airlines, and transportation providers to get them safely to their destinations. When negative events happen, including canceled flights and payment problems, SaaS services respond by amending their journey, solving payment problems and expediting alternatives.

Who does that best? Those companies who market strongly help agents and operators communicate the value of care and security to their customers. That’s a big value add.

Your SaaS offering provides reassurance directly to their customers and that strength should be mentioned in your messaging. Agencies and tour operators need a boost to their own marketing and they’ll choose the most well-marketed brand because it helps them build customers.

Their customers can see through to the software that agencies/operators use, to its usefulness and simplicity. And here’s the thing, marketing determines value in travelers’ eyes, even though it appears that a nice dashboard and service array should be enough.

The Travel Market has Evolved and Changed

Your SaaS marketing strategy and mix components have to respond to an evolving B2C and B2B demand. Change will bring continuous opportunities for your firm as large firms lack the agility to respond to them. Currently, staycations are showing great interest. And Bleiure trips, ecotravel, and sunbelt travel are much-desired experiences too. The complexity and total value of the travel experience have increased, and it’s growing worldwide travel demand.

The problem in travel businesses is that systems are siloed, disconnected, unresponsive, and unreliable. Are travel agents and tour operators sophisticated enough on their own to appreciate this? What if you were their source of insight?

Your new cloud-powered app/software platform likely resolves those legacy shortcomings with a variety of well-conceived connected services, and products to serve their clients more reliably via smartphones or laptops. That’s wonderful, but you need more.

Impress them by Being the Most Significant Brand for Them

Communicating your heroic solution is important to ensure they appreciate the full value. Digital marketing helps create a context where your product’s value is understood and most appreciated.

Although you’re proud of your SaaS software startup product and how it is the ultimate value for agencies and tour operators, marketing is what generates value in your target’s mind.

The focus has to be on SaaS marketing strategy and executing impactful, emotional-generating campaigns that create buying decisions.

SaaS Marketing to the Rescue

You’ll find the list of 10 steps for SaaS Travel Platform Marketing Strategy below.

Yes, there are plenty of SaaS marketing software platforms and they may be useful. However, before you even think of adopting those tools, you need an affordable and effective SaaS product marketing strategy. We can describe it is the process of creating and delivering the most significant, personalized and unique value proposition to your target customer.

Daily, weekly, monthly through multiple channels, we can connect with your target audience to build impact, comfort and loyalty. The value multiplies.

Excellent marketing and promotion can actually boost and magnify your basic value proposition (differentiation and perception of value). It can take your product from obscurity to total signficance with your audience, raising the value of your product to levels you never even dreamed of.

The right content, channels and exposure allows you to present your mix uniquely for tour operators, corporate travel managers, travelers, and travel agents. And that keeps the value proposition to each of them clarified and more compelling.

Your prospects in North America have 20 or more excellent SaaS marketing platforms to choose from. And which key features, benefits and promises are going to win them? Or does that matter when the market leaders own the communication channels? Let’s take some share away from them.

TravelPerk is a Leader: They Do Marketing

At the center of corporate travel software services in US and Europe is TravelPerk. I’m sure you know all about them. As the Spyfu graphic below shows, they receive about 50,000 visitors per month. A top market leader, however, they’re not accessing the full audience via Google. They have a healthy Google PPC budget and likely advertise on other ad platforms.

Travelperk SEO Traffic Overview. Screenshot courtesy of Spyfu.com

But are they using their ad spend strategically to maximize the performance of their free, branded and owned content? They’re a great company, however, they need more than 1800 visitors per day. They’re tapping into search user traffic via 100,000+ unique keyword phrases. That’s consistent, long-term value for the company. 60,000 visitors via free organic plus 2,000 paid clicks at $2 per click. Those numbers might not be entirely accurate, yet they’re not shy about spending to get leads.

TravelPerk PPC Ad on Google.com. Screenshot courtesy of Google.

The larger the top of funnel, the better the product/content, the more leads and subscriptions will happen.

Not to shine a bright light on a company that’s competing hard (bidding for top page placement on Google Search), but TravelPerk does give us a model to weigh our marketing strategy against. Here on the all important homepage, they offer their promise of stressfree, efficiency to corporate travel managers. They’re going beyond the usual promise of functional business travel software.

TravelPerk Value Proposition. Screenshot courtesy of Travelperk.com

Using their well developed SaaS software platfrom, they key in on the complexity and urgency of business travel itineraries. They top it off with travel perks, additional benefits for travelers and managers. And they encourage subscribers to use their added travel management services. So, the software positions customers to go beyond a subscription to an enhanced managed account with executive perks. That’s so smart!

However, the dizzying array of features and services might stress out travel managers even more, and thus obscure what should be a laser clear value proposition that is clearly more significant than competitors.

Do they make competitors disappear through an irresistible brand and offer? Or do they just put ads at the top of Google pages and hope for the best?

TravelPerk packs a lot of value, and you’ll need a strong SaaS software marketing strategy to bump them out of top spot. But you can do it if you want to.

The Market Leader Opportunity

Most of the SaaS travel management platforms aren’t marketing aggressively, so there’s an amazing opportunity to jump into market leader position and take the entire market. See the steps below build market leader power and keep your marketing affordable.

The challenge for most is to develop their value proposition, reach the travel market (agencies/corporate managers, babyboomer and Bleisure travelers, and tour operators) with the most significant, compelling, and personalized offer of value.

Launching Your SaaS Travel Marketing Strategy

10 Steps for SaaS Travel Platforms

establish your audience in terms of clear, compelling pain points.
establish your audience’s view of travel marketing services (expectations, and who they see as the market leader, what they’re willing to adopt)
hire a branding consultant to help you build your UVP and brand image and provide direction to your SEO/Content Strategist
hire an SEO/content strategist to conduct an opportunity audit and then deliver a comprehensive, sustainable strategy to create reach, engagement and leads.
build your website and design it to make a clear, creative message to your target audience.
build your marketing pages as per your branding and value offer (don’t add promotions — plan and build them in as the final step to create new clients)
create your content strategy and strategize how you’ll reach your audience with your content marketing pieces
establish your paid media budget and plan your keyword strategy and ad visuals.
use your SEO’s PR and link-building services
have your SEO/content strategist and graphic designer build a set of branded visual assets for social media and blog promotion

The simplicity of your marketing strategy likely foretells of affordability issues — since complexity, noise, and non-essentials simply waste money. I can help you keep your money focused on the essentials.

Getting your marketing optimized will impress investors, in fact, without it, investors may not take your business seriously. And weak marketing can impact your staff’s confidence and spirit too. It’s all about creating the impression of market-leading value and success.

Everyone is inspired by that.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post on SaaS travel software marketing and hope it helps power up your marketing for 2024.

If it’s time to begin building your SaaS Travel Product visibility and new revenue streams, then I’m looking forward to speaking with you. Contact me at 416 998 6246.