Guest Post: Why user journey consistency is important for travel ads

Heighten your customer’s experience, says Clicky Media chief executive Oli Yeates

Heighten your customer’s experience, says Clicky Media chief executive Oli Yeates

Social Media shows no signs of slowing and should be an integral part any travel businesses digital strategy –  as customers seek to engage with the brands they love. But how do you make sure your social ads are heightening and not hindering your customer’s overall experience?

What is user journey consistency?

We know more times than not, that a customer journey is not a simple interaction – in an ideal world a customer will land on your website and immediately, buy a product or enquire about your services – if only it was that simple. Predominantly customers will embark on a customer journey with multiple touchpoints, this can look something like seeing a Facebook advertisement, registering details,  receiving an email campaign, visiting the website, enquiring and purchasing. The key component here in order to succeed is user journey consistency, but what is it?

The user journey is the experience a person has when using or interacting with something, with a focus on what the user sees and interacts with. User journey consistency is a process a user takes where all visual elements are uniform.

Why is a visually consistent user journey so important?

Consumers trust brands that they recognise and remember. From the tone of voice to graphical style to the photographs used in their advertising, consistency makes a brand more dependable and recognisable. Consistency in design keeps customer satisfaction high.

Brand consistency is the act of repeatedly displaying the same brand messages, styles, and other brand elements to your audiences to ensure brand recognition. Brand recognition then builds trust and loyalty between your brand and your consumers.

Creating a consistent brand image from one touchpoint to another is vital, what do we mean by this and why is it so important? The moment you deliver a social advertisement you are setting an expectation for your potential customer, one that relies on your website living up to that expectation. As customers, we expect a seamless experience between different touchpoints, from the tone of voice, graphical style and photography used, it all should reiterate one another, to help build a story and move the customer from one phase to another in the sales process.

As a brand, if you nail this on the head, you have the ability to achieve some amazing results for your brand such as:

Making your brand far more recognizable across different touchpoints, this, in turn, makes prospective customers more comfortable as they know what to expect as they transition between different touchpoints.

Increasing trust in your brand across an array of different platforms, as users, we expect patterns, from your logo to colours and messaging to be translated from social media platforms to your brand’s website.

Promotes storytelling, did you know it’s out with the one-off, single-channel experience and in with the omnichannel, multi-touch points? Therefore consistency is key to build the story over time.

Enabling a single brand experience which is positive for your customers and cost-effective for your brand as a whole.

Using social media ads for lead conversion.
Social media can be a powerful tool when it comes to generating leads, but how? This comes in the form of paid social media, otherwise known as Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and LinkedIn Ads.

Facebook ads

The process of setting up an advertisement on Facebook is simple and can be broken down into 4 steps, deciding your ad creative, affirming targeting & bidding options and customising form fields.

Often the most popular social media platform, when it comes to advertising, with 84% of marketers choosing to advertise on Facebook to drive traffic and acquire leads

Instagram ads

The setup for Instagram is similar to Facebook, the only exception is that lead form filling options are limited to an email address, name, phone number, and gender.

Instagram seems to be growing in retrospect to advertising with eMarketer finding 48.8% of brands existing on Instagram and hoping to increase their participation by 70.7%.

LinkedIn ads

LinkedIn offers many different advertising types from sponsored content, sponsored inmails, text ads, and dynamic ads. Specifically for lead generation, LinkedIn offers Lead Generation Forms which work very similar to the ones we have previously discussed, except more data can be collected from a lead, and the lead details can be pre-populated.

LinkedIn is a successful platform for promoting your business especially if you are marketing yourself to another business rather than directly to customers.

Using landing pages & microsites for lead generation

Some social ads allow you to create lead generation forms directly into your ad post, meaning your customer can convert without having to leave the social platform. These lead generation forms are exclusive to Facebook and Instagram. This is a cost-effective method, if budget restraints occur, however, if you do have a sufficient budget, we highly recommend sending the user somewhere, where they can receive more information before converting. Perhaps sending them to niche content on a landing page or microsite.

So what is a landing page & microsite?

A landing page is an internal page on a website where the content is tailored to suit a certain niche, product or service. This page is used to inform a user of the What, Why, Where and How of the product or service, which includes consistent “call to actions” that push users to convert.

A microsite is a small website, which usually sits on a subdomain, this acts as a hub of information for a specific product service or niche. Microsites are similar to landing pages but they sit separately from their main website, yet still encourage users to convert directly.

How to achieve consistency from your social ads to your website

To ensure brand consistency, we need to be looking at the design and structure of the social advert and the landing page, side-by-side. The quick wins for this are colours, fonts, messaging and imagery: if we can streamline these tiny elements, we’re onto a winner already.

Social Advertising should be an integral part of your overall digital strategy, but make sure that your ads are heightening and not hindering your customer’s experience. Consistency is key, where all visual elements are uniform from your advertisement to your landing page. In turn, you will create a brand that your customers, trust and recognize through an array of different touchpoints.