Even though digital marketing has increased tremendously this year, and in any year-to-year comparison, it’s time to go harder. Digital marketing holds the key to gaining market share, increasing customer value and increasing incremental revenue. Digital marketing is the 2012 version of “recession chops.”

Here are 5 strategies to stay ahead in online travel marketing;

1. Testing: A comScore executive estimated earlier this year that 75 percent of its clients are testing their digital creative in parts of their campaigns. That’s a good number. Testing must be done for creative but it must also be done for audience relevance, segmentation and timing. Testing is relatively inexpensive, effective and essential.

2. Find growth areas: Once a travel company integrates a testing mentality they can be more aggressive and innovative about finding growth areas. Is it a destination? A new target audience? An underestimated holiday? Find something that can produce incremental growth.

3. Customize messaging: Even with the uptick in travel ads online, too many companies still rely on a few executions. If you want to be innovative, create a dozen of them based on microsegments. Take it to the next level and partner with cutting edge ad platforms that offer dynamic creative executions. Dynamic creative capability essentially creates custom ads for individual customers in real-time. For the travel category it can take a generic message such as “low fares” into specific fares for specific destinations based on individual customer preferences and behaviors.

4. Audit customers: Are the affluent customers still affluent? Have the older customers in the database travelled recently? Are business travelers using their loyalty program points? A rigorous customer audit will answer these questions and enable travel companies to execute against them.

Read More at HotelMarketing.com