Lowcost is targeting consumers in Germany, Australia, Spain, Italy and Sweden in the coming months and has hired Bigmouth to run PPC campaigns and formulate an SEO plan for each market.

Coordinated from Bigmouth’s UK team but delivered through local offices in each country, campaigns are already up and running in Germany and Sweden.

Meanwhile, LowcostHolidays has enlisted the help of Travelport-owned GTA to bolster its hotel stock ahead of the launch of EasyJet Holidays in the next few months.

In a three-year deal, GTA will supply Lowcost with city hotel inventory for the new EasyJet push into tour operating. GTA says it will provide “tens of thousands” of properties in the two and five-star categories to feature alongside Lowcost’s existing beach stock.

So the travel industry is continually being urged to consider mobile and social media as part of the overall marketing mix – but equally never lose focus on traditional online techniques such as SEO and paid search.

This minefield of data and options often leads to more questions than answers, but here are five killer marketing strategies that every travel company should have on their agenda.

1. Be authoritative

Search engine optimisation today is all about ART – authority, relevancy and trust. In order to become an authority in the increasingly complex world of search, companies need to supplement traditional approaches to SEO, where campaigns are based on research around historic search trends, by undertaking pre-emptive optimisation.

This killer strategy is about being the first to coin a new phrase or keyword, which results in Google ranking your site as more authoritative.

These days Google places significant emphasis on looking for ‘authority sites’ that come up with a new phrase or keyword, and sophisticated digital marketers will be spending at least  some of their time speculating over what the next big buzzwords will be in their sector.

2. Get mobile

Mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common internet access devices worldwide by  2013, and as a result every company needs to get ready for the mobile revolution.

At this stage, it is important to undergo a thorough research and strategy building phase to ensure that the subsequent campaign management and advertising undertaken maximises results. Mobile is becoming an important revenue driving channel, and travel companies need to put in place solid strategies around their mobile sites and advertising to become successful.

Many companies will also be investigating the  apps market, but even more important than having a great idea for an application will be coming up with an even better plan for how to market it.

With more than 250,000 apps available for download on Apple’s iStore alone, getting people talking about yours will be a critical component of any successful formula. Geared to maximise the benefits of your social networks, the launch plan should cover all channels and tap in to loyal customers first.

3. Borrow the best from other sectors

If they are serious about gaining the competitive edge in 2011, travel companies need to follow the example of other sectors and become more creative.

Many would do well to learn from the retail sector, which has been particularly inspired in its use of a raft of innovations from YouTube annotations to Twitter.

Examples of great video virals or social media campaigns from travel businesses are few and far between – perhaps because as an industry we tend to be too focused on ROI  - and, as a general rule, tend to lack the creative flair that has seen companies in entertainment and retail reap rich rewards.

Moving into 2011 social media will become an integrated part of the online marketing mix, and travel companies have to embrace innovations and creativity in order to become successful therein.

4. Get your social media measurements and metrics right

Currently travel companies are failing to measure the success of social media, and as more budgets are being allocated to social it is crucial to get the measurement and use of metrics right.

The most common mistake is that marketers fail to identify their objectives, focus on the most easily available metrics, and  ignore the most important metrics because they are hard to measure. There are a lot of different perspectives you can measure, and different stakeholders will need different metrics dependent on their role in the organisation.

According to Forrester Research, to properly value the impact of their social media marketing investments, interactive marketers must align their objectives, metrics, targets, and strategies across four perspectives – the financial perspective, the digital perspective, the brand perspective, and the risk management perspective.

The key is to define your objectives across the different areas of business that your social media strategy impacts and implement measurements that help to identify its impact.

5. Use Attribution Models to improve your online marketing campaigns

Currently most travel companies still deploy the ‘last click wins’ model when measuring the success of online marketing activities.

This model is flawed especially in travel as research is a huge part of the purchase process and, unless we understand the user engagement prior to purchase, we will not be able to understand the true ROI of our online marketing activities.

It’s time to implement attribution models, ie. attributing or allocating the value of a sale to the marketing activities that generated or drove it.

The goal of attribution is to understand what activities are actually working so that you can do more of them and change the activities that are not working well. Attribution models needs to be carefully designed as they certainly are not ‘one size fits all’.

Throwing out last click wins and implementing a complex and inappropriate model can be a pitfall. The key is to use analytics data to get a picture of how people interact with your website and use a technology that enable sophisticated attribution modelling.

As a result, the business will finally understand how their online marketing activities work at all consumer touch points, can optimise each touch point, budget accordingly and be more successful  in their online marketing.

NB: This is a guest post by Anneli Ritari, senior strategist for travel at BigMouthmedia.

The annual BigMouthMedia Online Travel Report found that – for the industry as a whole – the level of marketing spend on social media would account for 8% of total budget, edging ahead of email marketing with 7%.

Looking at individual sectors, only airlines marketers say email activity will continue to capture a bigger share of their budgets ahead of social media (10% vs 6%). Both online travel agencies and hotels say social media will grab 8% of spend, tour operators giving 6%.

The overall marketing spend mix for all sectors is as follows:

• Paid search – 36%
• SEO – 20%
• Display advertising – 16%
• Affiliate marketing – 10%
• Social media – 8%
• Email – 7%

Other notable data in the survey around the rise of social media as a marketing channel includes the resources used or people allocated to manage a company’s activity:

• 1 person – 24%
• 2 persons – 8%
• 3 persons – 2%
• Non-dedicated resource – 37%
• No resource – 22%
• Agency – 7%

But perhaps rather worryingly, as many marketers (38%) say they do not measure the ROI of a campaign as those that do.

For those that do measure social media ROI, direct bookings came out on top as the most popular metric (30%), followed by fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter (25%), web traffic (20%), interactions and conversations (15%) and reviews added (5%).

NB: Full report and methodology (Tnooz assisted in the promotion of the survey) is available from BigMouthMedia.

This year’s survey poses a series of questions ranging from how companies intend to spilt their marketing budgets over the course of 2011 to the biggest challenges respondents feel will face the travel, tourism and hospitality industry in the months ahead.

Last year’s survey revealed that travel companies expected to move the majority of their marketing spend into online advertising in 2010, with the 50% share allocated to digital channels in 2009 predicted to rise to 57% in 2010.

As the industry responded to unprecedented economic pressure, a clear majority also claimed the intention to significantly increase spending on social media.

Full results will be published on Tnooz in late-November 2010.

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The questionnaire was framed to gauge the opinion of industry professionals and their company’s plans for marketing spend online into 2010.

Here are the full results:

NB: The survey took place in late-October 2009 with a sample size of 150 industry professionals, mostly in the UK.

The questionnaire is designed to gauge the industry’s use of online media, marketing techniques, innovation in travel and predicted trends for 2010.

Taking just five minutes to complete, each participant will also be sent their own copy of the final report in late-November.

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Click here to go straight to the survey.