The European Commission recently published its study on the competitiveness of the European tourism industry and raised some very interesting points that I would like to summarize in this blog post. With regards to the European goal to remain and expand its position as the most popular touristic destination in the world with approximately 400 million visitors per year, a few very interesting “megatrends” are identified that resemble the tendencies of the industry to further embrace digital media and marketing. It’s not hard to draw conclusion for your business from them.
Megatrend 1: Globalization
Different societies, cultures and economies are increasingly interwoven. Technological changes, further liberalisation in trade of goods and services and the increased mobility of individuals have brought the whole world within reach.
Increase your reach across national borders and your marketing efforts across devices to deliver your marketing message at the right time – whether your (potential) clients are browsing the web on their desktop PC, looking for information on Twitter or using their phone.
Megatrend 2: Demographic change
In 2020 roughly 20% of the European population will be aged over 65. This older population will often have considerable purchasing power and have more free time in which to travel. Alongside the ‘greying’ of the population, the number of one or two person-households will increase in Europe.
Cater for this new demographic, and don’t forget to service new life and family models. The demand for the standard family beach holiday of the last decade has decreased significantly. Target groups have become more diverse, and they want customized solutions for their needs.
Megatrend 3: Access to information
Computer technology, internet, search engines, mobile phones, GPS and digital television profoundly change the way the world communicates, collects information and distributes products and services.
Don’t be afraid of new distribution channels. Use and leverage them to better understand your customers and be there for them – with support or your marketing message – wherever they are. Get a Twitter account, sign up for Foursquare and give your fans the opportunity to ‘like’ and recommend you on Facebook. Besides, take a look at regional social media platforms like Tuenti in Spain or the German StudiVZ. They are not as known for advertising and might deliver more bang for you bucks.
Megatrend 4: Experience economy
In an era where supply is abundant and where it is not always easy to distinguish products and services based on quality, consumers are increasingly looking for other factors on which to base their choices. ‘Soft’ characteristics such as design and meaning, as well as the creative combination of products and services into one ‘total experience’ are gaining importance.
Translated into online marketing this means that in a world of global competition – both menace and opportunity to your business – your ad copy, landing page call-to-action, creative or the presentation of your product can make the difference between lots of sales and many wasted advertising dollars. Get all the details right and create a consistent, satisfying experience for your clients from start to finish.
Megatrend 5: Customization
The focus on ‘me’ as a person will increase. Consumers are seeking tailor-made solutions, fitting their own personality. Society can no longer be divided into homogeneous target groups, but increasingly consists of many different niche groups.
This is why your money might be better spent in digital channels than radio or TV campaigns, where you cannot personalize your messages and products to the various niche groups you are trying to target. Define your audiences and tailor-make strategies, campaigns and website pages to deliver great value to them. And if you send out regular newsletters, please personalize! ‘Dear Jamie’ is ten times better than ‘Dear valued customer’, and don’t pitch offers to clients they have never shown interest in unless you are certain that they can appeal to them.
Megatrend 6: Sustainability
Concerns about climate change, environmental pollution, social welfare are being translated into an increased demand for ecologically, socially and economically responsible consumerism.
Megatrend 7: Health and wellness
The increasingly sedentary lifestyles of many people in developed countries have led to an increased focus on health and well-being as a leisure activity. The boundary between wellness and lifestyle on the one hand, and health care on the other hand, is becoming increasingly blurred.
These two trends are not particularly new, but might be worth having a closer look and strategize about for some hospitality businesses and tour operators.
Megatrend 8: Low cost business models
Increasingly, low cost business models are successfully entering the market, reducing products and services to their most basic components. These low cost business models are finding a place alongside more traditional business models.
Online tour operators are certainly part of this trend. And don’t be afraid of cutting down services if with the ends of being able to give your clients more value for less. Price is often a big factor, especially if times are tough. I have recently read an excellent Conversion Rate Experts study on an online travel company. Surveying their clients, the marketing agency found out that they liked the operator’s site, but were wondering about the missing phone number. The operator now explicitly states on their contact page that “We don’t have expensive call centres, so we can pass on these savings to you—making our holidays incredibly good value!” and turned this potential downside into a plus their customers now refer to in a whole different way.
The Commission reprehends that “many EU tourism enterprises are still too ‘product driven’ rather than ‘consumer driven’.” Don’t fall into the same trap. Get to know your customers and customize your digital marketing efforts, and offers, to fit their needs. This will make you stand out from your competitors, make for happier clients and increase the conversions you achieve. The benefits can then be reinvested.
Filed under: Mobile, SEM, SEO, Social, Tourism | Leave a Comment
Tags: e-commerce, ppc, SEM, social media, social web, Tourism, web 2.0
I would like to take up the cudgels for some of the best online resources on travel and hospitality marketing that focus on marketing in the digital space. If you want to keep up-to-date with industry developments, marketing strategies, studies and trends, these are first choices I strongly recommend.
Hotelmarketing.com and Tnooz Travel Tech are definitely my superstars. Around five to ten relevant posts per day and undoubtedly high quality content ranging from recent studies, in-house authors sharing their expert opinion on hot topics to well-known guest writers that are often tourism industry top players themselves. Enough said – both blogs represent a must for every marketer playing in this field.
An insider tip are the RSS feeds of the European Union on tourism-related initiatives, events and frameworks. They are not pulling out a lot of information, but the news they do publish are very relevant as they often talk about policies and strategies that could change the European travel market for a long time. The O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing, TourismInternetMarketing.com and Travel Market Report blogs don’t generate that many content, but the articles they publish every once in a while are certainly well worth reading. Last but not least, Tomorrow’s Tourist is an incredible source on the future of the industry. Innovative, well-researched, great to explore!
As a Cape Town marketer, Travel Wires is a South African expert blog that I would like to recommend if you happen to be involved in this exciting region.
I also enjoy reading German and Spanish blogs to keep up with developments in Europe and South America – if you are interested in them and able to understand the languages I would be glad to let you know which ones I prefer to follow.
If you own a personal blog on tourism marketing or have a recommendation to make I would be glad if you could leave me a comment. It is very much appreciated!
Filed under: Tourism | Leave a Comment
Tags: customer research, Tourism
Advertisers and travel marketers in Great Britain and Ireland, listen up: a bank holiday is approaching in these very competitive travel markets at the end of August!
A bank holiday, by the way, is a public holiday in both Ireland and the United Kingdom. It is observed by most financial institutions. Ergo, banks are closed. If you want to read more about the history of the British bank holidays, check out Wikipedia on the topic. Why should you prepare now? According to Google data mentioned in Jonathan Cranmers white paper on summer travel trends, most holiday-related searches for these dates happen shortly before the actual day in mid August.
The graph shows Google hotel and air queries in the UK and Ireland prior to the August bank holiday. The coloured circles mark the peaks of searches. They occur ten to 30 days prior to the holiday. Local travel search queries generally rise shortly before public holidays even though queries declined a bit in the past year due to the tense economic situation in Europe. Cranmer takes a look into the near future:
“We expect 2010 query seasonality to behave more like patterns seen in 2007 and 2008. Consumer confidence today is stronger than a year ago.”
He suggests to allocate sufficient budget to cater for the higher demand in this period of time and to monitor your bids if you are running search ads to not fall behind because of the possibly increased competition. Seasonal campaigns can help you capture generic traffic related to the bank holiday. Possible keywords could include “short breaks”, “weekend mini-breaks” or “bank holiday deals”.
As for the time after the bank holiday, there will be another high after the holiday and then again once schools holidays end. This spike will be reached within the first ten days of September. Have your budget, PPC ad copy and bids ready for this!
Filed under: SEM, SEO, Tourism | Leave a Comment
Tags: e-commerce, ppc, SEM, Tourism
Money is tight, budgets are being shifted and tourists think twice about booking a long holiday abroad these days. My company and I have identified three main travel trends in this new economic climate that you should definitely be aware of. Those changes in booking and holiday preferences are not exactly a secret if you are working in the industry, yet surely it is good to point them out. They will help you understand the behaviour of your customers better and adjust your offerings and promotions to the current situation.
1. Higher price awareness
- price comparisons are becoming increasingly popular as people are looking to find the best value-for-money offers; they compare prices and specials even more than they used to in the past, going for the highest quality bargain for their allocated budget
- trend to all inclusive: customers want as much planning reliability as possible and try to avoid possible hidden costs; they want to know that the price they book their vacation for constitutes the mayor part of money they will have to pay for their holiday in the end, so all inclusive offers are on the rise
- companies try to save on business travels by booking them highly in advance
2. Later bookings and shorter holidays
- on average, customers book their holidays much later compared to before the crisis; they are more spontaneous and careful to not take risks regarding their jobs and often take less time from planning their trips to booking them while also wanting to take advantage of last minute bargains as they know that there are more around because tourism has slowed down
- there is a high number of people that are still undecided about if and where to spend their holiday this year
- people don’t want to turn their main holiday of the year down, but they shorten it to both save money and not lose out at work; in Germany, for example, they holiday in their own country for 9.8 days on average, or 13.7 days if they travel abroad – 10-day trips are definitely a trend
3. Destination-specific effects
- there is a clear trend to nearer holiday destinations rather than long-distance journeys
- at least in Europe and especially Germany, there’s a tendency to spend the holiday in the home country rather than in foreign destinations; the private car often substitutes the plane ticket
- however, there is – and that’s positive – only a slight decrease of flight passenger volumes in Europe
Filed under: Tourism | Leave a Comment
Tags: customer research, e-commerce, Tourism
Google Germany is carrying out various very interesting studies on search behaviour and industry trends under the flag of their regional Full Value of Search programme. A study in German language that has been conducted over almost a year and ended last year in March specifically deals with the online information process of users looking for tourism-related services. In the coming days and weeks I would like to share the results of Google’s investigations with you and give you hands-on advice on how to interpret them and use them to better understand and, ideally, optimize your travel campaigns. The results relate to the German market, yet there are a few findings that can most possibly be generalized.
A main find of the study is that users research thoroughly before making up their mind and ending up completing your booking form. In fact, a period of more than four weeks precedes 37 per cent of all tourism bookings executed online. Only 15 per cent of searchers book on the first day of their investigation process. Users take an average of 25 days from their first booking-related search or website visit to the actual booking. This process is slightly longer for flight bookings (28 days) than for hotel reservations (26 days) and bookings through tour operators (24 days). They also visit an average of nine different websites in this process. More than 50 per cent look at least at five different websites before making up their mind.
This essentially means that focusing on only the converting keyword for your search campaigns is thinking too short – users might have visited your site and others before and they have performed many more searches and actions that this keyword does not cover at all. Have a look at one of my last blog posts to read about how to capture this data using Google Analytics. Think branding: create awareness for your brand and, if you have the budget, consider accompanying users all the way from their first, broad search to their final one.
Another interesting fact: three out of four potential online travel clients perform searches on Google before making a decision. You really want to be present when that happens, so always think of optimizing for and advertising on Google before taking Bing and Yahoo into account – especially if your target market is Germany. The picture in the United States, where Bing and Yahoo hold significant market share, might look a little different. However, Google is leading the pack here, too.
Filed under: Analytics, SEM, SEO | Leave a Comment
Tags: customer research, e-commerce, ppc, SEM, SEO, Tourism
A very inspiring video on the amazing opportunities and developments the evolution of text to hypertext have made possible. Take a minute, lean back and enjoy it!
Today the link structure of the internet serves to glue together all the pages that were made public as a result of someone linking to them. Through links, search engines’ automated robots can reach the countless interconnected documents.
Filed under: Social | Leave a Comment
Tags: content management, hypertext, information access, information retrieval, knowledge management, social media, social web, web 2.0
You probably know how to gather data for your website with the free web analytics software Google Analytics. All you need for Analytics to be able to start working for your site is to paste your individual tracking script into the code of all the pages that you would like to monitor. If you haven’t worked with web analytics yet, Google Analytics is a great, user-friendly tool that can also be used for more advanced analysis once you get a grip on how to interpret your website data.
Now, if you are running paid search ads to promote your business you also know that you can synchronize your Analytics account with your AdWords account to get access to some additional, informative reports. There are, however, two more reports that are extremely helpful for tourism-related sites that are being referred to by AdWords campaigns: visits to purchase and days to purchase.
You need to apply a little trick to get access to the two. They are part of the e-commerce tab in Google Analytics and have been developed for online shops. The Analytics script on your site is not sufficient to collect all the data these reports need. They want to know how many items someone put in the shopping cart, where the buyer is located and what the total worth of the purchase was. The e-commerce code, thus, needs to be implemented in addition to the Analytics code – and it looks very complex and intimidating! In tourism, you will often only want one thing: generate a lead to your sales team, who will take care of the enquiry. The solution for your site is to cut the e-commerce script down to its bare bone so that it can do its duty without you having to assign all sorts of item values and products to it.
This is what the customised e-commerce script will have to look like. Just replace the generic ID marked below with your individual Analytics ID and paste the code anywhere above the closing head tag of your HTML – preferably at the bottom of the page so it gets carried out after all the other important scripts on the page.
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ?
“https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(“<script src=’” + gaJsHost +
“google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’>” +
“</sc” + “ript>”);
</script><script type=’text/javascript’>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXX-1“);
pageTracker._setLocalRemoteServerMode();
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();var timeObj = new Date;
var unixTimeMs = timeObj.getTime();
var unixTime = parseInt(unixTimeMs / 1000);
var orderID = pageTracker._visitCode() + ‘-’ + unixTime;pageTracker._addTrans(
orderID,
“”,
“”,
“”,
“”,
“”,
“”,
“”
);pageTracker._addItem(
orderID,
“”,
“”,
“”,
“1″,
“1″
);pageTracker._trackTrans();
</script>
Why do you need to know how many days it took a visitor to actually enquire?
In a German Google webinar on the possibilites of marketing tourism products in today’s tight economy it was said that on average, people take 29 days from first clicking on one of your ads to actually visiting your site again to send you an enquiry. This is important information for you – it gives you insight on the booking behaviour of your clients. You can derive direct actions from this valuable data.
If visitors for instance come back to your site often before making an enquiry, you might want to treat them differently when they get back to you the second or third time – using their cookie information to facilitate the re-entry for them and accommodate them with relevant content. And if you ask yourself if it is really worth bidding on those broad, generic terms as visitors often seem to enquire through much more specific keywords – maybe a generic keyword was what brought them to your site in the first place. You can use the utm_nooverride=1 string, attached to your URLs, to tell Analytics to remember the first ad people had clicked on: http://www.example.com/?utm_nooverride=1.
By default, it would just delete this information with a new entry when people click on another of your ads after the first one.
Filed under: Analytics, SEM | 1 Comment
Tags: e-commerce, google analytics, ppc, SEM, web analytics
Welcome to traveldigital. If you are interested in what this blog is going to be about now and in the future have a look at the sections travel and digital. I would like to make this an international blog and post content in whichever major European language I come across. I will, however, try to focus on English and force myself to translate the essence of each post for everyone to understand.
Have a great time here and come back often!
I am looking forward to discuss all interesting aspects of digital tourism marketing with you here.
Cheers from South Africa
Matthias
Filed under: Random | Leave a Comment
Recent Entries
- European Commission defines touristic “megatrends”
- Travel marketing blogs and websites you should follow
- UK advertisers, get your marketing ready for the August bank holiday
- The three main travel trends in the economic crisis
- Users often take a month of consideration to book their holiday online
- The huge possibilities of hypertext
- Measuring time from click to conversion for your paid search campaigns
- Welcome, willkommen, bienvenido, bem-vindo, bienvenu!
