Lucern – Travel Marketing Conference
I have been away and now returned, I’ve been to Switzerland which made a wonderful backdrop to a conference dedicated to Marketing for Travel companies. The ATTA Summit.
Keeping things brief – what was the big ‘take-away’. It was Social and it was Mobile and neither of these can be ignored in fact we must step up our game plans threefold if we want to improve our website offering to our clients.
In every field this was true, customer service, branding, marketing, websites, return on investment, SEO and every interaction with our clients showed that we needed to be there on this system or that system.
Interesting facts
- The average 20 something year old has about 40 browser windows open at any one time… I have about 5 to 8 so I can believe this.
- Google research shows you should put your whole website onto a mobile phone, forget trying to divide up the content.
- We know Facebook brought Instagram for $1billion – but why did they do it, because it is all about numbers. People share things and this is only set to increase – period.
What can we do
We heard from Google’s head of Google Travel and he simply said produce more content. Provide stories for your customers to read, engage with them. And this is the key – providing content for our customers to read and share.
Social
Looking just at social for the moment the key falls into 3 separate sections that all businesses must fulfil.
- Provide a platform for sharing – you need to make it really easy for people to share your content. Forget copyrighting your images, or hiding behind usernames and passwords, everything should be upfront and shareable.
- Provide a stream – get your news out there, soft sell and make it interesting, keep it industry-wide, do not be afraid of competition you customers are looking them up anyway. Keep the news short and often.
- Provide Customer Service – give people a way to contact you via Social Media, and answer them promptly look for complaints, answer them. If you’re not on something, then you’re not giving your customer that opportunity to engage with you any longer.
This is all manageable and actually could be remarkable little work once you have passed the setup phase, but it is essential that we all do this. Why? because quite simply people are contacting companies through all these outlets and if you’re not on it, you won’t be contacted. SEO and ranking are Google also play a significant part in why you should be using Social.
Mobile
Over half of Americans now have a smartphone. India, China and the developing world are jumping the gun and buying straight into Internet-enabled phones. Europe is playing catch up to the world and everyone has the ability to send a Text, Email or Photo via their mobile.
However, that’s only half the story, people are replacing their desktop or laptop internet use with Mobile phones, so we need to be aware of that and something like 20% of all Google traffic is now via a mobile device. People also want full functionality from that experience. They do not want to ‘feel’ that they have to look up a ‘proper’ website to get the information they need.
We now have the ability to provide ‘responsive design’ – this means your website can respond to the screen it is being displayed on, if a Mobile, things get smaller if, on an iPad, things are bigger etc… It ultimately means we can design one website for all phones, tablets and desktops, so why not just do it.
And Lastly…
Everything is a story – all your content should be part of an ongoing story. No-one is interested in what you had for breakfast – but if what you had for breakfast is part of a bigger picture or story, then it becomes extremely relevant.
And that’s the key – join the dots for your customers, make them understand why you’re doing things and let them know the reasons, you’ll get a much bigger and better class of feedback.