September 24, 2015

Digital Travel, Leisure & Entertainment Seminar Round-up: 16 September 2015

The first Figaro Digital Travel, Leisure & Entertainment Seminar took place on Wednesday 16 September at The Hospital Club in Covent Garden, where we were joined by speakers at WAYN.com, Liberty Marketing, the Other Media, Adobe, Zeta Interactive and Agentivity. Here’s a quick round-up of insight from the morning

10 Lessons Learned From 10 Years Running a Social Travel Network
Peter Ward – CEO & Co-founder, WAYN.com

Peter Ward at WAYN.com (Where Are You Now?) outlines 10 things to keep in mind if you want to set up a successful social business. Start with a dream, and be flexible on how you’re going to achieve it. Identify a clear problem to solve and, if there’s a market for it, focus on it. Don’t try to do everything, just make sure you do one thing really well—you want people to be coming to you with the intention of solving a specific problem. Know what the core of your business is, and build around this when you need to. Test and iterate by looking at what your data’s telling you. And don’t be afraid to find inspiration in what other people are doing; look at what the industry’s telling you and then imitate and innovate in accordance with that. Find a way to get your users to recommend you to other users. When growing your team, make sure you’re hiring people who are in line with your current business needs. Keep looking at how you can change the way you do things. And, ultimately, have fun.

Advanced AdWords Strategies in the Travel, Leisure & Entertainment Sectors
Gareth Morgan – Managing Director, Liberty Marketing

There are plenty of developments in pay-per-click that are often overlooked in the travel, leisure and entertainment sectors, and Gareth Morgan at Liberty Marketing takes delegates through some of the main areas that marketers should be looking into. First, Gmail native ads: newly released, this feature allows you to target users by domain and keyword, meaning that you can advertise to your target market in their inbox. Gareth also discusses remarketing, a cookie-based function which allows you to bring users back to your site with a relevant message, increasing a users’ likelihood to convert by 96 per cent. Taking this a step further are remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA), which let you show users different ads on Google depending on which remarketing list they’re on. Making your ad stand out on the search results page can be achieved with ad extensions, as they take up more real estate on the page and make it simple for users to interact. You can also use ad customisers to bring real-time context, such as a changing price, to your add. Gareth also highlights the benefits of lightbox ads, which give the user a choice over which content they’d like to see, expanding to fill the screen when the curser is hovered over it.

Making the Most of Mobile Technology in Entertainment and Leisure
George Crabb – Managing Director, the Other Media

It’s well accepted that mobile is no longer just a communication device. It’s also very much about entertainment, research, convenience and even shopping. Mobile experiences, says George Crabb at the Other Media, should be built around Clayton Christensen’s ‘Jobs to be Done’ theory, which recognises that people engage with a product or service in order to get a task completed efficiently. He outlines five steps for delivering an excellent mobile experience. First, understand the context—your user may want different experiences depending on the time and the device they’re using. Tell them exactly what they need to know in the first instance and, if they want to explore some more, they will do so. Next, make it personal by allowing users to set preferences. Allow your users to do things that they wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. If you’re offering an experience based on technology, then make it seamless. Finally, make it timely—users need different information at different times so think about how you can make the experience relevant to that moment in time.

The Key Ingredients for Delivering a Superior Customer Experience in the Travel & Hospitality Industry
Michael Plimsoll – Industry Marketing Director, Adobe

Technology has disrupted the travel and hospitality industry, and start-ups like Airbnb have made their brand stand out from well-established competitors by offering exceptional digital customer experiences. This change, says Michael Plimsoll at Adobe, is driven by new disruptive digital business models. But how can you deliver personalised cross-channel campaigns? Michael highlights four key steps. First, make sure your organisation is completely aligned with your digital needs: consider what new skills might be needed within the team and what roles might need to be created; leverage the unique data you own to become a data-driven organisation. Create a unified customer profile by bringing together unique data sources. Implement a seamless experience from creative to delivery; businesses have started to adapt and create their own creative workflow processes that flow from creative to consumer delivery. Move into cross-channel campaign management that allows you to deliver consistent messaging to the consumer.

The Costs and Benefits of Adding Real-time to Your Marketing Mix
Adam Crisp – Strategy and Analysis Director, Zeta Interactive

Real-time marketing can bring many benefits to a business, but only if your content is relevant and valuable. There are potential pitfalls to any real-time marketing campaign, and Adam Crisp at Zeta Interactive offers delegates some advice for avoiding them. Users may be in one place, but they’re not all going to be there for the same reason. When sending out real-time triggered communications, therefore, it’s essential to understand the intent of the user at that moment. If they’re doing research and you send out a real-time push for purchase, this could be disruptive to their experience and might even drive them away from you. If you don’t look at the customer as an individual, you could be sending out offers to people who are already valued customers and potentially changing the tone of their relationship with you. Intelligent real-time involves looking in detail at the actions users have taken on your website, and then deciding what to do with it—even if that’s nothing. If you’re going to take on real-time, be sure that it’s needed; you don’t want to interrupt a journey that’s already running smoothly.

How Data Can Help Your Digital Marketing Take Flight
Riaan van Schoor – Co-founder, Agentivity

In 2014, 238 million people travelled through UK airports. Today’s traveller is constantly connected. Communications are often from multiple sources and, as such, do not come together to form an intelligent, consistent flow of information. Travel agents have access to a wealth of booking data which, if used, could allow them to make timely contact with their users, sending out appropriate offers and documentation at a relevant moment.