NB: This is a guest article by Ian Stockley, managing director for Indicia.
Digital and social media have opened the floodgates to real communication between brands and customers.
Despite the wealth of consumer data now available, many travel brands are failing to effectively utilise it to deepen its understanding of customers and improve engagement through tailored and relevant communications.
To stay ahead, travel brands and tourist boards need to integrate thinking across every discipline, know the value of every touch-point and put the customer at the heart of every communication.
This requires a step-change in thinking and a very different approach to marketing - one where customer intelligence sits at the heart of all activity.
The intelligent customer
A shift in the balance of power between brands and customers has occurred. Individuals know more about the products they buy than ever before.
Early stages in the buying cycle used to be driven by what the brand chose to say in its advertising and marketing. Now they are initiated by the way consumers pick up those messages – or even create them in the first place.
Social media has given the consumer a new power: market intelligence is available to all, via comparison websites, user reviews, blogs and ratings; it is accessible online and through the mobile phone.
Hearing the voice of the consumer, acting on what it is telling the brand and reflecting the individual’s needs and desires in a conversation is now what makes marketing engaging.
It also makes it more effective. Marketing has to become smarter.
Intelligent marketing
Travel and holidays are enormously emotionally-driven purchases and are one of the most researched purchases consumers make.
The potential to ignite interest and spark conversations through imaginative marketing is therefore incredibly exciting.
The challenge travel marketers face is that consumers and their purchasing decisions are varied and multi-faceted - they’re dealing with individuals, not mass markets, and with shifting roles, not fixed identities.
Driving creative messages, content and even the online experience needs to be supported by data.
Creative ideas built on insights should give the consumer a clear sense that the brand understands, recognises and respects them – in other words, something they can trust and will want to buy into.
Get it right and it powers a campaign beyond what classic marketing has ever been able to achieve. Intelligent marketing is all about leveraging data to generate the best understanding of the consumer, to identify appropriate and powerful propositions that match their needs and wants, to express that knowledge creatively and to use the consumer’s preferred channels to deliver the message.
By using customer intelligence that way, what starts as a conversation steadily becomes a deeper connection.
Thinking about data
Putting this approach into practice is more challenging. For one thing, a data tsunami has hit organisations, unprecedented levels of transactional data across channels and behavioural data flowing from every touchpoint.
Processing that data is no longer a technical challenge; turning it into valuable insights is.
Consumers are no longer buying holidays, they’re buying experiences. This requires brands to re-evaluate how it categorises its products and services.
Purchasing decisions aren’t solely driven by age or lifestyle, therefore traditional segmentation methods that use FRAC variables (Frequency, Recency, Amount and Category) no longer cuts it.
Two very similar people could have very different perceptions of a brand and/or destination. Brands now need to understand why consumers look at a certain destination or service and what sort of experience they’re trying to achieve.
For example, is a prospect looking for an active adventure holiday or does a more sedate, cultural preference underpin their holiday desires.
Re-categorising segmentation by experience and consumer attitudes rather than products/services in this way requires data sources that discriminate between individuals and add value.
Additional external digital data such as web browsing behaviour and email engagement data can provide the vital clues about what consumers are thinking, their personalities and their preferences.
Consumers will make their own choices, what’s important is that when they make those decisions brands recognise what they’re doing in a way that triggers the right CRM activity.
The consumer now expects brands to reflect the customer intelligence they have gained at every touch-point and in all communications, anything else just looks lazy.
The marketer therefore needs to know how to apply customer intelligence to the creative output, the selection of media, the content used to populate touch-points and to understand which insights are achieving that all-important relevance and resonance.
NB: This is a guest article by Ian Stockley, managing director for Indicia.