"Customer acquisition costs" is the phrase trip planning naysayers like to use when explaining why they think the sector is a startup graveyard.
NB: This is the second instalment of a two-part viewpoint by Saket Newaskar, co-founder and chief technology officer at Triphobo. Click here to read the first part.
They argue that it is very expensive to attract users, particularly when some travel sites have an online marketing budget running into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
But let me go slightly deeper.
When it comes to user acquisition, I agree to an extent. It is tough to get through in the travel space but there are some strategies which can work and which are being used by some successful trip (or travel) planning businesses.
These are some strategies which can work:
1) SEO
People say this does not work today for startups as some advertisers put a lot of money on Google ads.
Nadav Gur, principal at NG Vanguard Enterprises said in his original article for Tnooz which started the debate, said:
"Inevitably this means that you too have to advertise a lot. And no, free user acquisition schemes such as SEO do not work in 2015 at scale in established markets. The Priceline Group spends over $2 billion per year on Google Ads alone. Guess why?"
In 2012, Tnooz ran an article headlined "Google AdWords gets stronger, but travel keywords struggle with conversion"
Even though this article is more than three years ago, it is relevant today, and the trends mentioned in the piece - particularly the emergence of long-tail search patterns - still apply.
The article mentioned that "flights" and "hotels" were declining as search terms, and there are some similar developments today as shown below:
The future of SEO is the long tail questions which Google wants to answer with relevant answers. The key is to identify the right trends on search engines.
Here's an example of what I see as successful SEO in the travel planning space and it comes from Rome2Rio.
Rome2Rio has managed to generate more than 84 million pages. What are these pages? Here is an example: try the search below.
It's all about smart execution!
2) Traffic and content sharing partnerships
One strong example of this is Hipmunk:
Developing tightly bound solutions with large content platforms generates great branding and business. This is not your API affiliate program it is about co-developing products and pages.
As ever, the success is dependent on execution.
3) Content Marketing
You need to build a content generation factory. The success of content marketing is dependent on how well it is executed on social and other content sharing platforms.
Check TripHobo's Facebook page. We drive more than a million users directly from our Facebook page, 85% of which are organic.
So from my experience, the user acquisition piece is not an insurmountable challenge.
4)Build a great product and keep on improving it!
This is the most important long-term marketing strategy. This is sometimes overlooked but having a great product is what generates the digital word of mouth. There are a lot more strategies that we at TripHobo are working on but the most important factor in any marketing strategy is the execution.
Once you have a good user acquisition model in place with a lot of low cost hacks, you can figure out if you want to monetize the traffic with your own inventory or affiliate inventory. It's going to be profitable if you are smart and good at execution.
Motivation, motivation, motivation
Successful products and companies - Facebook, Pinterest, Airbnb - were not built overnight. They had strong founding teams that had the ability to persist and solve problems, remove roadblocks and move forward.
It's not easy to build a company. It needs a can do attitude. It needs a lot of "real" out of the box thinking.
At TripHobo, the founders experienced surreal pressure and bad times before we saw any success. But we try never to drop the ball nor allow a key issue to fall through the crack. We make sure that we experiment every day.
We know that execution is all about problem solving, persistence. We make sure we have a large idea funnel and we execute each idea to the best of our abilities, giving it everything we have got.
We have come a long way and we still have a long journey ahead. We will move forward and keep on scaling our platform every day.
So here I am, telling Tnooz readers, the travel industry and anyone else who cares: a travel planning startup is not a bad idea at all!
Related reading from Tnooz:Why you should never consider a travel planning startup (Jan 2016)
NB: This is the second instalment of a two-part viewpoint by Saket Newaskar, co-founder and chief technology officer at Triphobo.com. Click here to read the first part.
NB2:Image by Shutterstock.