TRAVEL WEEKLY BUSINESS
customers is continually evolving. LEE HAYHURST reports
BIG DATA: TRAVEL FIRMS ‘FAIL TO KEEP UP WITH SOPHISTICATED TRACKING SYSTEMS’
The theory and technology for gaining a better understanding of the impact of marketing spend is well ahead of implementation, a panel discussion led by the summit’s headline sponsor heard. The debate was chaired by Criteo’s
director of business intelligence and account strategy director, Sylvain Piquet. It looked at the evolving world of
marketing attribution models which exploit data to shed light on the activity that was most important in contributing to a sale. Mark Varley, managing director of Manchester-based agency MEC, said the thinking behind this complicated area was increasingly sophisticated.
But he added: “A lot of people in the market are nowhere near in terms of sophistication
and understanding. There’s always a paranoia that everyone is doing a fantastic job. Actually, the level of sophistication is not as high as you would expect.” The panel agreed it is as important to become better at understanding what contributes to each sale as to a failed sale, but this requires a huge amount of data
“Knowing if marketing drives sales is the biggest challenge”
processing. The rise of mobile and the problem of tracking customers as they move cross-devices makes attribution problems even more acute. Elliot Pritchard, chief marketing officer
Sylvain Piquet RKSHOP
Travel marketers need to stop thinking about sales channels in isolation and should target audiences, regardless of which channel they are using. David Gilbert, Kenshoo head of social, said old-fashioned
marketing approaches that silo channels, such as paid search, email and brand advertising, were dying out. “In the future, the marketers who do best will be those who consider activities of audiences and how best to reach them with the right message at the right time,” said Gilbert.
of Travel Republic, said the best way was getting customers to log in but this does not capture all visitors. “The important thing to me is not cross-device, it’s personalisation. To do that we need to robustly identify who they are,” he said. Cian Weersinhghe, chief marketing officer at Secret Escapes, said Google and Facebook were working on this as they had to prove the value of mobile advertising. He said that knowing if marketing was driving incremental sales was his biggest challenge, adding: “I want to make sure we are allocating the right money to the right channels.”
FEEFOWORKSHOP
Travel firms should make sure they respond to both negative and positive reviews for maximum impact, delegates attending a Feefo workshop were told. Matt Eames, sales director at the
reviews platform, said customers were looking for trust more than anything else. He said reviews should be exploited to increase conversion.
Placing reviews on product pages and Google ‘gold stars’ generated through use of platforms like Feefo next to ‘book now’ buttons have been seen to encourage bookings. Eames said: “Google loves to see those conversations going backwards and forwards. If you’re going to do reviews you need to invest in people power to do them properly.”
TECHNOLOGY: NEXT GEN IS THE NEXT STEP
Sabre Travel Network demonstrated how next-generation smartphone and wearable technology may be used in the travel sector. The technology giant’s head of innovations, Joakim Everstin, demonstrated Google Glass to search for flights and get packing tips, and iBeacon indoor positioning technology that can direct customers to a hotel room. An iPhone app that allows the users to adapt their trip while in transit was also demonstrated.
Joakim Everstin
4 December 2014 —
travelweekly.co.uk • 71
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