After I had finished the first draft of this blog, I went back and counted how many times I used the word effective. It added up to too many, and I had to go back and do some wordsmithing. However, the truth is that is what this post is about. Being effective -not wasting marketing energy and money. Producing clients, sales, and product awareness in a super-saturated travel and hospitality tech marketplace and getting the most out of every dollar. Are you with me?
1) Campaign Management That Delivers Leads
You have, no doubt, already considered many different online campaigns, but before you add any of them to your marketing plan, ask yourself if they deliver leads. Who are your prospects? Are the campaigns truly designed to reach them? Moreover, if the campaign does reach them, what are the chances the campaign will entice them to purchase? What is the call to action? Campaigns that don’t have this at their heart are a waste of valuable dollars for tech companies, especially those in the start-up phase.
2) Content Strategy with Downloadable Assets
Part and parcel to the above type of campaign management is content strategy. One of the most effective ways to generate leads is to deliver content that your target audience wants and needs. This is different from self-promotion. Deliver ideas. Takeaways. Valuable strategies or thought pieces that are relevant to the industry but not solely focused on your product. One of the most effective ways to do this is offering a branded downloadable asset, whether that is a white paper or an e-book.
3) Highly Targeted SEM
It is easy to think more clicks is better, but when you are paying for everyone, you better be certain you are reaching someone who could buy. Be specific about where you are spending your SEM dollars. Hospitality and travel do not always overlap. If you are in travel, market only to travel. If you are in the hospitality, market only to hospitality. In other words, don’t cast a wide net. Then fine-tune your message and, ideally, include an offer.
4) Social Media: There’s doing it, and then there’s doing it well
Social media strategy is ubiquitous these days, but there are approaches that work and approaches that don’t. Posting photos of the office breakfast doesn’t qualify as conveying company culture (I’m pretty sure all that company culture stuff was way overrated anyway). So fine tune your message. Less is more. Find out when you are users are active and post wisely using searchable hashtags. Have a call to action, and similar to the content strategy ensure that you are providing value. This could mean reposting articles of interest to your audience, or creating a social media series with tips or strategies taken from a whitepaper or e-book. Make all your content work for you.
5) Targeted E-Mail Campaigns
The old mass e-blasts are a thing of the past. Archaic in virtual terms. Why? Because how do you craft a message that works for 30,000 people? It is impossible. There’s still a place for e-blast campaigns, but to be a truly effective tool, fine tune your distribution to, say, 1000 – 2000 recipients. Then tailor your message to those recipients. Be specific. Be personal. Moreover, always have an offer (psst, a price reduction or a pilot period is about as effective as it gets).
There’s that word again. I challenge all travel and hospitality tech marketing plans for 2015 to include the word effective in the title as a constant reminder of what needs to happen at the end of the day.
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