I need to hand it to Google though. They have really revolutionised the world of search on the Internet. Their online glossaries and even the conversion software, Analytics have helped any layman become an expert in this very complicted field. I fell into all this thanks to a little bit of curiosity and lot of luck. Like many other companies, our company too had outsourced online marketing including the SEM (Search Engine Marketing) for years now.
But about two years ago, we realised that we needed to get it all inhouse. Fortunately, with all the softwares and tools that Google offers, it was possible to do so a lot faster. I was not an expert in computers but was always good in marketing and pretty comfortable around new softwares. And thats how I started. Having gone through all the google blogs and texts, I saw that we were not completely exploiting the potential of the Internet. Of course we had expert companies doing our online marketing but they were not from our field. What was but natural for us, wasn't so evident to them. So with all this homework done, I was ready to try it out for myself. I used the Google Analytics code to track our Hotel website and thus build a picture of our online customers. It gave me a lot of precious information, like what pages they visited most, what words did they type in to search for whatever they were looking for, etc. It also helped us to calculate a very accurate ROI (return on investment), which is not the case with the traditional (offline) means of marketing, like newspaper ads and billboards. Once into it, I couldn't really get off it and consecuently I could see the results in terms of revenue increase. The sale of rooms actually tripled in 1 year. What is nice about the whole thing though, is the fact that anyone can use this in their field of expertise. All you need is some patience to go through the easy 'step by step' manuals.
Here are few terms that we all marketers need to know now:
CPA: Cost per action. The effectiveness of many other forms of online advertising have their effectiveness measured on a cost per action basis. Many affiliate marketing programs and contextual ads are structured on a cost per action basis. An action may be anything from an ad click, to filling out a lead form, to buying a product.
CPC: Cost per click. Many search ads and contextually targeted ads are sold in auctions where the advertiser is charged a certain price per click.
CPM: Cost per thousand ad impressions. Many people use CPM as a measure of how profitable a website is or has the potential of becoming.
CTR: Clickthrough rate - the percentage of people who view click on an advertisement they viewed, which is a way to measure how relevant a traffic source or keyword is. Search ads typically have a higher clickthrough rate than traditional banner ads due to being highly relevant to implied searcher demand.
PPC: Pay Per Click is a pricing model which most search ads and many contextual ad programs are sold through. PPC ads only charge advertisers if a potential customer clicks on an ad.
ROI: Return on Investment is a measure of how much return you receive from each marketing dollar. While ROI is a somewhat sophisticated measurement, some search marketers prefer to account for their marketing using more sophisticate profit elasticity calculations.
SEM :Search engine marketing
SEO: Search engine optimization is the art and science of publishing information and marketing it in a manner that helps search engines understand your information is relevant to relevant search queries. SEO consists largely of keyword research, SEO copywriting, information architecture, link building, brand building, building mindshare, reputation management, and viral marketing.
SERP : Search Engine Results Page is the page on which the search engines show the results for a search query.
Spider : Search engine crawlers which search or "spider" the web for pages to include in the index. Many non-traditional search companies have different spiders which perform other applications. For example, TurnItInBot searches for plagiarism. Spiders should obey the robots.txt protocol.
TrustRank : Search relevancy algorithm which places additional weighting on links from trusted seed websites that are controlled by major corporations, educational institutions, or governmental institutions. (Source: seobook.com)
Finally, I would like to conclude that the marketing plans that are being concieved, have to be a balance of online and offline marketing, as the customers havea tendency of switching medias and that makes it a lot challenging to track and the calculate the ROI. For example: a customer might find you online by typing in the keywords and then finally not buy anything on your site, but might later call you over the phone.
The bottomline is if you dont figure in the first 2 pages of Google and the Yahoo, MSN (Live), you are as good as dead.... All the best.
Friday, 19 October 2007
Thursday, 18 October 2007
Get online or be dead! Part I
Never before has Internet played such a vital role in the Hospitality Industry. What I have experienced in the last few years has made me believe that there exists no logical model for forcasting the business development via the Internet.
I see myself as the perfect example who converted himself into someone I wouldn't have thought I would be. Let me explain:
For all these years, especially in Europe and Asia, we have been following a rather old business model in the Hospitality Industry. The way of managing a business, be it Hotels, restaurants or travel agencies, we didn't show a lot of innovation (at least not all of us). I was surprised to see even not so long ago, business owners still being hesitant about this whole e-marketing and e-business thing.
I remember this one business owner saying, I quote "I am not very sure of using my credit card online! If I don't trust the internet then how can the clients who come to my hotel do the same?" And so this chap actually didn't wish for his clients to pay for the services he provided via the internet! What he didn't realise is that he didn't have any choice anyway if he were to survive in this century!
Well, I met him a few months ago and you guessed it right, he finally allowed his clients to pay online. He also discovered that his annual revenue had doubled! That made him realise that he had actually lost so much of this potential business for all these years because of his 'Not trusting the new technology'.
For years now the Hospitality Industry has been using the traditional methods of marketing. As far as the Internet and their website was concerned, they trusted their web-masters to do the trick for them. They didn't realise that web-masters were meant to build websites and were not meant to be experts in marketing.
In the US however, they got this point real quick and good for them too as the online buyers there have been active since about 10 years ago. All this meant that the whole marketing plan in the business model had to be altered. This required a lot of thinking. Finally, the industry got the point and developed some specialised solutions accordingly. There are now loads of companies specialising in Online Hotel Marketing and offer customised solutions for Hotel Companies of all sizes.
In Europe, this took sometime and it was not very long ago that companies started importing this overseas model. Last february, I had been to the e-marketing fair in Paris which had something like 400 companies selling everything from Softwares to personalised marketing solutions, although there were not a lot of companies specialising in Hospitality or Tourism solutions. Never mind, this was anyway a big improvement. A few years back, this kind of a fair would have has something like 20 companies offering their services!
I see myself as the perfect example who converted himself into someone I wouldn't have thought I would be. Let me explain:
For all these years, especially in Europe and Asia, we have been following a rather old business model in the Hospitality Industry. The way of managing a business, be it Hotels, restaurants or travel agencies, we didn't show a lot of innovation (at least not all of us). I was surprised to see even not so long ago, business owners still being hesitant about this whole e-marketing and e-business thing.
I remember this one business owner saying, I quote "I am not very sure of using my credit card online! If I don't trust the internet then how can the clients who come to my hotel do the same?" And so this chap actually didn't wish for his clients to pay for the services he provided via the internet! What he didn't realise is that he didn't have any choice anyway if he were to survive in this century!
Well, I met him a few months ago and you guessed it right, he finally allowed his clients to pay online. He also discovered that his annual revenue had doubled! That made him realise that he had actually lost so much of this potential business for all these years because of his 'Not trusting the new technology'.
For years now the Hospitality Industry has been using the traditional methods of marketing. As far as the Internet and their website was concerned, they trusted their web-masters to do the trick for them. They didn't realise that web-masters were meant to build websites and were not meant to be experts in marketing.
In the US however, they got this point real quick and good for them too as the online buyers there have been active since about 10 years ago. All this meant that the whole marketing plan in the business model had to be altered. This required a lot of thinking. Finally, the industry got the point and developed some specialised solutions accordingly. There are now loads of companies specialising in Online Hotel Marketing and offer customised solutions for Hotel Companies of all sizes.
In Europe, this took sometime and it was not very long ago that companies started importing this overseas model. Last february, I had been to the e-marketing fair in Paris which had something like 400 companies selling everything from Softwares to personalised marketing solutions, although there were not a lot of companies specialising in Hospitality or Tourism solutions. Never mind, this was anyway a big improvement. A few years back, this kind of a fair would have has something like 20 companies offering their services!
This brings me to what I have been doing all this time. Well, I started off in this industry with my usual education with an MBA in Hospitality from Vatel. I then continued my career in the Front office hoping to be a General Manager one day. However over the years I realised that the clients who came to the Hotel had all been on the internet and had booked a room at least once in their lives. It was that very time that I said to myself that I need to jump into this and adapt myself if I ever hope to be a successful manager.
SEM, SEO, PPC, CPC !!! Ever heard of these abbreviations before? Well, they now need to be a part of any marketers vocabulary. You cannot afford to not know them. They are like the very basic 4Ps of marketing that we all learnt back in school. What is still sad is that we unfortunately do not have a very academic application to this online marketing subject.
Well, hopefully we will have some kind of a programme soon in place for us non-IT people so that they will not have to work the hard way like the way I did. More later.... Thanks for reading...
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