Travel with Us E-Marketing Strategy - Case Study Example

Visit our website at http://travelwithusota.wix.com/we-take-you-there

COMPANY OVERVIEW

“TRAVEL WITH US” is a small family run travel agency based in Huddersfield. We are a small organization whose main business revolves around the provision of package holidays and UK weekend breaks. Over the last few years we as “TRAVEL WITH US” have had various challenges in the highly competitive market. As a result, we have seen it necessary to diversify our market and product range. In order to accomplish this renewed focus, we see it necessary to have a strong online presence. This will enable us to engage well with our current and past customers, and hopefully, attract prospective ones. We thus envisage that our online presence should be able to help us satisfy customer demands with the help of email marketing, social media, and other e-marketing tools.

In the current report, our new actionable e-marketing plans are presented. We endeavor to develop an e-marketing plan that will enable us to compete efficiently within the online environment. Therefore, the core aim of this report is the creation of an online presence that allows us “We take you there Travel” to:

• Increase our brand awareness
• Cultivate a sustainable online product range across manifold channels.

INDUSTRY OVERVIEW

When it comes to the travel industry, there is a great potential for e-commerce. The travel industry is the world’s robust e-commerce markets. The market is exploiting available cost-saving conveniences between travel and the online marketing. The significance of designing websites that reflect customer need is a key factor which stimulates online travel sales (Strauss, 2008).

The online travel industry is marred by fierce competition. Owing to this as well as contemporary travel paradigms and product characterization, e-commerce businesses strive to have low prices so as to attract customers and gain an increased market share (Cohan, 2000). Consequently, services of online travel agencies (OTA) are highly similar but commoditized. The current TRAVEL WITH US e-marketing strategies and actions are aimed at creating value through differentiation more than pricing. As an OTA, it is possible for us to provide a higher level of services thus creating better customer loyalty and brand positioning which will be able to differentiate us from our competitors.

BACKGROUND

Travel as an activity dates far back in time, having led to the generation of billions of revenues globally. With the discovery of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the 20th century, tourism has greatly shifted to online channels. Many suppliers and intermediaries are now struggling with vicious competition so as to sell their services with the help of the e-commerce network. As a result of the OTA product characteristics, particularly its intangibility, their sales rely highly on information and personal touch (Fu et al., 2010). For that reason, online travel agencies rely highly on price for competition.

Although the traditional travel agencies usually sell holiday packages, and offer travel consultations, providing fineness with a personal touch and serve clients not wanting to bore themselves too much with booking processes, OTA serve clients who are more independent, determined as well as price and time sensitive (Gee, 1990). The landscape of online travel industry competition is far much intense primarily because of easy entry into the market as compared to traditional agencies. The ease of international expansion also aggravates the situation. Additionally, suppliers are able to start sell straight with consumers. Market players such as Google search engines have made discovery of OTA easier. This is the reason why OTA rely so much on prices when facing their competitors. Every day, prices of online travel products get lower, a factor that continues to orientate their demand. The outcome of this price wars drives the high commoditization of various services by OTAs. Most OTAs provide alike services. However customization on their websites and better prices attract consumers.

Bearing in mind the above price-based competition TRAVEL WITH US will be able to differentiate its self from competitors by executing a number of e-marketing plans aimed at making it have a competitive advantage. The e-marketing plans are intended to devise ways that we as “We take you there Travel” can differentiate ourselves from competitors by adding value to our value chain, and not rely entirely on reducing costs since most of our competitors are doing that already. We understand that the key role of any travel agency has changed from merely knowledgeable provision to assisting customers in booking entire travel packages (Chiou et al., 2011). This the reason why we envisage providing a broad spectrum of products and services to our customers. The figure below is a structure that shows some of the products offered by an OTA and some of the client segments.

Figure 1: Figure 1: Travel Industry Structure

“TRAVEL WITH US” ONLINE PRESENCE

4.1 Current Threats

There has been a widespread unfavorable public perception towards conventional travel agencies like ours. We aim to change this. After interviewing a number of customers on what they thought of our business, considerable negative perceptions on our traditional travel agency were observed. Currently, the young generation is an ardent user of the internet (Krumova, 2011). Failing to have an online presence means what we are losing a massive number of customers. Even when a quality traditional travel agency like us provide value for money, there has been a concern that a multitude of consumers were drifting towards the internet in booking travels, thinking that it is more efficient and less expensive.

TRAVEL WITH US has discovered that the negative public perceptions are disheartening promising young couples, school-leavers, and other internet users from using our agency to book holidays. We aim to address that issue by having an online presence.

4.2 Available Opportunities

According to Krumova (2011), the emergence of e-commerce has been a great opportunity and less of a challenge as initially perceived in the tourism industry. Our touristic products and services which have virtual characteristics are going to benefit a lot from the new online channel. Actually, the internet is better suited for the sale of intangible products and services rather than the tangible ones. The current forecast indicates that there is still going to be a continuous growth of online channels for the tourism sector in many years to come.

Many expert have explained the success of e-marketing as well as the transparency given to customers who can now be able to search easily for best value of their travel necessities (Kalyanam & McIntyre, 2002). It is possible to have consumer generated date in real-time through the comment buttons of a website. E-marketing offers a high level of personalization and customer retention and saves a lot of operating costs when compared to the traditional channels. A large number of advertising tools that comes with e-marketing eliminates both distance and time barriers and the ability to economically store massive amounts of data online makes e-commerce highly convenient for our company.

E-MARKETING PLAN

When it comes to traffic generation, performance marketing, SEO, email marketing, network-based marketing, affiliate marketing as well as market segmentation are critical. Another related concept is conversion where pricing, technology, and products features are critical so as to attract online customers (Strauss, 2008). Retaining follows in the third where trust branding becomes important. This is the reason why customer support is necessary when building a company website. The proposed e-marketing plan for our company will be based on this pillars.

According to Strauss (2008), the pillars mentioned above are synergistically connected to each other and signify the universal dimensions of:

• Technology - Technological enhancements meant to add value to “TRAVEL WITH US” value chain.
• Customization – Personalization of our customer-specific needs as well as segmentation targeting.
• Network - Business-to-Business relations that “TRAVEL WITH US” will have with other key industry players and stakeholders.

The strategies and actions mentioned are joined to the pillar purposes; therefore, they can be enrolled to more than one pillar. This modeling leads to the creation of the model shown below.

Figure 2: Figure 2: An Online Travel Agency E-marketing Model

With the intention of pulling customers to the TRAVEL WITH US website, advertising e-marketing and publicity strategies are necessary.

5.1 Performance Marketing

Performance marketing involves actions which result in marketing the gains proportionally our current investments. Therefore, the amount of investment in our performance marketing is likely to be close to gains of a particular strategy.

5.1.1 Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Currently, there are a significant number of web navigators which are used to access websites indirectly through access of links shown by search engines after keying in specific words in that search engine (Ramos & Cota, 2009). This is highly vital for e-commerce companies since it control their visibility in various search engines results. Search engine marketing (SEM) makes this possible. Normally, creating successful SEM in various search engines is a bit complicated, due to the fact that is hinged on established keywords which trigger addition of phrases different from the ones typed and also due to the fact that it works based on the bids of every each keyword (Brown, 2007). TRAVEL WITH US need to maintain a keywords portfolio which makes the most the company profits every keyword. This is quite challenging to us, as we need to manage smartly our search engine campaigns so as to have positive conversion and a failure to do that might make most customers go away upon visiting our website, thus leading to losses. A suitable partner will be Google AdWords. With this search engine ad, we will only pay when someone clicks on our so as to visit our website or calls us. When building the proposed SEM campaign, we will be:

• Creating trustable and clever ads that will not suggest spam to visitors.
• Utilizing real-time models in analyzing competition so as to point any stronger campaigns from identify competitors.
• Using customer knowledge management systems in understanding paths followed by potential customers before deciding to come onboard.
• Constructing software aimed at better placing the ads, since they reduce human efforts and save costs. This is why software building has inordinate potential in most SEM campaigns.

5.1.2. Meta Search Marketing

With increasing reputation for the online travel industry, meta search engines are necessary for TRAVEL WITH US. Travel meta sites are normally top-of-mind. Even when some other OTA perceive it as a threat and go alone, this is very unwise. The meta searchers are presently predominant players in our value chain, presenting valuable routes to increasing our online accessibility (Brown, 2007). We shall, therefore, implement meta searches. TRAVEL WITH US will work with meta searchers such as WebCrawler to increase our online discoverability. Generally, customers sort OTA by lowest prices flaring price wars and extreme competition. To cater for this concern, TRAVEL WITH US:

• Will keep a competitive pricing.
• Will build high brand recognition and awareness.
• Will have features which enhance overall quality service and product delivery.
• Will detect competitor price muddying methods.
• Will negotiate advantageous contracts focused on commissions for each purchase, able to protect us in the event of loss facing our competitors.
• Will pressure meta searcher partners to also put competitor rates made by customers in the meta data websites.

Besides enriching website content, service quality is also outstanding in customer loyalty for any OTA. Any bad experience during customer purchase will have adverse effects on our company. This is the reason is why having a user-generated content in a meta-searcher website will benefit TRAVEL WITH US. The best way to upsurge visibility is by having a special agreement with widely used internet search tools such as Google.

5.1.3 Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

An additional way to enhance the visibility of TRAVEL WITH US website is by search engine optimization (SEO). While SEM achieves that by sponsored ads, SEO can spontaneously yield higher positions in the search result (Killoran, 2013). We will however avoid SEO tools that mislead target needs with the aim of achieving a desirable positioning. Our website optimization shall include decisions which focus on what is best our visitors. Therefore, our SEO will consider two main objectives:

• Regard our customer interests by enriching our website for purposes of benefiting customer experience and competitive services.
• Incorporate our modifications with apt optimization strategies which shall boost our ranking in search engines results.

5.1.4 Email Marketing

Email Marketing remains a popular tool for advertising even now. This powerful private marketing tool can attract visitors to our website. We shall include promotional materials which customized for customer needs. 5.1.4.1. Mailing List Creation

A major challenge with email marketing is the need to have a previous interaction a customer so as to have the email contact for mailing a customer (Jenkins, 2009). Due to this, we as TRAVEL WITH US shall hitch a mandatory registration form in our website for access to popular data about our company and our services. We are therefore able to filter visitors and know which once have strong will of purchase from those that are just browsing. However, it is understood that some potential customers may skip our website when they realize that registration is a must. This is the reason why we shall make some pages accessible within registration, especially the homepage.

5.1.4.2 Customized Email Marketing

With a large mailing list, it does not mean that our email marketing strategy is successful. It is also true that most promotional emails currently fall into the spam folders of an email account. Customization is a good way of attracting customers to our website. It is, therefore, necessary to focus on customer intelligence in this case. This makes it easier for us to adapt our offers to specific customer needs or group customer needs. Having a thorough customer profiling is likely to improve appeal on our service quality. We will also be able to allow customer which information they would like to receive during registration.

5.1.5 Social Media Marketing

Considering the large number of users using various social media networks and increasing platforms, it is mandatory to have our presence felt. Social media provide a vital source for customer intelligence assembly and also offers a unique opportunity for direct contact with customers (Tuten & Solomon, 2013). Nonetheless, mere presence in social media cannot add value to our operations. We can make it more useful by using it to:

• Create brand awareness - We shall use it to ignite our branding strategies since they connect us with customer networks.
• To promote special offers and promotions as well as viral marketing campaigns.
• To achieve market segmentation – This will help us to succeed in pursuing localized responsive approaches when internationalizing our services and adapting social media network the national language of a focus market.
• To customize our services – Information gathered from customer feedbacks through social media interaction facilitate customizations so as to meet specific customer needs.
• To networking with partners - Social media shall allow us to launch joint campaigns with partners and exchange customer profiles or make bidirectional referrals.

METRICS FOR OUR E-MARKETING PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT

Nowadays, key performance indicators (KPIs) are mandatory for e-commerce, if success is to be achieved (Parmenter, 2007). Monitoring KPIs will help TRAVEL WITH US to identify the progress of our e-marketing goals. The quantifiable measurement of KPIs with gauge our performance in relation to the set goals. For instance, we aim to increase the site traffic of our website by 50 % in the coming. Consequently, the KPI for this goal will be the number of unique visitors to our site and the traffic sources that send us more visitors. KPIs should be measurements which are able to demonstrate accurately and concisely demonstrate whether we are in the progress of achieving our goals or not.

6.1 Our Goals

Choosing a KPI begins by plainly stating our goals and understanding various sectors that affect the said goals. With our e-marketing plan, we have three goals in mind:

• Growing our site traffic by 20 percent in coming year.
• Increasing conversion rates by 3% in the coming year.

6.2 Our KPIs

The most suitable KPIs for the current e-marketing plan include:

• Unique and returning visitors
• Site traffic
• Text subscribers
• Page views per visits
• Traffic sources
• Quality and number of product reviews
• Newsletter subscriptions
• Pay-per-click traffic volume
• Facebook and Twitter fans

CONCLUSION

The current report presents our proposed actionable e-marketing plans which we believe shall enable us to compete efficiently within the current online environment. Having an efficient strategy is critical to the success of any company, more so a travel agency like ours. When it comes to online tools like meta search engines, pricing is of great importance and differentiates various competitors thus affecting customer decision. Networking is also important and social media platform provide an opportunity for TRAVEL WITH US to advance its strategy. With SEO, our company will be able to improve its online visibility to potential customers. Other tools such as search engine marketing and email marketing should also be implemented so as to enable us achieve an increased competitive advantage.

Negotiating favorable key performance indicators is also essential for the success of our company. This is the reason why we have devised a number of KPIs for e-marketing strategy which should be able to gauge our performance in the coming year and beyond. Checking competitor prices for all the key routes on meta search engines should be a routine task at TRAVEL WITH US, even with the costs that come with it. It is therefore suggested that TRAVEL WITH US create an automated system which should check competition the KPIs thus benefit our value chain.