ANTOR – Harnessing the Powers of Research

The Association of National Tourist Offices Representatives held the latest in ANTOR’s afternoon seminar series yesterday at the Four Seasons Hotel in Sydney, with the goal of the seminar to explore how ANTOR members could gain a competitive edge over competitors, by better utilising information that is readily available, and thus ensuring that their marketing strategy is a good fit for the current marketplace.

Topics included:

** the use of online data to really find out all about your market sector and your competitors;

** using your online presence to its maximum advantage to receive the same coverage as the major players;

** using qualitative research to build a strong brand, create more effective marketing strategies and develop better advertising campaigns; and

** improving your distribution by researching and better understanding your travel agent

With a panel of four well established companies [Pictured above from left David Sullivan, Fred Schebesta, Hugo Stokes and David Carroll] each providing insights on a number of research tools and how they could be used for maximum advantage, the seminar was very well attended and ANTOR members not only learnt some interesting facts concerning travel and tourism, but also most would likely have left with a greater knowledge of events, behaviours, theories and laws – and planning how to apply this to their own organisation’s marketing strategies!

Monica Nerney, the Manager Australia & New Zealand for Tourism Ireland, introduced the panel members and kept proceedings in order, which The Mole particularly liked, with four presentations, a question and answer session and an informal networking session.  The relatively short mid-week, mid-afternoon session, followed by an optional networking session gives the best chance for maximum attendance, makes presenters cut (mostly!) to the main points, and is not so long that people fret about being out of the office!

David Sullivan, the Account Director at Hitwise gave the opening presentation, with Hitwise providing an online competitive intelligence service which gives daily insights on how 25m people interact with over 800,000 websites.  David stressed the importance of knowing the marketplace and the companies in that marketplace, then presented a ‘State of the Travel Market’, with some interesting and entertaining results including:

** More people in the UK visit travel websites than in any other country;

** People in Hong Kong make the least number of visits to travel websites;

** www.travelchinaguide.com is currently the most visited site, followed by www.visitbritain.com followed by…. www.australia.com; and

** More visits are made to the Vatican site than to the Australia site!

In the Australian market, the most visited sites are destination accommodation followed by travel and transport with Wotif and TotalTravel front-runners at the moment and in terms of travel agencies, most people visiting Flight Centre and Webjet, with 70% of visitors to airline sites going to Qantas, Jetstar or Virgin Blue.

People tend to use generic placenames in searches related to travel and tourism and “Australia” is number one, but “Tourism Australia” is 24th on the list.

The destination most favoured after a travel/tourism search is not a tourism site at all but Wikipedia!

Demand is growing for more ‘local searches’ and for news article searches and searching on “Map of Australia” does not bring up a tourism site!!

David explored some of the implications in all this information (including a case study) for developing marketing strategies in a number of areas, including, Benchmarking, Performance, Search Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Online Advertising, Content development and Lead Generation.

Hitwise’s partnership with Mosaic now enables them to identify the best sites for particular audiences and in terms of sites that have the best ‘overlapping audiences’ with no surprises that the audience for golfing sites heavily overlaps with the audience for Viagra sites…..!

Fred Schebesta from Freestyle Media, also the ADMA Australian and NSW Young Direct Marketeer of the year 2006, put forward a very compelling case for really investing time and effort into your website for big dividends, with Fred, in effect, educating many people (including The mole) on just how complex it can be to develop a company website, and also how it should be used effectively as a core part of any marketing strategy.

One of his key points was that website traffic should be converted into database records, i.e. the goal of the site should be to capture email addresses rather than simply drive traffic to merchandising and conversion, with the database then leveraged for later campaigns.

The site should also be well maintained, updated regularly and given a tool that will encourage people to make return visits!

Hugo Stokes, the Director of Stokes Research & Planning gave everyone an inside view on Brands and how they exist in the minds of customers, with Hugo exploring how qualitative analysis is key to both building the right brand and growing your business and as the world becomes more homogenised, the greater need to differentiate destinations, leading to the development of Destinations being marketed (and managed) as brands.

Though intangible, destinations are now being differentiated using images, ascribing a ‘personality’ to the destination, and building a perception of the destination, with this collection of images, ideas, meanings and associations ultimately determining a customer’s experience so it is important to build the right brand through qualitative analysis.

Most importantly, the brand must motivate the customer into action!

David Carroll from Cicada Communications then presented how to better understand the travel agent, including their perceptions of destinations (and their products & services) and thus improve distribution, David also detailing the benefits of using targeted surveys and speaking with front-line staff.

Two points are particularly relevant, namely,eEven with high profile destinations, travel agents influence people regarding those destinations – particularly regarding their length of stay and National Tourist Offices gather a significant amount of anecdotal information from travel agents (feedback is not always unbiased!)

So when building a strategy, introducing a destination brand, don’t forget the need to understand your travel agent for the benefit of all.

The seminar finished bang on time, which meant refreshments all round…  The feedback to The Mole was that the seminar had been very useful and very worthwhile attending, which should ensure their continuing success.

Well done ANTOR!

ANTOR Seminar Report by The Mole