Let’s get personal

Customisation was a key theme at this year’s ABTA Convention in Abu Dhabi. Andrew Burgess, founder and CEO of Equimedia, explains why it’s time for your business to get personal.

"Travel companies have been curating and tailoring holiday packages to specific customer needs for some time, so this is an area where the industry could truly shine. It’s also an area where smaller brands could steal a march on their larger rivals by effectively using the understanding they have of their loyal customer base.

Customisation and personalisation ran through many of the discussions at the ABTA Convention and was particularly key to a presentation by Thimon de Jong, director of WHETSON/Strategic Foresight. He focused on the incoming ‘You Know Me Society’, where businesses are increasingly under pressure to show customers just how well they understand and respond to their needs. This is something already in play in the industry, following Expedia’s hyper-relevant ‘Travel yourself Interesting’ campaign earlier this year, which saw the brand target affluent audiences with higher cost destinations. Working with Sky to insert ads during top rated shows on its Sports, Drama and Movies channels, typically consumed by higher net worth customers, meant Expedia could ensure the right types of households saw the ads and could gather relevant prospective customer details through a competition on the Sky website.

To address customer’s demands for increased personalisation, a good place to start is through the brand’s online presence and marketing. Google AdWords, programmatic ad targeting software, paid social media campaign targeting, and YouTube ad targeting will allow holiday advertisers to deliver the right messages to each potential customer audience segment, and their existing customers, at the right time, and through the right platforms for each audience segment.

There are a number of digital tools currently available to demonstrate to customers that ‘You Know Me’. AdWords allows the delivery of tailored messages through search term targeting, and existing customer or previous site visitor re-targeting technologies such as Customer Match (also available in Facebook) and use of RLSA (Retargeting Lists for Search Ads). Video targeting through various platforms and ad targeting in You Tube to show the right sort of product to the right audiences means even the smallest of operators can pinpoint their potential customers with a great degree of accuracy. There is even technology which can link online browsing and search activity with a digital ‘call me back’ button, sent from the user’s phone to an advertiser to connect the two immediately in case a would-be traveller has questions.

As this trend and demand from customers to be recognised as the source of valued custom becomes more embedded, it becomes even more crucial that messages are made as relevant as possible based on what data is already held on that person. It’s even possible for companies to identify people’s moods based on their openly-shared information and tailor communications accordingly, or trigger ads to show if it is raining or the temperature falls below a certain level. This means if someone is clearly feeling a little down, or stressed, or it’s raining outside, they will receive inspiring images of white sand beaches or crystal clear waters.

The issue of relevance is not something that businesses can ignore. With smartphones now developing personal assistant technology still further, and even common search engines now delivering tailored results to users whether or not they are officially ‘logged in’ as a recognised user, every online interaction is now tailored and filtered accordingly. As this technology is refined, it will become just as necessary for brands to ‘market’ to algorithms and machines conducting this filtering, as it will be to recognise and engage the actual person you’re trying to reach.

Digital PAs can and will filter and sift the information for their users just as physical ones do for a company boss. The businesses who are savvy to these filtering techniques, while also getting as close as possible to understanding individual customer needs, will be the ones which make it through the digital relevance barriers-to-sale. So the pressure to become personal stems not only from a desire to demonstrate you know your customers, it will also become a necessary part of the digital marketing process in the very near future.

Of course, much of this activity requires two things – a commitment to wanting to connect, and getting a handle on customer data. Specialist digital agencies can help with this process, but it has to start with a business getting to grips with its customer base and profiling who they are so similar people can be identified. Look at holiday buying trends to understand who is likely to be buying what, and when. Look at what people aren’t buying from your business, which they might be interested in, but haven’t thought of. The door is open, the technology is there, and the channels are in place. Now you just need to take the next step."