This phenomenon has been coined “The Me Me World” by trend watching professionals, Foresight Factory. Data not only helps with personalising communications, but also fine-tunes products to be aligned with the consumers’ needs, allowing organisations to target specific audiences over time.
Today we touch on the top three things that can be learnt through quantifying engagement, taking the travel and hospitality sector as an example. To do this, we will look through the lens of the LEWIS Marketing Engagement Tracker (MET) which measures various elements of an organisation’s digital estate in order to garner actionable insights.
When you think of travel and hospitality, we often envision scenic destinations, the comfort of a home away from home, and the sense of adventure being in an unfamiliar place. What helps define this emotion is the tonality used and experience delivered by the organisation within its digital estate.
Tonality is not only defined by content (though that plays a big role) but also the structure of the content that dictates user experience. When optimising user experience, brands must focus on making maneuverability very intuitive from the homepage – this includes having easy access to contact or booking pages. Additionally, when developing page sections, avoid technical language or jargon – be concise. User experience is very important because it affects how long users stay on your site, how many of them explore further than the home page, and of course the conversion of viewing a site to making a booking or reservation.
When we first explored quantifying the engagement of the 300 largest global brands using our MET methodology, we notice the vast majority of brands often use social media as a megaphone rather than a way to engage with a target audience. For travel and hospitality brands, it is especially important that a holistic social media strategy, focusing on higher engagement, is adopted. In addition to maintaining an active calendar of posts, brands in this sector will realise that reputation and trust can be built through social media. Addressing consumers’ queries, needs and concerns in a public forum can help improve brands’ reputations because it shows how a brand is willing to be transparent and place priority on the customer.
Finally, we look more into an element which impacts SEO – the implementation of backlinks and the building of a community within your web space. Backlinks and community building are the concept of having many inbound and outbound links to and from a site, be it from partner sites, or from news publications. This is a very important practice because it a) brings in more traffic from inbound links, and b) is one of the metrics within SEO that helps the algorithm determine where you should be placed in a search.
Again, in today’s marketing context it is extremely important to make use of all the elements of data that can be picked up when measuring engagement. This will help brands improve on what they have and evolve in this consumer-centric world. If you are interested in the travel and hospitality industry or the concept of the MET as a whole, please feel free to check out the full report here.
