The Travel Marketer's Guide to Social Media and Social Networks - (Page 4) EXECUTIVE SUMMARY [ No longer allowing organizations to pay lip service to a “focus on the customer,” the consumer has assumed the driver seat in brand identity, and marketers who do not acknowledge this will do so at their peril. ] being a point of contact. Imagine a constellation of stars representing a group of people in a network, each pattern unique to one consumer but interconnecting to each other through the common friend, colleague or acquaintance. One consumer could feasibly be active in LinkedIn, SecondLife, Flickr, Yahoo! Groups, Classmates.com, and TripAdvisor. This isn't about learning how to manage in MySpace or Facebook or about which one will finally reign supreme in cyberspace. It is about the emerging concept of "consumer constellations" and how consumers will belong to a collection of networks. The Internet is, in fact, becoming one big social network. Learning the topography of this complex set of networks is the first step for marketers to develop a strategy of customer engagement. A NEW PURCHASE FUNNEL Following on this theme, the next step required is to understand the purchase process undertaken by travelers. Gone are the days when a travel marketer focused primarily on two points along the purchase continuum: (1) awareness campaigns to promote brand name recognition and (2) tactical campaigns to capture attention at the time of booking with promotion of 800 numbers or URLs. The newly evolved purchase funnel, reflecting consumer online behavior, identifies multiple points of contact and the new online technologies create a variety of opportunities for travel marketers to interact with all consumers at every point along the way, not just loyalty club members. Interaction with the consumer doesn't end when the booking is made. It continues during the travel experience and in the post-travel dialogue, which then feeds into the next purchase to influence the decisions of family, friends and colleagues for their next trip. There are online tools to address every point in the process and most of them are found in the social media arsenal. Yes, consumer reviews are crucial, but they are merely one point of contact and often serve only as Brill's Travel Planning Funnel Source: Dale A. Brill, Chief Marketing Officer, VISIT FLORIDA 4 Published by HSMAI Foundation and TIA
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