R2: Responsible for Results

The current economy will propel our industry into high performance marketing – more productive, less expensive and based to a great extent on accountability.  The discipline of working our leads into an organized, segmented database needs to come way up on our marketing priorities, just as evaluating them for results becomes second nature.

The result is a marketing model that gets wider at the bottom, instead of narrower.

What it used to be like..

In the era of mass media we made up for the loss of personal attention to the customer with sheer numbers.  For 60 years radio, and then television, moved customers faster than marketers had ever seen before. 

Marketing was shaped like a funnel: millions of impressions at the top, and thousands of conversions at the bottom.  The process was: awareness – interest – conversion.

What happened?

Media then fragmented.  Cable television made it possible to reach more specific audiences than ever before.  Special interest magazines proliferated.  Then came interactive.  Now marketers can compose an audience that is more specific than conventional media could ever deliver alone.

And people changed.  Self-improvement and the desire to fit-in fueled marketing success in the mass-media days.  Now, self-fulfillment has replaced self-improvement and standing out is preferred to fitting in.

People want their interests confirmed, not directed.

How do we market now?

Let us put the marketer back in the driver’s seat by changing our process from Awareness – Interest – Conversion to a new one:  Awareness – ENGAGEMENT – Conversion.

Technology has given us a way to activate leads and not just collect them.  Instead of paying for impressions at the top of the funnel, we should take a more active part in converting and expanding those leads.  Let’s think in terms of an hourglass instead.

Awareness – Engagement – Conversion

By engaging those impressions at the top in a managed dialog and sending them considerate e-mail messages based on their own interests, we are able to convert much higher numbers of them into customers.  Results of Dialog Management campaigns in tourism confirm this... even in the current market.

Expansion – Referral – Recommendation

Once a lead becomes a visitor, the same process can expand their business to include more attractions, activities and room-nights.  The key is considerate messages based on the interests they showed originally.

By continuing the managed dialog, we can help generate referral and recommendations among the visitors’ friends and family, ultimately creating brand ambassadors.  This may be the area in which social media really comes into its own for destination marketing.

The Starting Point

It all begins with accountability: capture those e-mail addresses; measure your conversion rate; observe their responses so you can segment your database by interest.  You are on your way to having a managed dialog with your visitors and you’re riding the wave of a marketing revolution.