Happy Holidays to All

Lets make 2017 a fantastic year for all!  Pray for world peace.  Love your family and friends.  Make America great again.

Shame on Me

Frequent relevant blog posts are important for any business and I have been negligent.  For all my friends and business associates, I apologize.

Travel Marketing Dynamics has gone through a major re-organization over recent months and our resources, development and focus has evolved more toward mobile marketing.  This does not dilute our total online marketing service, it is simply an integration of the newest mobile marketing techniques with the more traditional.

Our new text marketing platform is easy and convenient for our users, plus we are the only text message service offering options for one-way push marketing or two-way to engage with guests/customers.  Plus, we will take on a collaborative approach with our users and manage the marketing process for them with monthly reports on our progress.

I wish everyone a wonderful holiday season and I hope we have an opportunity to discuss your business and how TMD can help in 2017.

Sincere Regards!!

4R Marketing

As we are all aware marketing methods and practices are evolving rapidly.  We have moved from mass marketing and progressively away from much of the past print marketing methods.

Today, marketing is about analysis, targeting, engaging and personalization when setting our marketing goals and objectives.  The combination of these practices for Internet and mobile marketing are the 4R approach to effective marketing.  These four Rs are as follows:

Research
Apply ongoing research relevant to your competition's marketing methods and your customer's expectations and trends.

Response
Prompt your customers shoppers to respond to you in an informal manner through spontaneous mobile and online social platforms.  Respond quickly and in an informal manner to customer reviews, questions and comments.

Relations
Build relationships with your customers to get them to download and retain your mobile apps, provide their email addresses for ongoing push messaging and email promotions.  Ask them to connect with your business through public social networks.

Reputation
Your business reputation is critical!  How customers respond and provide public reviews about your business can make or break you.  It is important to monitor for customer reviews and respond quickly where possible or if there is doubt about the source of the review take immediate action.  Reach out to the reviewer or source via email or phone where possible.

Keep your Rs in perspective to grow the most important R for your business ... Revenue!

Marketing Logic

Is there enough hype for everyone about the new trends in marketing? 

Is content king or is it just another way of explaining how to create and manage written content, nothing new here!  Do you think anybody ever called Ernest Hemingway a ‘content creator’?  If they did, I bet he would punch ‘em in the nose.” – Greg Satell

Are there too many cooks in the kitchen and not enough Chefs?  Granted there are new and diverse marketing methods available for travel and hospitality businesses.  Businesses still need their website, but it is only as good as its content, including picture, video and images.  They also need to manage search optimization by building links, managing tags and frequent content updates. 

As the functionality on mobile devices and the rapid growth the number of users, how you integrate mobile into your marketing is critical.  As you maintain the more traditional online marketing initiative, your adoption of mobile marketing is critical.  Mobile offers amazing marketing capabilities such as Location Based Apps, Proximity Marketing, Location Triggers (wifi, beacon and GPS) enable customer analytics and mobile is mostly about the ability to engage a prospect or customer in a non-intrusive manner.

So where do you put your marketing dollars in the coming year?  The percentages will vary somewhat for different segments of the travel and hospitality businesses, but clearly it is becoming easier to understand your customers, match their needs and expectations and build a valuable relationship.

The basic budget allocations are (1) Invest in website, search and social for the Pre-Booking (2) mobile for In-Hotel Guest relations (3) Email and social for Post Departure.  We do offer a FREE marketing analysis to help determine where you can improve your results

Mobile Marketing for Travel

I can only assume you have heard all the chatter about mobile marketing for travel companies; airlines, airports, hotels, car rental and destinations.  Plus, the chatter about how slow the travel industry has been to implement mobile services for travelers.  Yes, travel companies have been slow, but that is not a bad thing.  Regarding how a traveler can benefit from mobile apps and messages is up to the individual traveler.

Mobile marketing is a combination of multiple technologies and how it applies to travelers has to be a personalized connection between the suppliers and the travelers.  It may be iBeacons for a specific location like an airport or a destination like Bourbon Street or it is about messaging individuals in specific hotel rooms or reaching an individual via a code in their digital airline ticket.  Effective mobile marketing has to fit the business and the needs or expectations of their customers.

There is a serious benefit to travelers but the service provider, whether it is a car rental, airline or a hotel has to provide the right service at the right time via the most convenient platform and device.

TMDynamics is currently working with diverse non-competitive service providers that provide the best customer solutions for the right businesses at the right time.  Give us a call!

Hotel Marketing with Local Products & Services

Today's hotel guests expect more than a clean bed and a free breakfast.  Offering a taste of the local culture and flavors will help build a productive and profitable relationship with your guest and the local business.

Here is an example of how to elevate your guest experiences.  Just reach out to local businesses to grow your business.....   LINK

Online Digital Marketing Strengths & Weaknesses

I think we all get it by now that online marketing is important to your business.  The majority of consumers are accessed through a combination of online and mobile marketing methods and the results are better customer relation, new prospects and more sales.

The strengths offered by online and mobile marketing are the ability to target by market and individual demographics, create push and pull consumer and customer engagement and most important to measure your level of success so you can dedicate more time and cost to the channels that work best for your business.

The weaknesses in online and mobile marketing will vary based on the size of your business and your market niche, but the most prevalent weakness is knowing your market and how to target and engage the best prospects.  The next challenge for effective online and mobile marketing is the time resource demands.  Success is a result of how you interconnect your online presence, search, social and advertising. Unfortunately, each of these initiatives demands a totally different skill set and a deep knowledge of your business and brand perception.

To build a successful and cost-effective strategy and implementation plan requires a staff with diverse skills or a combination of a limited staff with outsource measurable aspects of your initiatives.  There are some effective tools available to help your internal staff to maximize their productivity, but due to the demand for quick and response, relevant posts and personal engagement the process cannot be automated.

The most important elements for your overall success are (1) build your internal communications between management and staff pertaining to your online reputation and brand perception  (2) Never commit to an agreement for external services for more than six months (3) All external services must provide a monthly measure of their results (4) Be willing to change with the market trends and demands.

Hope you find this helpful!