One organization that has been tirelessly working on bringing together the unorganised and fragmented homestay segment and increasing focus on this space, is Stay On Skill. The company that tries to find a way to let you travel more while minimising the hit on your credit card, is now launching India’s first marketing accelerator that will help homestays skyrocket their customer base, revenue and brand value in an intensive three-month programme.

Each month Stay On Skill will send three selected travel influencers to a homestay, where they will experience the offerings of the property and promote it on their respective social media channels. Additionally, every month there’ll be Masterclasses by experts on different topics to help them grow their business. From customized marketing strategies, to analysis of online presence, Stay on Skill will ensure that by the end of these three months, the properties would have not only increased their reach but also understood the nitty-gritty of marketing themselves better.

TravHQ spoke to Arjun Tuli, founder of Stay On Skill, about the programme and the company’s plans of giving homestays across India a much-needed social boost.

1. What was the trigger behind launching an accelerator programme?

Stay On Skill in the last one year has helped numerous commercial properties in different aspects. Duing all of this one thing that we have realised it – hotels and homestays in India are popping up like wild mushrooms. In the city of Ooty itself there are more than 2000 hotels (and these are just the ones that are listed online). Across India, more than 1,75,000 properties are taking online bookings. Amid all of this, the problem is – how do you make people know that you exist? Listing on platforms like Airbnb or Booking.com doesn’t ensure you visibility or bookings. If your property shows up on the second page of Airbnb, you might as well forget that prospective customers will get to know about you. One good way to stand out from the crowd is to create a brand for yourself digitally – through social media, blogging, and video creation. But unfortunately, most homestays or hotels are not much aware of to how to go about it. Our analysis show that many of them in the past have been cheated by fake bloggers and instagram influencers, who either don’t have authentic following or high traffic.

So, at Stay On Skill, we decided to make these things transparent for properties and provide them some real value. The idea behind the accelerator is to help the deserving properties get the visibility they deserve, and the complete three-month program is designed around that. We won’t only be sending curated travel influencers to their property, but also teaching them how to make more revenue through different digital marketing techniques, and how to perform well on booking portals.

2. What according to you are the benefits of having such accelerator programmes in place in the travel industry?

On a broader scale benefits would include –
1) Properties gain visibility.
2) They get access to star influencers who have the ability to make their property go viral.
3) They get access to Masterclasses on different aspects of Social Media, Digital Marketing, Web Booking, so that after the accelerator they can take forward the learnings and start executing it themselves.
4) Build a brand value – when some good influencers get associated with your property, it creates a great brand value for you. (Unfortunately, most properties don’t know how to capitalise on that)
5) Increased brand value and visibility leading to increase in revenue.

3. What are the long-term gains that you see arising from this programme?

In these three months, Stay On Skill will provide the properties a great exposure in terms of visibility and brand value. Although visibility is short lived, brand value is not. If the properties can cash in on this brand value, it will have a long term effect on the kind of customers they attract.

The properties also gain immense knowledge from the Masterclasses. Each Masterclass is designed to provide specific insights to the property owners, that they can use to enrich the experience of their customers, and thereby increase their revenue. The knowledge from these won’t run out with time. If you execute it, you are bound to gain and add a lasting value to your business.

4. Big brands like Expedia and Marriott have already conducted accelerator programmes for their listed hotels, or improving customer experience. Is yours the first-of-its-kind offering for homestays?

If you go through the accelerator program by Expedia, it was aimed at moving hotels higher up in ranking on their own portal by giving an additional 10% cut in the bookings.
There was no addition to the property in terms of brand value, digital exposure or knowledge.

Stay On Skill accelerator is built around a completely different value addition. We are highly selective in the properties that we chose for the accelerator. We have limited them to just 10. The idea is provide them the maximum benefit through exposure and sharing our learning of this industry.

The Stay On Skill accelerator is not just limited to homestays. It’s open to hotels as well, as long as they fulfill our acceptance criteria – there should be something unique about the property – which we analyse basis the different parameters of stay, lodging, food, culture and experience.

5. How is homestay marketing expanding and evolving, particularly in India?

The homestay market in India is expanding at a faster rate than it ever was, especially in the areas of Himachal, Uttarakhand – where the locals are now realising the potential that tourism holds. For locals, getting into the tourism industry also means that you are not investing your time in doing activities like drugs, and tourism has helped a lot in that perspective – giving employment to many.

6. Isn’t there a fear that if the properties don’t get conversions in terms of revenue, despite the huge reach that you are promising, they may come back to you disappointed?

Not really. What Stay On Skill is really good at is providing the properties with immense visibility at a very low cost of investment. Thereby, helping them build a brand and name for themselves in the industry. Along with this, we equip the properties with knowledge required to convert the leads into customers. But if after this conversion doesn’t happen, then it means there’s some other aspect of the property that is lacking, which we need to identify and help overcome – which we shall do.

And this particular batch of the Stay On Skill accelerator is Not For Profit . All that we’ll be receiving from the properties will go towards payment of the bloggers, influencers, graphic designers and social media experts – we won’t be making a profit of a single penny from it.

7. What are Stay On Skill’s future plans regarding this programme?

We started the Stay On Skill accelerator as medium to share our knowledge and expertise with the properties and help them benefit from it. If we are able to make it happen at a small scale of 10 properties, next time around we’ll try to make an effort to reach a wider audience and help more properties benefit from it.

The application for the first batch closes on August 31. If you are a homestay or a hotel looking to increase your digital presence, apply here – http://stayonskill.com/accelerator.html.

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Any brand now has more platforms than ever to communicate with their audience, each one slightly different than the other. Social media platforms hold a significant spot in the entire marketing map of any brand yet their relevance has changed over the years. Some have gained an even more important spot while some have lost their lustre. To complicate matters further for the brand, audience now prefer even simpler channels like messaging to be in touch with the brand. The likes of WeChat are already giving plenty of sleepless nights to the social media giants and the trend is likely to continue. Who would have thought things will be promoted and paid for via a chat app?

The change isn’t just limited to the platforms where the users are but how rapidly existing formats are gaining momentum and new formats are coming in. While we haven’t seen the pitch, we are quite sure that video wasn’t something that Mark Zuckerberg focused heavily on when he first pitched Facebook to Peter Thiel. And yet, the platform is now full of videos and is taking the fight against the video giant. YouTube on the other hand now has a large array of 360 videos and VR is the talk of the town.

But where does that leave the marketers? It is an everyday fight between maintaining the momentum on already popular platforms and identifying where the action is shifting. While it is easier for brands with a global scale to allocate resources to experiment, it isn’t the same for startups. And the challenges extend much further.

For almost two years, we have been actively meeting and getting acquainted with entrepreneurs in travel industry. Each one of them building something unique to address the pain points of travellers. Some of them carry strong experiences of working in marketing roles and teach us a trick or two while many others are tech superheroes who rise up to challenges with code. However, irrespective of the expertise, they have to do a bit of both to minimise the required resources in the early days.

We are trying to make the job a little bit easier for the second type of entrepreneurs by bringing together the best marketers, tourism boards and content creators from across the country to share their knowledge with them during TravelNEXUS. For the first type of entrepreneurs who have cracked the marketing code, we are offering a platform to showcase their work and share their learnings with others (Sign up here, we want you there).

We have an array of discussions and keynotes lined up where domain experts will join to share insights. There will be discussions on how travel and hospitality companies can unlock the maximum potential of conventional social media channels as well as identify the upcoming ones or how brands can maximise the impact of their campaigns among many other things. The event is supported by hospitality partner Ramada Gurgaon Central and travel partner Plush Escapes. Leading social media news portal Social Samosa will also bring its expertise to the event. You can read more about TravelNEXUS here.

Full Schedule

The event was originally scheduled to be held on March 25, 2017 at Ramada Gurgaon Central however, we have to push it further due to some unavoidable circumstances. New event date will be updated soon. We know you want to put your every penny towards your business which is why we have kept the registration costs as low as we could. You can reach us through our social channels, mail or use the comment section for any queries you may have.

Registration link.

Update March 17, 2017- Event date to be rescheduled.

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There is an increasing number of platforms for travel brands to connect with their audience and it’s the same story with formats. Playing the creative note, brands are competing against each other in a bid to stay on top of their customers’ mind but that isn’t all child’s play. To stay ahead of the curve, travel marketers have to keep learning and adapting to the change.

TiE Delhi, in order to help with the same, is hosting the Travel Marketing Summit 2016 this Friday (September 30). We have the full agenda of the event and the sessions certainly look interesting.

Following the opening address, there will be a fireside chat on the Emerging trends in Travel Marketing. Naveen Seshadri, COO at Lonely Planet and Daksh Sharma, Founding Partner at TravHQ will discuss what marketing trends we will see in travel. Following this, Anshuman Bapna, Chief Product Officer at MakeMyTrip will share insights on the behaviour of young digital consumers which can help brands better tailor their strategy.

Ajay Jain, Founder, Kunzum.com will talk about the opportunities in India’s travel market which will be followed by Dishad Master from Mercury Himalayan Explorations sharing tips on the art of storytelling and how content marketing can be the best sales tool.

TripAdvisor is the undoubted leader if we talk about user generated content. Nikhil Ganju, Country Manager, TripAdvisor India will talk about the power of user generated content and how platforms like TripAdvisor can be used to engage audience. There will be many other exciting sessions that will offer insights on important topics like finding the right platforms for marketing a travel brand and best practices to drive engagement among others.

Navneet Kaushal, CEO, PageTraffic and Ashish Chopra, Head-Content Marketing, ixigo will share top tips from their experience of promoting startups on a shoestring budget. Ashish is the man behind all those quirky videos by ixigo and has received various awards for pulling such successful campaigns. Certainly the right man to learn travel marketing from.

If you are a travel startup, we would love to hear your story. Connect with our team at the event. The event will be hosted at WelcomHotel Sheraton, Saket, New Delhi. You can avail discounts on registration by using promo code “travHQ”. Register here.

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Online travel market is growing and so is the number of brands fighting to grab a share of the already limited attention span of the users. This means that marketers have to play smart and use every trick in the book to maximise what they gain out of their efforts. However, with all the new advertising options rolling in, young travel brands often struggle to meet their marketing goals.

We reached out to Ratan Jha, Top contributor in the Global AdWords Community and an expert digital marketing strategist, with some questions that brands often try to find the answers to. Here is an edited excerpt from the conversation:

Mobile seems to be the focal point of both social platforms and search engines. How do you think brands should adapt to that?

Mobile is definitely the focal point today. Every brand should understand and adapt to it as soon as possible. To me, every passing day is already making brands miss several valuable micro-moments if they are not yet ready for mobile devices.

Google reports it has more people searching from mobiles than from desktops globally and Morgan Stanley Research reveals that the number of mobile phone users have already surpassed the number of desktops users. Further, a recent press release from TRAI says India has over 1033.20 million cell phone subscribers. It has already surpassed USA and has become the second largest country in the world with highest number of cell phone subscribers.

These amazing stats are actually opportunities for the brands who are mobile ready and obstacles for the ones who are turning a deaf ear to this transformation.

If you look at it from a marketer’s point of view, these stats are not challenges, on the contrary they are opportunities. Every brand should understand it and get ready for the mobile world as fast as possible.

Coming to your question as to how brands should adapt to this transformation, I have three to things to say –

1. Take a mobile first approach – Gone are the days when websites used to be designed and developed for desktops first and then a modified version used to be made available for mobile devices. Today, there are more mobile users than desktop users. It means there are more touch-points on these small devices than on the bigger ones. This is the reason brands should work to make the experience better for mobile traffic first.
2. Be ready for Omni-channel – I have debated this at several occasions. Why are businesses obsessed at optimising only paid ad landing pages for conversions and not usual website pages? Take yourself as a potential customer to a particular service. Do you always click an ad when you intend to buy the service in question? Not really. Based on the commercial intent in your query, you have got the same potential for conversion whether you click the paid ad or organic link on a search engine. Then, why aren’t the usual website pages optimised equally for conversions as a paid ad landing pages? Don’t you want your organic traffic to convert? Remember, in today’s digitally obsessive world, every single channel matters a lot. Leave less exit points and keep on-page or in-app paths to conversions shorter. Every single version of your pages, be it for PPC, organic, social traffic, emails or something else, must be optimised for conversions. Be ready for all channels of traffic, not just one or two.
3. Offer optimised speed – Having a mobile optimised website that leaves no horizontal scroll and fits to the screen size allowing users to view your products or services without using pinch and zoom is not enough. Speed matters a lot. Your mobile website should ideally load within 3 to 5 seconds. If it takes more than that, the very purpose of having a mobile optimised site is failing.

A few important things to note in this regard are – avoid cheap hosting, use content delivery networks, use loss-lessly compressed images and serve pages from cache.

More importantly, if you are a business that produces good volume of contents, have Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) implemented. AMP is going to see a lot of buzz in the recent future, and as early adopters you will have the benefits for sure.

In order to improve user experience, Google now offer more detailed results for flight and hotel searches. Do you think this would affect major travel brands in long run? If yes then how should they deal with it?

One cannot bite the hand that feeds it. Travel is one of the industries that create a major part of Google’s advertising revenue, and Google knows it well. Having said that, Google flights does not support direct booking of tickets from its own interface (only few are supported). For this reason, it does not pose a bigger threat to any travel brand that’s not there in the result.

Further, it’s no more confined to selected few. Brands which want to have their listing appear on Google’s flight search can contact ITA Software directly. It’s important to note that ITA Software was taken over by Google before the launch of Google Flights.

P.S.- Brands wanting to get a competitive edge in organic listings should start embracing Schema.org mark up.

Google has recently added new ad options like sponsored listings for local businesses in Google Maps while Facebook expanded Dynamic ads for travel. How can the brands leverage these additions?

These new ad types and features are actually opening up more avenues for brands to extend their reach to. But ironically, not many brands are able to make the most of features that involves technicalities.

For instance, Google AdWords Dynamic ads have already been available for several specific industries including retail and travel, but only retail/ecommerce sites are using it the most. The reason is obviously – technical challenge. The same applies to Facebook’s Dynamic Travel ads as well. It integrates through Facebook’s marketing API. So obviously, it does have technical challenges. Setting up ads for Google map is considerably easier as it depends on location extension itself.

If you ask for my two cents on these new ad types, I would say that they have got the potential and brands, specifically hotels or restaurants chains must use them.

How different is travel industries ad CTR compared to PPC campaigns across other industries. In addition, can you comment on an average lead cost for travel brands such as OTAs?

CTR is one metric that can be significantly different from business to business in the same industry and from campaign to campaign for the same business in question. There are several factors that affect Click Through Rates.

However, if you are asking about an industry benchmark, it is between 2.1% to 2.5% for Search Network and 0.4 to 0.55 for Display Network. WordStream reports 2.18% for Search and 0.47% for Display Network based on its own data.

Talking about lead costs, a benchmark can be deemed around Rs600 to Rs1000 for online travel agencies that target offshore audiences and sell travel packages.

For small travel agencies, there is always debate that CPM (Display Advertising) doesn’t contribute to lead generation. Your views on that?

Display Network is more complex than the search network and for this reason it needs more strategic approach. Advertisers need to invest time, efforts and obviously money to make display network campaigns work to their benefits. I can tell you one thing, once you have got the display campaigns optimised properly, it can bring much more conversions than the search network, and that too at a lower cost.

There are way too many targeting options available for display network, but most of the businesses stay confined to contextual targeting only. This is one of the ailing points.

Some of the targeting options that are less experimented but more likely to work better for travel industry are – managed placements, in-market segments and custom affinity audiences. Ads in Gmail with keywords targeted to competitors, popular brands and domain names work well for travel industry. Further, ads targeted to customer email match audience and even to its similar/lookalike audience that platforms like AdWords and Facebook build based on their contextual engines and users’ browsing behaviours are known to work better. And finally, demography targeting is one key aspect that a travel brand must not ignore.

What are some platforms apart from Google and the popular social media services, that you think travel brands should explore to find new customers?

StumbleUpon Paid Discovery, Reddit Ads, Pinterest Promoted Pins, are Twitter Ad with Cards are some of the potential advertising options for travel industry other than Google and Facebook.

What are some tips that you would like to share for travel brands, especially the young start-ups, to maximise the returns on their online ad spends?

Travel is one of the industries where conversion path length is longer in general. People usually take time before making their final decisions. This is where remarketing becomes very important. Ironically, remarketing is not being used effectively by majority of the small to mid-sized travel companies.

A travel business must not avoid remarketing campaigns. Not just usual remarketing campaigns on Google display network and Facebook, but some of the advanced strategies like cross channel remarketing, dynamic remarketing, remarketing on search ads, remarketing to customer match and similar/look-alike audiences help being available right in front of the potential customers in their moments of decisions.

An analysis on AdWords Time Lag report gives valuable insights about how long your potential customers are taking to convert and how many interactions they are having before making their decisions. It gives you detailed insights on your online sales cycle which helps formulate strategies and make informed decisions.

Other than paid search marketing, embracing blogging and inbound marketing combined with email marketing and active presence of social media channels are some of the proven and cost effective methods of establishing a competitive edge today.

Ratan Jha helps multiple brands, startups and established ones, to formulate strategies and grow their online presence. You can follow him on Twitter @RatanJha where he frequently keeps sharing useful digital marketing tips and insights.

The post Travel marketers, everything you wanted to ask about digital advertising answered by Google AdWords expert Ratan Jha appeared first on TravHQ.

With the increased internet penetration and exponential growth of businesses in India, innumerable digital marketing organisations have come into existence in the past few years. Instead, as per the article, the digital marketing industry is booming high with 40% growth rate. Consequently, the number of online marketers for destinations has increased too.

Formulating a good marketing strategy for tourism is vital for online travel marketers. It plays an important role in coordinating business activities, eliminating interferences and maximising profits. We have listed few key points below that might be highly useful for digital travel marketers.

Tapping into the needs and emotions of customers

Online travel marketers must keep in mind that creating an immediate need for destinations is a crucial element. There are different methods of carrying out this process. Online marketers can post attractive photos of cuisines, off-beat spots, flora and fauna related to the place. Interesting facts can be revealed too. This will grab the attention of trippers within seconds and bring higher engagement in the online medium. Beyond this, the format of the content should be gauged. For example, online videos might not be the best option in India as internet speed is drastically slow here. More innovative forms of content like gif animations and cinema graphs can be considered. Another aspect that is deemed necessary is bringing a sense of emotional connection between the people and the products/services. If a photo of a destination reminds the trippers of a particular travel experience, the travel brand can perform exceptionally well in the market space.

Focusing on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter

Social Media platforms can be extremely useful for online travel marketers. Beyond attracting tourists, it assists the trippers in shaping their travel plans and decisions. Timely and positive feedbacks on people’s reviews can encourage travellers to re-visit the destinations. Online reviews, Facebook comments and Twitter posts can impact a destination’s attendance. One exemplary social media campaign has been #MeetSouthAfrica. It had produced 9,000+ tweets, 77.8 million tweet impressions and 1,059 photos on Instagram. Needless to say, it had grabbed the attention of many people worldwide and promoted South Africa in a major way.

Relevance of SEO

Travel SEO is visibly different from the regular SEO. People while making travel plans usually do lot of research online. As per the reports, they search queries usually consist of long tail keywords. For example, instead of just typing ‘holiday’, they might look for ‘safest family beach holiday’ or ‘best places to visit in South Africa’. For good SEO, content should be developed in a similar manner. Also, linking few parts of it from reliable and popular websites can put the content in a more noticeable position in the search engines. Such tricks should be considered while designing the marketing strategy.

Listing in popular websites

Online travel marketers can enlist their products or services in sites like TripAdvisor, Hipmunk, Flightfox and BookingBuddy. Similarly, they can associate with travel bloggers to increase the visibility. Getting their content across through blogs can be a good marketing technique. Hence, the brands can easily expand their businesses, achieve maximum exposure and obtain monetary benefits later.

Travel PPC should not be set and forget

Travel industry is third largest in paid searches. Some easy tricks can help your Adwords campaign outperform and get worthy return. AdWords should never be set it and forget it, but with travel, pausing seasonably irrelevant campaigns, making adjustments to ad text, and monitoring locations, time and hour of the day are even more critical to avoid wasting large sums of marketing spend. Not only searches but in order to promote your destination, marketers must put their sweat and tears into display advertising. Use of captivating visuals with some compelling strategies like re marketing can do wonders in small budgets.

These tips should help all the Destination Marketers frame their digital strategy. If you have any additional points to add on, do let us know!

The post Destination Marketers: 5 interesting tips for framing the right digital strategy appeared first on TravHQ.

#SoMeT15US, organized by Destination Think, was held on October 14th and 15th at Harrah’s Theatre, New Orleans. The objective of this business conference was to assist different destinations & brands become stronger on social media and thereby add more value to the digital industry. To know more details about this particular conference, you can go through its webpage.

Here are some interesting tweets that emerged from #SoMeT15US:

#1. The essence of Marketing

Keep your marketing simple, subtle, "embrace what others say" about you, put the DNA of your people in your marketing @FCuypers #SoMeT15US

— Social Media Tourism (@SoMeTourism) October 14, 2015

Our Take: Frank’s tweet points out a basic but relevant point ignored by marketers frequently. At times products and services offered to the customers do not meet their needs or demands. Understanding the pulse, the minds of the people and emotional needs of potential customers is really important. Marketing, as a practice, needs to be flexible. Just as too many cooks might spoil the broth, complicating the process of marketing unnecessarily does not work well.

#2. The power of visuals

Images get 5x the engagement as text-based posts & the #1 thing that makes images memorable is people. #SoMeT15US

— Rachel Ann (@xRachelLew) October 14, 2015

Our Take: A picture is worth a million words and the same is true for social media. We take less time to process images as compared to text and that is why images get more engagement as compared to text. Using more graphics and photographs will drive up the engagement for your brand account. Adding people to photos works even better as compared to photos that don’t include real people.

#3. Intuitive Blog-posts- Your SEO Goldmine

"Our blog posts are the most valuable & underrated asset we produce because they have huge evergreen SEO benefits."-@LandLopers #SoMeT15US

— Molly Allwein (@molly_vstpgh) October 15, 2015

Our Take: Professional blogs of companies are either not updated frequently or totally neglected. Various studies have suggested that blogs can drive close to 50 percent more traffic on the website of a business. This underscores the importance and value of corporate blogs. SEO plays a significant role in the online world and blogs can play an important role in increasing visibility on search engines.

#4. Social Media is just inevitable

"Be careful what you wish for, the spotlight is now on us & we have to deliver."- @wilhelmus #SoMeT15US #endgame pic.twitter.com/5OTuW5vCtT

— Molly Allwein (@molly_vstpgh) October 15, 2015

Our Take: Nowadays it is hard to find people who don’t use social media. Even the baby boomers are actively using platforms like Facebook to share stories and find content that interests them. People don’t just look up for brands on Google anymore. They search for Facebook page or Twitter handles as well and that is why it is important to have strong social media presence.

#5. Reputation = Return on Investment

"Reputation is our ROI" says @seanmdixon at #SoMeT15US Crowdsource inspiration from consumer-written reviews and content

— ReviewPro (@ReviewPro) October 15, 2015

Our Take: Sean precisely summed up the use of social media for marketing. Brands often try to measure social media ROI in terms of sales or leads but that is a debatable approach. While social media can drive sales as well, it should primarily be used to build an image for the brand and give it a character with the right messaging. For travel brands, social media can be used to inspire a traveller to take a journey rather than selling a destination package.

Did you come across any interesting tweets around #SoMeT15US? Do share them with us.

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