As travel marketers, we use the phrase ‘viral marketing campaign’ all the time. We often try to desperately push the brand or product and achieve big numbers. With the increasing number of travel startups, more brands are rubbing shoulders to take a bite out of the limited attention of the audience. On social media, it is a small window for them to leave an impression.

Ajay Jain, Terrence Voon and Taranjeet Singh talking about online marketing campaigns

During ‘The Singapore Dialogue: Innovation in Travel’ organised by TiE and Singapore Tourism Board earlier this month, these travel marketing campaigns were the topic of an interesting discussion. The panel included Terrence Voon, Director, Marketing Activation, Singapore Tourism Board, Ajay Jain, Founder, Kunzum.com and TiE Delhi-NCR Travel SIG – Chair and Taranjeet Singh, Country Business Head – India, Twitter India. Some interesting stories and lot of insights were shared during the discussion. Here are some snippets from the conversation.

#1- You don’t always need to start the conversation

Brands often try to tell people about their products or brand and initiate conversations around it. They will host chats around themselves and invite people to talk. This might work to some extent for some major brand but not everyone will have this luxury. Brands should keep track of what the conversations on the platform are around and plan campaigns around the topics that people can connect with. Taranjeet shared the example of how the #saluteselfie campaign by Reliance gained huge traction because the timing was perfect to join the Independence Day conversation on Twitter.

#2- Customers don’t care about your product

“Customers don’t care about your product, your profits, your brand or your success” said Terrence Voon. It is important that your marketing strategy has a very clear objective. It should inform people about something new, educate them about a topic or entertain them, make them laugh. If that is not the case, you need to get back to the drawing board and rethink the strategy.

#3- Get local

It is important to have different strategy for different markets. Terrence shared the story of how Singapore Tourism made news among the people of Philippines. The people there really love music so they got a local rock band on-board to play for the promotional video. The video got millions of views and the song was picked up by local radio stations. Its success inspired more content around it like behind the scenes video.

#4- Trending hashtag is insignificant

Taranjeet shared how Brand Managers often go to Twitter because they want their hashtag to trend. According to him that is absolutely pointless and hardly makes a difference if you can’t get your message through. Even if brands rope in accounts with strong following to tweet about them, they are not connecting with the target audience but just working to be in the list of trends.

They should try to focus on leveraging the trends like Lufthansa did during FIFA World Cup 2014. Emirates was the official airline partner but with just one simple tweet, Lufthansa was the one who grabbed all the eyeballs.

#5- No marketer can ever plan a viral campaign

“There is nothing like a viral marketing campaign. It is an end result, a consequence of people on the platform engaging with the content. No marketer can ever plan the end result”, said Taranjeet when asked about suggestions to plan a viral campaign and we couldn’t agree more. According to him, brand strategists should take a step back and define the objectives of campaign clearly. Twitter should be used more as a listening tool. They should observe the usage pattern of various words/hashtags to plan out the campaign. When questioned about influencer marketing for campaigns, he said that it is good for temporary spikes at times but hasn’t got a significant advantage in the long run.

You can find more stories from this event here or other past events here.

The post “There is nothing like a Viral Marketing Campaign” – Taranjeet Singh, Country Business Head, Twitter India appeared first on TravHQ.

With new technologies and innovative startups coming up in travel, we are beginning to see new trends emerge rapidly in the Industry. Singapore has been at the forefront of such innovations and is setting an example of its neighbors including India. To explore such trends in Asia, Singapore Tourism Board brought ‘The Singapore Dialogue- Innovation in Travel’ to India with TiE (Delhi Chapter). The summit brought together representatives from global travel brands, innovative travel startups and industry analysts.

Deep Kalra, CEO, Makemytrip with Bart Bellers, Senior Advisor – Corporate Strategy, Amadeus Asia Pacific

Deep Kalra, Founder & CEO, Makemytrip and Bart Bellers, Senior Advisor- Corporate Strategy, Amadeus Asia Pacific discussed about the new trends that we will see in India and rest of the Asia. Here are the 5 major ones that will define the travel industry in future.

#1. Sharing economy

“We have an unused room in our house. We can rent it through Airbnb and make some extra money” isn’t something you commonly hear in India. According to Deep Kalra, there is a general opinion around peer to peer services that they can’t work in India, but we will be surprised with their growth in future. There will be a surge in number of people who sublet their house to travellers through platforms like Airbnb or lend their cars using something like Getaround to others when it is unused. We have already seen Guesthouser implementing a similar model in India and we will see more such platforms grow big in future.

#2. Mobile first approach

Businesses are going app only not just because it has become a fashion these days. When it comes to the Indian e-commerce industry, we have entirely skipped the desktop generation and jumped straight to mobile phones. Going mobile only is a smart thing to do for many businesses. Location based services like Uber and last minute services like HotelTonight are not suited to desktops. Going forward, we will see more businesses being built around mobile.

The buying power of Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities is strong and vernacular will help brands connect with them in a better way. According to Deep Kalra, people who build products for these cities in their native language will probably end up doing really well.

#3. Augmented reality/ Virtual reality

With almost all the major technology companies working on virtual reality and augmented reality, it won’t be long before it becomes mainstream. While taking a virtual tour on Oculus Rift might not be as good as taking the actual tour, it is a new experience in itself. People can choose to virtually experience the activity before they actually go for it. Google with its Jump project is trying to make virtual reality really affordable and also available for educational purposes. Augmented reality will make a part of navigations systems and virtual tour guides. We will see more innovations in this space going forward.

(Read: Jump!!! Google is taking you on a tour)

#4. Wearables

Apple Watch is surely a cool thing to own right now but it hardly has any strong use case at the moment. Brands are coming up with apps for the quirky gadget and trying to add to its significance but these are still the early days for wearables. We will see an entire ecosystem being developed around wearables and then they will play a much bigger role. They will be used for paying for transactions, navigating at airports, checking flights, unlocking rooms, checking into hotels and lot more. Many new companies will enter the scene catering to the travel industry with wearables.

(Read: Why your travel brand shouldn’t join the wearable race)

#5. Predictive modelling

Since travel is a tech driven industry, we hear the term ‘big data’ all the time. It is just heaps of data collected over time which has been processed to make sense of. Companies will use the data to forecast trends like flight prices, ticket availability and hotel prices. Brands in US are already doing this and now we have the technology and data to do something similar. We recently saw ixigo leverage the data collected over the years to develop PNR predictor which gives a pretty good idea if a waitlisted train ticket will be confirmed or not. More brands will come up with similar innovations to associate with their products and boost customer experience.

We will be publishing more stories and interviews from The Singapore Dialogue in the coming days. You can find them along with the past events under the Events section on our website.

The post The Singapore Dialogue: 5 upcoming travel trends in Asia appeared first on TravHQ.