Archive for May, 2008

Search Marketing 2008 Benchmark Guide – tactics to increase online travel booking

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

I am a big fan of the Marketing Experiments team over in Florida.  Not only because they like to go surfing right out of their office, but because they are very scientific about their work in online selling.  Even though they do not focus on online vacation rental and online travel bookings, their materials are very applicable to vacation home rental managers.

Their latest publication:  Search Marketing 2008 Benchmark covers all the latest trends in Search Marketing.  See an excerpt:  http://www.marketingsherpa.com/exs/Search08Excerpt.pdf

Couple of immediate take-aways:
 - About half of online seller will increase their PPC and SEO budget by over 10%.
 - Only House Email Marketing has a higher ROI than SEO & PPC
 - SEO and SEM positions are very hard to fill
 - Long URLs are not good.  Short ones are.

If this is an area you plan to invest a lot of time and energy, the ME Benchmark could prove to be a very valuable resource for you.

Ralf
www.liverez.com

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Offline US Travelers are Moving Online

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

A new report out by PhocusWright highlight the many online travel trends.  No surprise, online travel is strong and growing.  Following are a couple of highlights from the report: 

  • Exclusive online buyers account for two-thirds of all online travelers and represent an important source of future revenue opportunity. Players in the U.S. online travel market need to stay on top of the latest intelligence about their customers.
  • OTAs dominate every leisure travel component category purchased online and across different travel scenarios tested. This underscores not only the power of increased advertising spend but their broadening reach, brand awareness, appeal to the novice user, diverse content, complex offering and user-focused approach.
  • Despite increased rates and increasing economic pressures last year, hotel was the top component purchased overall. This underscores consumers’ need for a change in venue to really disengage while traveling for leisure, ability to find deals and the plethora of inventory and more unique hotel options available online.
  • With half of online travelers using the same purchase method for leisure as they do for business travel, travel providers have the opportunity to cross-sell leisure travel to this coveted group of business travelers.
  • Frequent travelers and seasoned online buyers continue to dominate, but now the former “diehard” offline users have begun to use the Internet as their usual method for travel shopping and purchasing. As novice users, this “late majority” possesses different travel and purchase behavior, has varying levels of online technology savvy, requires different messaging and is demographically unique.

    • The PhoCusWright Consumer Travel Trends Survey Tenth Edition

    What does this mean to you, the vacation rental manager?  You better be online – in a simple & pleasant way.  Have an online experience that is similar to what travelers will find in booking business travel.  Vacation homes are right in the sweet-spot of the trend that people need a change of scenario to vacation.  Know your target customer, and niche – because you will get outspent in marketing by the big online travel agencies.

    Ralf
    www.liverez.com

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    Posted in Industry Trends, Online Bookings, Online Marketing, Website | No Comments »

    Forget Keywords; It is about Keyphrases for Vacation Rental Searches

    Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

    Whether you are SEO’ing or PPC’ing – it all comes down to having the right words in mind, and focusing your efforts on those words.  The word ‘New York’ is very powerful.  So is the word ‘Skiing’.  But think about how many different contexts these words can be used in, and how many cyber-sellers are using these works to position themselves and their products/services on the web.

    OK – nothing new so far.  But here is the new statistic – the Average Google search has 4 words!!  One place to check out how different keywords, and keyword phrases compare to each other is in Google Trends:  http://www.google.com/trends

    That means your target vacationers are not thinking about which word they should search on, but which phrase to search on.  Shoppers are no longer inputting single words or a couple of related words.  They are searching on meaningful phrases that define very specific target content.

    So my advice is, think in terms of meaningful phrases that define what your target prospects are searching for.  Not ‘New York’ or ‘Skiing’, but ‘New York Family Ski Vacation’.

    Happy booking!

    Ralf
    www.liverez.com

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    Maximizing Your Vacation Marketing Dollar in a Down Economy

    Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

    Impossible to turn on the TV or radio without hearing about how tough the economy is these days.  In order to help you make your marketing dollar go as far as possible to drive guests to your vacation rental homes, here are a couple of tips.

    Email Marketing:  New campaigns with special return guest and new guest promotions.  Examine all your data systems to ensure you are collecting all the email addresses you have gathered over the years.  Segment your list carefully to create targeted offers.  Look carefully at open/click reports from your email marketing provider.

    Partnerships:  Partnerships with related business can be very beneficial in sharing costs, and in sharing prospect leads.  Combine lists and advertise to a joint group of people.  Offer mutual specials to customers to provide an incentive.  Share the cost on advertising that would be out of reach for either of you.  Also think about partner in the closest population centers – example:  if you are a vacation rental property manager in the Blue Ridge Mountains, look for partner in Atlanta.

    Public Relations:  Look for opportunities to create headlines and news in local news publications.  Even coverage in local news will now make it all the way from Maine to California through the internet.  It will also create powerful link-backs to your site if you link to your site in your news release.

    Google Adwords:  It’s important for you to be where your prospective renters are searching for you. What’s great about Adwords is you can really figure out what your customer acquisition costs are and limit your monthly budget spend.

    Here’s a quick example:

    • Cost per click for your keyword = .10
    • Click Budget per month = $200
    • Clicks you’d like to get per month = 2000
    • New customers from clicks = 20
    • Customer Conversion = 1%
    • Cost per customer = $10

    Create a Blog:  The more you post about relevant things the more you’ll get picked up by Search Engines in the natural rankings and the more you’ll get site visitors.   Guests searching for vacation opportunities in your area, will come to your vacation rentals through your blog.

    Interested ot hear of you have any tricks.

     Ralf
    www.liveRez.com

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    9 out of 10 travel buyers say travel-related podcasts, online video influence their purchases

    Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

    Interesting report coming out from PhoCusWright about online travel purchasing.  Check out the report at:  The PhoCusWright Consumer Travel Trends Survey Tenth Edition

    It examines the growing influence of rich content and social media—including podcasts or live online video and traveler-generated reviews from within and outside of one’s social network—in determining where leisure travel will be purchased online.Findings indicate that the vast majority of U.S. online travelers are influenced by anonymous feedback and recommendations from fellow travelers (see chart). The most popular are reviews from people they do not know (87%), travel blogs/online diaries and travel review Web sites (both at 86%). Interestingly, reviews from people travelers know ranked fifth, though still highly popular at 72%.

    Online Video and Reviews Critical to Influencing Method of Purchase
    Positive influence of features in determining where leisure travel will be purchased online

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    More Online Bookings – Easy as Algebra?

    Monday, May 19th, 2008

    The folks at Marketing Experiments are focused on eCommerce – which also includes online vacation rental vacation bookings in my definition of getting online bookings. 

    I have always liked their ‘Conversion Index’:  Conversion = 4m + 3v + 2(i-f) – 2a is a great way of looking at how to dissect the various aspects of what gets prospects to book a vacation on your site. 

    Here are the definitions for the Conversion Index (above) there are four elements that are critical to increasing conversion:

    •  Motivation (m) of the prospect visiting your website to make a purchase.
    • The clarity with which Value Proposition (v) is expressed. After motivation, it’s the most important factor in determining whether a customer buys from a site or not.
    • Incentives (i) such as specials, rewards, etc. are used to mitigate Friction–producing (f) elements such as finding information, clicking many buttons, etc. in the conversion process.
    • Anxiety–causing (a) elements, such as asking for personal and credit card information.

    Evaluate your vacation property rental website with these principles in mind. 

    Thanks.

    Ralf
    www.liverez.com

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    Seeing the Forest for the Trees – Do you need traffic or bookings?

    Friday, May 16th, 2008

    Today I had another one of those conversations I often have about online vacation rental solutions:

    “Hi, this is Ralf”
    “Hi, I need some help with getting online bookings.  I need to get SEO.  I need to get PPC.  I need to get more traffic to my site.”
    “Ok.  What do you know about the visitors to your site?  Where are they coming from?  What are the clicking on?  How many are booking?”
    “I don’t know.  I know I need more traffic”

    This is when I take a long sigh, and start into my spiel about the importance of conversions.  Suddenly he says, “Well of course.  Kind of forgot about that equation.”

    The equation he is referring to is the “impressions turn into click-throughs, turn into site visitors, turn into bookings”.  So it is as much about what you do with the visitors once they are on your site, as it is about how much traffic you generate to the site.  It is something that in the ‘heat of the battle’ is often forgotten because some of us are judged on characteristics such as number of visitors, or impressions.

    So always remember, the key statistic is the number of bookings.  Work backwards from there and see how you can influence the numbers in the equation – whether conversion or audience.

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    Relaunching the LiveRez Blog

    Thursday, May 15th, 2008

    OK, I am back from a crazy April of traveling, moving, and all the excitement that comes along with that.  First of all, let me get the move out of the way.  Last week, my family (my high-school sweetheart wife, and four kids ages 13-3) moved from Salt Lake City to Boise, ID.  The most amazing part is not all the stuff I realized we had, it was that we consciously chose to move so much of it.

    In April I had the opportunity to attend the Eastern VRMA, Western VRMA, FloridaVRMA, and the Atlanta Vacation Home Expo.  I will go into some detail about all these show in future bog entries.  However, one overriding observation I have is that there is an incredible opportunity for our industry.  This opportunity comes from two direction:  (1) we have a great product, and (2) we are currently very much under-utilizing the power of the Internet and the ability to create a public movement for the vacation rental market.

    One of the things I am trying to do is help educate the vacation rental community on some web marketing basics that can help us drive more bookings and awareness.  Last month I hosted a webinar on Driving Website Conversion,  this month I am hosting a webinar on Search Engine Marketing Basics.  If you are interesting in attending this free webinar, please register and join us.

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