It’s January 2021, and it really is now or never, if you want to ensure your digital marketing setup will fully capitalise on the return to revenue at the end of lockdown, when travel bans and tourism closures come to an end.
Since the market is not coming back until at least Q2, you have one last golden opportunity to get your digital marketing mix just right.
But there's a lot to do, and time is genuinely running out to make sure you’re still going to be relevant, visible and desirable to your clients, all of whom have gone through a personal transformation over the last 12 months. If you don’t do the work now, there is a significant risk that your business will wilt whilst those around you bloom.
Why now is really the time to do up your digital marketing
The market is stalled, and summer bookings are looking more precarious now than they did even a month ago, but the market will return. When it does, it will be back with a vengeance. All good right? The thing is, if you don’t review your digital marketing, you may no longer be positioned in the right way to intercept your target market. Be prepared for the market to have changed, in these five ways:
1. What people want may be different now
The world will have been cooped up for the best part of a year.
That’s an awful lot of combined thinking time.
The geopolitical situation in the world has lurched about too. The USA is about to warm up considerably to internationalism and culture, whilst the UK may be perceived internationally to have cooled down. This might have an effect on what people want from you, and what they value. You might need to address underlying concerns that weren’t as obvious before, like security, environment, how welcome they will be.
Elements of your global offering may well have been sourced differently whilst you’ve been away through self improvement and remote experiences. Rather than thinking about the totality of your offering as the only option, consider breaking apart packages so that people can pick and choose the elements they want.
They may end up just buying as usual, but by allowing customers to demonstrate niche preference, you have a way to pick up the tremors which may lead to seismic changes in the future. One way of doing this is to have a shopping cart approach to your website which allows people to select micro options, not just apply or book for the whole thing.
2. Your routes to market are likely to have shifted
If you sell primarily through third parties, during the down time, agency networks may have contracted or changed. If your agents have been reaching remote clients digitally on your behalf, they may have lost positioning during lockdown. That means even if you have a great relationship with them, your tried and tested collaborators may not be able to deliver the bookings you’re expecting when the flood gates reopen.
Your direct routes to market may also have changed. Covid-19 has accelerated digital adoption, so the way people source the kind of thing you offer may now be different. For example, they might be getting their travel inspiration from TikTok, and not from the word-of-mouth recommendations you’ve always counted on, simply because they’ve hardly spoken to their friends in a year.
3. The content people need will have changed
Much of digital marketing is about having the right content in the right form to delight your ideal clients at the moment they need it. The earlier you can engage with clients in their research phase, the more likely they are to stay with you through to booking. People are certainly going to have different questions than this time last year.
Brexit is now real for the UK and has created formal immigration requirements. The vaccination situation with Covid is going to keep changing.
The delivery of information is going to need to be much more just-in-time, and bang up to date. Last week’s data on lifted travel restrictions may no longer be of use. The more current you are, and that includes the website, the more useful you are to your clients.
4. Expected turnaround times are much faster now
The meteoric rise in uptake of shopping via platforms like Amazon under lockdown has gone further than simply change the face of retail. It has changed our expectations around what constitutes good service.
Post lockdown and travel restrictions, people will struggle to dissociate their ability to order today for delivery tomorrow, from the kind of lead times and advanced bookings that tourism professionals would prefer. In other words, brace yourself for a deluge of last-minute bookings the moment the all-clear is sounded. You may be working with zero visibility as to how busy you'll be, how quickly.
If you work with international markets, the freeing up of travel restrictions will be staggered to some extent, but how easily will your marketing and sales systems cope with those volumes? What manual processes will cause bottlenecks under sudden, intense load? Where will you run out of capacity first? It might be elements outside of your control, like seats on a plane or train. What could you do to mitigate?
5. Your online positioning may have shifted downwards
And back to digital marketing, you urgently need to know whether you’re positioning online now as well as you were a year ago. A lot could have changed, particularly if your competitors have been cracking on with content marketing and other digital bits and pieces.
Once you’ve decided whether your offering has changed, what those top FAQs now are, where you market will come from, and what their latest expectations are going to be, you’ll need to generate new content to anticipate those needs. You’ll have to make sure the new content positions as well as your old stuff, if you are relying on online searches to drive your bookings.
Content marketing takes time. Your success this summer could rely on whether you’re in first or second position for a handful of business-critical keywords.
Time to crack on. Really. It’s now. Shout if you need a hand. We don’t bite, and we really can help.
[They push] us to think further and always bring innovative ideas to the table. [They aren’t] afraid to be brutally honest when we need to hear it. Everyone is professional and always looking out for what is best (even if it means saying no sometimes). I wish I always had them behind me to guide and challenge me.
Gerri Leon, VP Marketing, Pinnacle Performance Company
