Having a mobile version of your website is an ICND suggestion for the Best Web Changes for Vacation Rental Websites to Gear up for 2012. It’s incredible to look at the analytics across many vacation rental companies’ websites and look at how the mobile traffic has increased in as little as this past year against last year.
According to Human Factors International, 68% of consumers said, “if they knew a business had a made-for-mobile version they would prefer to use it over the standard website on a mobile phone. Mobile websites are fairly easy to build and you don’t have to completely redesign your site for it or recreate your functionality.
It just needs to be taken to a simpler platform. If you are going to redesign your website, ask your web developer (or ICND) about responsive CSS. It’s a new CSS technology through HTML and CSS where your website is responsive according to the size of the monitor (or mobile device). We’ll be featuring a new site soon with it! Stay tuned.
In the first quarter of 2010, RevPAR increased around the world with the America's being up 5.3% according to Smith Travel Research (STR). In 2011, the growth is on trend to continue across the globe. It's obvious that, although today’s bookings aren't quite where they were at during the pre-recession days, the industry is slowly managing to crawl out of its slump. Which is good news for all of us!
Travel Industry:
With so much inventory on the market for rentals, competition remains strong and customers are becoming increasingly selective as they can. In order to take advantage of the upward trend, travel operators will need to be increasingly flexible in not only marketing their rooms, but determining what price their customers are willing to pay. Vacationers have a wealth of comparative pricing information at their fingertips with portal sites, ensuring that they won’t book if a hotel or vacation rental's pricing is too high. More and more, even a few dollars can make the difference between a customer booking and not booking with a property or company.
This year it will be more important to stay on top of your game in the online marketing arena and companies who do so and put their budgets into online marketing will reap the rewards in 2011 more so than any other year we've seen thus far. Gone are the days we'll be able to rely on direct mailings and a few postcards and we'll need to take every avenue to stay on top of the trends in online marketing.
Think about how Google's $700 million takeover of ITA Software, which will not only make the internet powerhouse a serious operator in the travel business, it will also rewrite the rules for bookings. As Google keeps its hooks in every inch of the internet, it will seed its travel offerings throughout the online space. It's very possible that starting as early as this year, web surfers logged into Gmail will be able to plan and book their entire vacation with a few mouse clicks inside the Google web ecosystem, making it much easier to do from anywhere, while on the go.
Mobile will also take a bigger role in 2011 than in 2010. Check your Google Analytics and pull last years data with mobile users compared to 2010. 2011 will be even stronger. Customers, particularly, business travelers, will make even more booking while on the road or in the air and as close as while sitting on the boardwalk outside of the hotel while sipping on a tropical cocktail. They have the chance to wait until the very last opportunity to grab the last minute deals in an arena where there's tons of inventory left and we're fighting for every dollar.
To top it all off, vacationers will be using more and better smartphone apps to sniff out available rooms and, crucially, the best prices on those rooms and rentals. According to Priceline, 58% of customers with mobile devices made their booking within 20 miles of their hotel where they ended up staying. More impressively, 35% of those polled were within one mile when they clicked on the “reserve this room” button.
Consumers have the power
We've been preaching it for years, but the recent boom in rooms and houses available to rent, along with the advanced OTA's and their ability to dominate the search engines, topped with the technology of smart phones and on-the-go research sets up an interesting arena for 2011. Driving your customer loyalty with programs and customer relationship marketing strategies will play a crucial role in this years marketing. A huge development just taking place has been American Airlines pulling form Orbitz and subsequently being dropped by Travelocity. American Airlines now relies on their own website to deliver the marketing message that they will find the best deals with AA. Even though they are driving down prices, they avoid the costs of placement and fees with the OTA's. Travel leaders will need to find their own solution to optimizing their bookings OTA's as well as their own websites. Increase customer loyalty through programs and interacting with social media.
Social Media
With Facebook taking the lead over Google and other powerhouse websites at the end of 2010, we'll see a huge shift in the involvement of Social Media in your overall marketing mix. Sooner rather than later, the travel industry will find a way to book within Facebook and need to plan accordingly, before they lose out on valuable social media bookings.
In December, 100,000 brick and mortar businesses in 5,000 cities who had claimed their Local Business Listings got snail mail from Google in the form of Favorite Place stickers, with instructions to put them in their windows and use them to promote their business.
Included on each sticker is a bar code that some smart phone users can scan to pull up Local Business Listing information, including coupons, on their phones. Outwardly, this appears to be just another bribe that Maps is offering to get businesses to claim their listings. In reality, Google could be testing any number of things relating to smart phone use, mobile search and local businesses. It's worth noting here that Google encouraged Local Listing Ad advertisers to link their ads to their Place Pages instead of to their websites because the Place Pages render well on small screens and contain all of the information a mobile searcher is likely to be interested in.
Google is continually testing and tweaking, so changes are no surprise to those who watch it. But in 2009, the number, frequency, acceleration and anticipated impact of the changes both in paid advertising and organic results regarding Local Search at Google have been remarkable. In my opinion, these increasingly louder rumblings indicate that once Google finds the optimum combination of the right user interface and profitable local advertising to display, it will unleash a formidable storm in the world of Local Search. Are you ready?
Posted: January 8, 2010 9:06 AM
| Posted By : ICND Team
Related Categories:
Smart Phones,Social Media
Consumers Positive About Tech Changes
JANUARY 6, 2010
Source: EMarketer.com
Mobile phone is greatest change for the better
Americans looking back at the end of a decade have little love for trends such as reality TV, they are generally positive when evaluating the most basic technological and communications advances that have affected their lives, according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
Respondents had the overall best view of cellphones, which 69% claimed were a change for the better. Sixty-five percent said the same of both e-mail and the Internet.
Other, more advanced handheld devices, such as BlackBerrys and iPhones, were also relatively popular, though one-quarter of respondents thought they were a change for the worse. Unsurprisingly, younger adults were more likely to be positive about the rise of smartphones, while users over 65 were more evenly split.
Online shopping was slightly less likely to be seen as a good development, at 54% of total respondents. But when it came to e-commerce, 24% of consumers said it made no difference—and younger adults disliked it at more than twice the rate of seniors.
“No difference” was also a major factor in consumer views of the marketing darling, social networking sites. Adults of all ages were notably ambivalent about the sites, though nearly one-half of those under 50 had a positive impression. Despite wide uptake in recent years, the largest group of respondents over 65 did not know enough to say whether social networks were good or bad.
Even active users of social media have registered mixed feelings of the medium with other researchers, however. Crowd Science reported that more than one-half of female users ages 12 to 21, for example, thought they spent too much time with social media.
Helpful tools, that's the name of the game. I've been talking a lot about segmentation, and here's another great tool to combat that - the smart phone (the most popular being iPhone, Blackberrys, and the Google Android). But, a bit differently than the previous web tools I've listed in this Internet Marketing blog. For one, it's not a web tool...it's a device. Smart phones (defined as handheld devices that have PC/Mac like functionality (email, IM, web browser, Internet access, desktop file applications, etc) are very versatile tools when it comes to doing business and being a consumer. In fact, they're game changers. Talk about segmentation...smart phones are one of the major causes of the issue.
But, they can also help you pull it all together. Smart phones allow you to access all your communication channels (email, IM, SMS, MMS and phone) as well as media files (text, music, video, powerpoint, and spreadsheets) as well as your favorite social networks. You can take pictures and videos of your own, book travel and flights, check on package delivery statuses, check the weather, and shop. And, probably the most popular element of smart phones, they also allow you to access hunderds of apps (making it the Swiss Army knife of web tools).
Because of the popularity of smart phones (dropping prices, increased bandwith speeds, more inclusive functionality), many national companies have created their own branded apps specifically for their smart phones customers. They've even put their apps in their commercials, like Nationwide, USPS, Dominos, and Expedia (or was it Travelocity?). This is clear evidence that one) smart phone users are growing in relevancy when it comes to marketing and two) cool apps sell products. Hell, iPhone almost exclusive advertises its phone by only advertising its app store (see any recent iPhone commercial). As a result, many other smart phone makers have followed the same tack in their commercials. Other than coverage area and speed, apps are the biggest selling points for smart phones.
How many times has an iPhone owner waved their Carpenter Level app or Tip Calculator app in your face? Oh, don't get me started.
Hundreds of third party web development companies also churn out apps every day (because selling a successful app can make you millions) - one of the coolest being ShopSavvy's newest barcode reader app just to name ONE.
But I digress as usual.
Smart phones keep you plugged in (a blessing and a curse), which allows for you to keep doing business no matter (virtually) where you are. And yes, I'm a Smart Phone owner myself (Blackberry Curve 8900) - but I'm new to it. Before that, I had a Nokia from 2001. No kidding.
So I'm writing all this as a newly addicted smart phone owner (both from a new marketer's perspective and a consumer). You can definitely stay on top of things, but when you start sleeping beside your smart phone - you need to seek professional help.
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