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Tim Walters feels the company has made substantial advancement in four areas this year. These areas include ease of content creation; site analytics and reporting; caching and dynamic delivery; and the ability to quickly prepare and launch new sites.
"Our success in the travel sector has been even greater than we expected, and clearly shows that the industry recognises the need to make the web a primary channel for customer communication and marketing. In the last 12 months, we have signed up brand name, industry leading customers in destination resorts, cruise lines, and European hotel properties, says Walters.
Walters spoke to Eyefortravel.com about company's latest initiatives and new trends ahead of Sales and Marketing European Travel 2005 conference.
Excerpts:
What new trends have you witnessed from client's perspective and how have you responded to them?
We see a real hunger among travel providers to move from "display" to "persuade" - that is, to move from a site that shows the same content to everyone to one that can respond to specific desires of a given customer segment.
A hotel sales office will have substantially different telephone conversations with a business person looking for conference facilities, a bride-to-be planning her honeymoon, and a retired couple returning to the property for the sixth time - so why should the hotel's web site present the same information to all site visitors?
In most cases there's actually a simple answer to that question: money. It's not impossible to build a site that targets content for particular customers, but it's usually expensive, because developers have to write the code that controls the delivery logic. This also means that IT becomes a gatekeeper between the site and the marketing staff; every change or refinement requires another development cycle, and more expense, etc. Companies often find that it simply isn't cost effective.
The solution lies in dissolving this dependence on IT by giving marketers the ability to create, refine, and manage the delivery rules for online promotions. This is precisely the aim of our Engage product: Just as content management tools allow business users to create and manage web content, Engage enables marketing professionals to control highly targeted web marketing activities.
How do you think clients, whether they are from the supplier's side or from travel online companies, are using content for judicious use?
Frankly, most travel industry sites are not nearly as effective as they could be. They offer a static, "one size fits all" view of the available products and services; they often don't offer enough information to address the prospect's buying anxieties; and when the visitor is ready to act, many sites don't support online booking or purchases.
But this state of affairs is changing rapidly. Online marketing and sales are now so crucial to a travel provider's success that sites and content use are beginning to receive much greater attention.
At the last EyeForTravel show in London we were approached by two people from a major UK resort chain. One of them was the marketing director the other, rather surprisingly, was the IT director. They were fully committed to the same goal - creating an IT platform that would enable marketing professionals and content experts to manage online content and promotions. I think this is a sign - the imperatives for doing business online are now so fundamental that any cultural divide between "creatives" and IT pales in comparison.
What according to your are factors that should be taken into consideration before shaping content of a travel site?
When a visitor first comes to a travel products site, he or she initiates a virtual sales opportunity for the provider. But it's an odd, one-sided "conversation," since the prospect can switch topics or walk away entirely with a single mouse click. Success depends on using everything you know about your customers' needs, behaviours, and fears and shaping a "persuasive experience" that will serve their needs, respect typical behaviour, and address their fears or anxieties.
People don't visit, say, hotel web sites in order to read a few sentences, look at a few pictures, and then leave. That's a waste of time. They come to the site because they're hoping their questions will be answered and they can make a comfortable purchase decision by booking a room. Too often, today's sites still frustrate this desire. We like to talk about marketing-oriented sites as "persuasive applications," but most often that simply means building a site that enables a visitor to do what she wanted to do in the first place.
How do you think companies are leveraging database from a CRM perspective? What do you think are new trends in this area?
One of the most important trends is to create opportunities for "personalized" conversations with customers and prospects. Among other things, a CRM is a "CPM" - a customer profiling machine. Properly operated, a CRM system can reveal the desires and habits of different types of customers. These profiles or segments can be fed to a marketing module like FatWire's Engage, and site visitors will then receive the content and promotions that are most pertinent to their interest and most likely to support their purchase decision.
What plans are in the pipeline? What targets has FatWire set for itself?
Our goal is to build on our momentum and become the recognized leader in travel industry content management. To that end, we're constantly refining Content Server and Engage, and we're also working with interactive agencies, booking systems, and third-party content providers to ensure that our customers can offer "persuasive experiences" to site visitors.