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"Marketing is dedicated to revenue generation, and their initiatives are sometimes creative, speculative, and without a clearly defined payback. IT is about cost control, ROI, and accountability. But it's also clear that this mismatch is becoming a top-of-mind concern for more and more firms - Forrester, for example, has published an entire series of reports on bridging the gap between marketing and IT," says Walters.
"This reconciliation is being driven by the specific benefits and challenges of online marketing. Compared to nearly every other channel, the web is immensely more targetable, measureable, and interactive. The targetability and interactivity are what make the increasing personalization and persuasiveness of the online exchange an inevitable development. It's not a matter of if but when. And the measurability of online marketing campaigns - with the right tools, marketers can monitor the effectiveness of a promotion virtually in real time - introduces a new level of analysis and accountability," says Walters.
Walters shared his viewpoint on new trends and operations of the company with EyeforTravel.com's Ritesh Gupta Excerpts:
How do you assess the current content management tools that allow users to create and manage web content? Where do you see Fatwire's Engage product among these?
There's a distinction but also a close relation between a content management system (CMS) and a module like Engage that enable online promotions and targeted marketing. In the early days of the web, knowledge workers would create information for the sites and then pass it to a Webmaster who transformed it into HTML web pages. The CMS was created to dissolve this "Webmaster bottleneck" and put knowledge workers directly in charge of the web content for their areas of expertise.
Today, consumers are demanding more relevant and personalized information, rather than "one size fits all" web sites. If a travel provider tries to answer this demand, it typically creates a new "programmer bottleneck," because the rules that determine who sees what have to be coded by developers. A product like Engage does for marketing professionals what a CMS does for domain experts - it relieves their reliance on IT and allows them to take control of segmenting site visitors and then creating and managing targeted messaging or promotions.
You had mentioned 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 Engage product. How is this product being perceived? Where do you think there is scope for improvement?
The market interest in Engage is growing in step with the desire to move from "one size fits all" sites to sites that provide a persuasive experience that is more likely to address a specific visitor's needs and expectations.
With consumers having variety of options to choose from suppliers, intermediaries, search engines etc, what should be the focus as far as investment in consumer-centric technology is concerned?
For travel providers, getting budget distribution right is not going to get any easier - but if they make the effort, it will get more effective. Buying search terms, pay-per-click, and agreements with all kinds of OTAs and GDSs will remain important. But the more you know about your target on the front end - not just who you'd like to attract but what you must say and do to attract them - will refine and focus spending on the intermediaries. At the same time, these same insights will help travel providers make their home sites more personalised and persuasive, and more of the budget will used to support this channel, where they can directly establish their differentiators and sell to the consumer without payments to intermediaries.
Are there new technologies that can make personalised selling more effective and easier to implement? What are the major pitfalls?
I'm glad you asked - FatWire's Engage is precisely one of the software solutions that make personalisation and more effective and easier to implement. But, as above, the pitfalls usually involve:
Not understanding the consumer
Not transferring the understanding of the consumer into a persuasive site experience
You can't have a conversation unless you know who is on the other end of the line. The conversion rates on travel sites today is a reflection of their one-size fits all approach to online marketing.