Trove Talks: Our Success in Helping Destinations Adapt Data-Driven Decision Making
This is a blog by Trove Associate Reema Maarouf.
We have heard it all before: data is essential for businesses to grow and prosper. At Trove, we have decided to dive deeper and share the insights behind this trend specifically to how it relates to the travel and tourism industry. To many, marketing is the implementation of ultimate creativity and out-of-the-box idea. To others, marketing decisions are only based on past trends and numbers. To be effective for its audience, however, creative marketing needs to be data-led.
Why is that?
1. Identify new business opportunities
Organizations can react to market developments more quickly with the use of data and analytics. By utilizing data analytics, tourism organizations can recognize customer patterns and behaviors as well as new business prospects more rapidly, thus giving them a competitive edge. Data can provide insights that enable firms to innovate and develop tourism experiences and product offerings that satisfy consumer demand, hence generating interest from visitors.
2. Better serve your customer experience and boost engagement
Data can be used by businesses to learn what customers prefer. Data, for instance, can help businesses figure out the most economical approach to handle client concerns and problems, cutting down on problem response times and enhancing client experiences. In tourism organizations, DMOs can perform sentiment analysis using online and social listening tools as well as perform visitor satisfaction surveys to better tailor marketing to visitors. These steps are to target them with the ideal messaging that will grab their attention.
3. Improve your product development
Data is essential for finding and converting data into business opportunities in a competing global market. DMOs should look to work with travel trade to understand current product offerings, tours, visitor experiences, and packages. DMOs should look to perform quarterly or annual visitor satisfaction or feedback surveys to understand which packages visitors are responding to.
4. Know what’s working and what’s not
KPIs enable you to forecast future events as well as your performance. They inform you if you are on track to get the desired results. This helps you determine exactly where your time, focus, and budget should be targeted and spent.
5. Segmented Audience
As a marketer, you are aware that not every potential customer can get the same messaging or benefit from the same marketing strategies. They all require particular marketing messages and tools to advance because they are at various stages of the buyer's journey. You can organize your prospects by segmenting them based on data such as demographics, actions, and lifestyles which makes it simpler to customize your marketing initiatives. Nowadays, various communication routes can employ data, and utilizing data effectively allows you to contact more people through a variety of communication methods. Last but not least, customer insights guarantee that messaging is aligned and consistent.
What different destinations were able to achieve with data-driven marketing operations through a Trove partnership?
The Cambodian Ministry of Tourism, funded through the French Development Agency (AfD), was able to increase the capacity of the Ministry of Tourism and related tourism stakeholders throughout the Kingdom of Cambodia in communications and marketing. The core objectives of this approach were to strengthen the capacity of the public and private stakeholders as well as to improve and implement the sector development strategy.
Bilbao was able to develop a social media and digital strategy for STEP Language Services' core DMC focused on an SEO and web strategy to attract more interest in their offering, as well as a trading strategy for B2B customers.
Dubai's Cultural Tourism Authority to develop and increased engagement across its social media in relation to content for Dubai's cultural, heritage, and religious products during Expo 2020, the largest global MICE Conference. Much of the content saw on average 200% increases in likes, comments, and views.
Analytics and a search engine strategy were developed for the largest Southeast Asian Destination Management Organization, based in Manila Philippines. Sentiment analysis was performed on social posts by the general public to develop a branding strategy using the results of that sentiment analysis, followed by building a website and a web strategy focused on search engine optimization. Also, new content was created for Asia Bespoke Tours around blogs, social content, and digital content to optimize their web presence.
Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) built a new marketing optimization strategy. The project was focused on the development of a new membership portal for the association and its trade destination, tourism and travel members, a new front-end website and web presence, SEO strategy implementation, and on-going website maintenance. Using the right tools, the association was able to scale its membership volume through a new web presence and interactive portal. Not only but also, the association worked to promote and market its health, wellness, and adventure travel segments to relevant trade partners globally.
In a data-driven approach, decisions are made based on data instead of intuition.
Trove proudly offers its trovesentiment tool, which provides social listening capabilities to monitor, track and analyze every conversations online regarding your destination across text, video, image, and audio. Our trovesentiment tool offers actionable insights and competitive metrics.
Contact one of our expert advisors to know how you can make the most of our product and expertise to better drive your business forward to achieve a data-driven approach.