Braving new frontiers: five pointers to help travel brands in 2013

Nobody said it was going to be easy for online travel businesses and it isn’t. EyeforTravel has been hearing from some of our top speakers at this year’s Travel Distribution Summit Europe to find out what keeps them on their toes and awake at night.

In this multichannel, digital world, the landscape continues to shift and change. Newcomers pop up daily and entrenched players are upping their game with new products and services. Mobile transactions will soon be mainstream, the technology is here to truly deliver on the promise of ‘big data’ and driving compelling, personal and relevant messages to the customers’ device of choice is no longer a nice to have. Let’s take a closer look at the big issues this coming year? 

Small Businesses Use E-Books to Build Their Brands

After 25 years in business, Ziva Jewels decided to bring its designs directly to consumers via online sales. But the personal service customers found in the retailer's stores didn't translate well online: Despite spending an hour or more with customers on live chat to educate them about diamonds and gemstones, the effort failed to generate new sales.

"Without pictures and diagrams, it was hard to get across the important points about buying fine jewelry," says Felicia Ceballos-Marroquin, Ziva Jewels's marketing director.

Ziva's solution? Create an e-book to educate and keep customers engaged with the brand. 

Why Content Marketing is Not Branding

It would appear that our buzzword du jour is “content marketing.”

You might have noticed that they talk about it a lot here on Copyblogger.

(If you haven’t noticed that, you’re either new or you don’t pay attention very well.)

At a gathering in Boston recently, I threw out this one: “Content marketing is weaponized storytelling.”

It got a lot of retweets. And now, weeks later, I don’t really know if I even agree with that.

But I do believe that content marketing is a lot more like sales than it is that dubious (and yet somewhat important) word “branding.”

Here’s what I mean by that. 

Οι τάσεις που θα κυριαρχήσουν στο brand marketing το 2013

Οι τάσεις μάρκετινγκ που μπορεί να δημιουργήσουν σημαντικές ευκαιρίες ή να αποτελέσουν μεγάλες προκλήσεις για το brand marketing αυτή τη χρονιά καταγράφηκαν από τους ειδικούς του χώρου. Πόσοι άραγε είναι έτοιμοι γι αυτές;

Λογοδοσία

H διαχείριση της φήμης στα social media δεν ήταν ποτέ πιο σημαντική, η διαφάνεια για κάθε brand είναι κρίσιμη. Το 2013 ακόμη και το μικρότερο λάθος μπορεί να γίνει ένα τεράστιο πρόβλημα δημοσίων σχέσεων. Οι άνθρωποι του μάρκετινγκ θα πρέπει να είναι έτοιμοι με σχέδια αντιμετώπισης δυνητικών προβλημάτων για να προστατεύσουν τη φήμη της μάρκας τους. 

Villa del Palmar Slam Dunks New Branding Campaign

It's a bitter cold Sunday night here in Kansas, sitting in my home office and I'm reminiscing of my trip to Villa del Palmar in October. Villa del Palmar resorts are geared towards families and couples, but I must admit as a traveling party of one I found it to be very enjoyable. I was invited to tour Villa del Palmar to experience everything that the resort had to offer and to be given a sneak peek into their latest branding campaign. A campaign that was appropriately entitled "Your Story Starts Here." I had no idea how true that statement would be for me when I exited off of the plane on that Thursday afternoon.

Perhaps you are wondering what my trip has to do with marketing, ironically enough it has everything to do with marketing from a branding perspective. If you have participated in my branding course you know that your brand is what your customers perceive about you and how you make them feel. I'm going to share with you how one company not only successfully drafted a branding campaign, but delivered on it as well.

Οι τάσεις που θα κυριαρχήσουν στο brand marketing το 2013

Οι τάσεις μάρκετινγκ που μπορεί να δημιουργήσουν σημαντικές ευκαιρίες ή να αποτελέσουν μεγάλες προκλήσεις για το brand marketing αυτή τη χρονιά καταγράφηκαν από τους ειδικούς του χώρου. Πόσοι άραγε είναι έτοιμοι γι αυτές;

Λογοδοσία

H διαχείριση της φήμης στα social media δεν ήταν ποτέ πιο σημαντική, η διαφάνεια για κάθε brand είναι κρίσιμη. Το 2013 ακόμη και το μικρότερο λάθος μπορεί να γίνει ένα τεράστιο πρόβλημα δημοσίων σχέσεων. Οι άνθρωποι του μάρκετινγκ θα πρέπει να είναι έτοιμοι με σχέδια αντιμετώπισης δυνητικών προβλημάτων για να προστατεύσουν τη φήμη της μάρκας τους.

Brand Positioning For Professional Services Brands

Unlike product brands that you can pick off the shelf or take for a test-drive, most professional services organizations sell an intangible. The product cannot be fully “experienced” until it’s purchased. That intangible is usually a promise to produce a desired future outcome that improves the condition of the customer.

Professional services are sold on reputation and trust, and a strong brand establishes these qualities in the minds of prospects. The prospect buys into the promise based on their level of trust with the provider. For this reason, brand building for professional services companies is often more critical to building business value than for product brands.

In an age where most service brands are price driven commodities, professional services brands have to be positioned in the minds of customers with razor sharp precision. To be effective in creating relevant differentiation for their brand, marketers of professional service brands have to be thinking about building cathedrals in the minds of their target customers, rather than providing bricks (services) to them.

Brand & Internet Marketing

Οι μεγάλες μάρκες δημιουργούνται με Μεθοδολογία
Τα δημοφιλή Εμπορικά Σήματα και οι μεγάλες επιχειρήσεις δεν δημιουργούνται έτσι απλά. Είναι αποτέλεσμα σκέψης και ανάλυσης, όπου δημιουργικές ιδέες συλλαμβάνονται και υλοποιούνται με μεθοδολογία.
Η επαναλαμβανόμενη στρατηγική που απαιτεί η μεθοδολογία, παράγει αποτελέσματα υψηλής ποιότητας.

Οι 5 βασικοί κανόνες του Branding και του Internet Marketing

1o βήμα: Να είστε διαφορετικοί
Ότι και να πραγματεύει η επιχείρησή σας πρέπει κατ' αρχάς να χτίσετε το εμπορικό σας σήμα. Δώστε στην μάρκα σας νόημα για κάτι σημαντικό και προπάντων διαφορετικό.
Οι πελάτες και οι συνεργάτες σας, έλκονται από τη δύναμη της μάρκας. Ένα ισχυρό εμπορικό σήμα, με νόημα, έχει μεγαλύτερη διοχεύτεση στο Internet και όλες οι εμπορικές δραστηριότητες της εταιρείας θα παράγουν καλύτερα αποτελέσματα με υψηλή απόδοση.

Communicating your Brand’s Story through Marketing Automation

You can use the fanciest of tools marketing automation has to offer (and most of you do), but if your brand isn’t being showcased as a part of your messaging, you’re missing the mark. The question then becomes, how do you tell a story that speaks to buyers but also conveys what your brand’s personality really is? Look around at some of the companies who are marketing to you.  Likely there are some you identify with that have a strong sense of who they are, while others, not so much.  Recently we saw an interesting battle of brands – Apple vs. Samsung.  Now that battle had nothing to do with public opinion, but as the two squared off you could certainly see the contrast between the two organizations.  Apple markets its products under the umbrella of its brands perception – and wins because of it.  Samsung, well, I simply don’t know what that perception is as they haven’t communicated their brand story quite as well.  How buyers see your organization matters, and for that reason we still have to consider brand – even in modern day conversational marketing.

Grow your social community through constant measurement

The best branded social communities will never be of the “set it and forget it” type. A community on a brand site is a living thing – requiring ongoing measurement and refinement to grow and remain successful.

Align social goals to existing business goals

Business goals for social communities should always match the existing goals for the site. Conversation for conversation’s sake is not a goal. Forget meaningless vanity metrics like fan and follower count. Instead, determine what you’d most like visitors to do, then measure your community’s impact on those metrics.

Discover and Crush Your Brand Barriers

When creating your brand strategy for a product or service it is important to perform a careful analysis to determine principal barriers that you may come in contact with. These barriers are also known as market conditions that can keep your product or service from achieving success.

For example they could include the following:

Competition
Timing
Financing
Location
Lack of Demand
In order to be prepared to face these obstacles or barriers it is important to spend time doing a careful analysis of your product or service. This analysis will assist you not only in the development of your brand, but also in the positioning of your product or service.

4 Steps to Better Understand Your Brand's Social Media Relationships

Many brands have moved beyond dabbling in social media to implementing more in-depth social media strategies that require more resources. With more resources comes more scrutiny.

A well thought out social media strategy isn't complete unless there is a plan in place to measure the results. This is where many brands get tripped up because they aren't sure how to bring all the required data together for accurate analysis. One aspect of the analysis should be to focus on understanding the relationships your brand has with individuals and how these relationships grow over time.

Entering the Ongoing Era of the Strategist

McKinsey management consultancy released a couple of papers in July which essentially said that in times of pervasive, ongoing uncertainty a company’s top management team needed to spend a lot more time, more often on strategy. Problem was that many of the top managers weren’t equipped to develop and implement strategies.

Where ad spend is growing and what it means for your brand

Nielsen ‘s Global Advertising Trends, Q1 2012 report was released revealing three key trends that will a profound impact on your business.

1. On the global level, the web is leading advertising growth. What’s more, the two categories that showed the smallest growth were the two mainstays of traditional media – television with only 2.8% growth and magazines advertising that actually shrunk by 1.4%.

Branding Your Business Through Social Media - 3 Keys to Getting Started

Gone are the days when having a highly ranked web site was enough to make waves and attract new business. Just like people, company brands now need to communciate, to "network" and to reach out beyond their normal comfort zone.

This shift means moving from the two dimensional apect of a static web site, to the three dimensional realm of engagement and interaction. It starts by identifying the type of social media sites that best reach your target audience. Here's how to start...

PR Disasters: Prevent Them by Monitoring Your Brand Before Crises Happen!

Ignoring a brand crisis can REALLY cost you – as United Airlines found out. Their refusal to take responsibility resulted in a loss of an estimated $180 MILLION!

Some PR agents think of PR from one campaign to the next, but this is the wrong approach for the social media era. Your brand is constantly changing as people talk about it on social media and this is often where crises originate.

    PR disasters are just as often the result of a slow accumulation of dissatisfaction that boils over as they are the result of sudden, unexpected catastrophes.

5 Ways to Monitor Your Brand’s Effectiveness

Building a brand isn’t solely about numbers and figures. It’s about attracting an audience that will be an asset throughout your brand’s lifetime. Unfortunately, for a brand to be successful today, it has to distinguish itself amid the noise of thousands of others vying for attention on the same platforms.

With venues like Twitter and Facebook already flooded with brand marketers, how can you ensure that any outreach you do on behalf of your brand is actually working? Here are five ways to measure and monitor your brand’s effectiveness online.

1. Are You Engaging Your Fans?

Successful Brands Care: The Case for Cause Marketing

As the call to action for community service and helping others becomes more vocal, it is apparent that many non-profit organizations would not be successful without the support of businesses and their brands. But is the benefit reciprocal? Nielsen conducted a global study in March trying to determine that very question. Does cause marketing—the use of social and environmental efforts to build a brand and increase profits—work? There is, the study found, certainly a segment of consumers who are socially conscious and do care.

Large Retailers Say Social’s Biz Impact On Par With E-Commerce

When asked about the digital marketing channels having the greatest impact on their businesses, 58% of senior executives working for large retailers point to social media, per KPMG survey results [pdf] released in June 2012. Interestingly, this puts social media’s impact on par with online shopping, which was cited by 59% of the respondents. It also means that more retailers see social media as having had a great impact on their business than email campaigns (49%), mobile shopping (36%), and mobile promotions (28%).

Who Knows Your Brand Promise?

Back in March, I wrote a piece on change and on how I believed CEOs aren't interested in change. Last week, I wrote about how CEOs are the brand champions and how the buck stops with them. I followed that up with a post asking CEOs if they put themselves out there, if they stand behind and in front of their brands. As of this moment, I have only received one response to that challenge.Anet

So now I want to know, what about your brand promise? Are CEOs talking about it? Is it guiding and driving strategy?

I've written about brand promise many times in the past, but today I want to know some brand promises and which companies broadcast their promises to their employees and their customers.