Logically speaking, the more people that visit your website, the more chances you have to make a sale â€" not necessarily, Best Western’s Alexander Birk insisted at the Berlin ITB Convention.
“We have been trying for years to convince our executives to invest in driving up traffic numbers,” Birk said. “So now that we are suggesting a strategy that will decrease the overall visitors, it’s a bit of a shock.”
The method behind the madness is to reach the right audience, therefore generating a higher conversion rate.
According to Brik, 88 percent of visitors leave a travel site without making a booking and 75 percent never return. But by targeting the right customers and keeping a close eye on data to see how they shop, hotels can flip these figures.
“We have different banner ads for different data categories,” Birk said. “We see who is about to leave the website and for some we offer a discount, others an upgrade.”
Instead of wasting money, time and resources on a catchall solution, it's much easier to work with people who are already inclined to want your product.
He added that a good marketer can be where the customer is, but a great marketer knows where the customer is about to go. This decreases the chance that a customer will end up choosing a competitor for the service they are looking for.
Although customers have started to become immune to traditional advertising, the way to make strategies like banner ads work is to find out what consumers want.
This is strictly an exclusive feature, reprints of this article in any shape or form without prior written approval from 4Hoteliers.com is not permitted.
