World Travel Market - How UGC Fuels Travel Bookings
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At this World Travel Market event, Stackla's Andy Mallison shares why social media and user-generated content (UGC) are the future of travel marketing.
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World Travel Market - How UGC Fuels Travel Bookings
- 1. Curate don’t Create How UGC fuels the travel booking cycle Andy Mallinson Managing Director, Stackla @andymall, @stackla andy.mallinson@stackla.com
- 2. 2Netgear Proposal Stackla is the UGC marketing platform of choice for the world’s leading travel brands.
- 3. 3Netgear Proposal The future of travel marketing is already here… Curate don’t create
- 4. 4Netgear Proposal Authenticity Personalisation at scale Reduced creation costs
- 5. There’s been a dramatic shift in consumer behaviour…
- 6. 6Netgear ProposalBrands created content for consumers Back then Consumers create content for brands But now
- 7. 7Netgear Proposal Brand-generated content is being ignored Brands are spending more year-over-year increase in brand created content 3X For less return of all brand created content gets noticed 5% *Beckon Research
- 8. 8Netgear Proposal User-generated content is getting noticed of purchase decisions are peer influenced 81% Drive sales of consumers trust earned media more than owned media 92% Strengthen consumer trust *Nielsen *Forbes
- 9. 9Netgear Proposal 2.5 Billion pieces of user-generated content are created everyday
- 10. 10Netgear Proposal Authenticity Personalisation at scale Reduced creation costs
- 11. 11Netgear Proposal “Big Data meet Big Content”
- 12. 12Netgear Proposal Africa Under 35 Hiking Personalisation + Content Scalability Maximise “Big Data” with Stackla’s “Big Content”
- 13. 13Netgear Proposal Machine learning-powered predictive recommendations help you continually • Improve content performance • Reduce curation time • Personalise experiences at scale Better content. Less effort. Managing Content at Scale Always (Machine) Learning
- 14. 14Netgear Proposal Managing Content at Scale Always (Machine) Learning Family Blue Sky Clouds Mountains Safe For Work Snow Skiing Stackla Co-Pilot Recommendation Engine 1 Scans, evaluates and tags content composition. 2 Matches image evaluation with previous moderation choices 3 Analyses content performance Co-Pilot creates real-time predictive recommendations on what content you should publish, discard, tag and rights manage.
- 15. 15Netgear Proposal Authenticity Personalisation at scale Reduced creation costs
- 16. “Real visitor photos are more relatable and credible with potential travellers than expensive professional photography.” Aida Merdovic, Director of Online, More effective and impactful social ads, display ads and digital billboards @MaartenDanial
- 17. @MaartenDanial 3x 66% Higher click-through rates than their branded Facebook ads Hamilton Island achieved: lower cost per click compared to their branded Facebook ads More effective and impactful social ads, display ads and digital billboards
- 18. @ahisgett "Using the amazing photos from our visitors provides us with a real time stream of beautiful, fresh imagery and authentic endorsements. This allows us to show how it feels to be in Scotland, and helps our site visitors to project themselves into the experience. UGC is not only effective but it has the added benefit of significantly reducing our content creation costs.” Esther Gould, Digital Customer Experience Manager Reduced content creation costs
- 21. Download your free UGC guide at stackla.com Andy Mallinson Managing Director, Stackla @andymall, @stackla andy.mallinson@stackla.com
Editor's Notes
- Thank you. The purpose of today’s presentation to tell you about the powerful role that UGC can play in your marketing strategy and how it can fuel the entire booking cycle from inspiration through to purchase and back around again.
- For a quick bit of background, Stackla is a enterprise grade content platform that specialises in User-Generated Content enabling our clients to harness the authenticity of their customers’ content, typically but not exclusively social content, and use it across all of their customer touchpoints such as web, email, digital billboards, social ads etc. Our platform is used by over 450 brands around the world and Travel is a particular sweet spot for both UGC and for Stackla.
- So my specific focus in this discussion today is about travel marketing and the role that technology plays in that. Even more specifically it is about User Generated content and how technology is helping brands connect authentically with their audience and customers. My argument is that the future is already here. Only last month Visit Scotland opened the World’s first Instagram only travel agency powered exclusively by User Generated Content…harnessed by the Stackla UGC platform of course! So I would like to propose that in the future, and by that I actually mean now, travel brands need to stop Creating and start Curating. Harness that amazing content that is being posted by the likes of you and I. Instead of relying on traditional brand-centric marketing, usher in a new era of customer-centric marketing where brands market with people as opposed to market at them.
- Now before all the brand marketers and content creators stand up and throw their iPhones at me, I am not suggesting that branded content doesn’t have a role, of course it does. It is about a blend of the two…but it simply wouldn’t have been as impactful if I said curate and create. However, if UGC isn’t part of your travel marketing plans in the next 12 months then you are in the minority. As I mentioned before…the future is already here. So in the next 10 mins I am going to explain why UGC is so powerful. There are many reasons why, but I am going to focus on just 3. [CLICK] Let’s start with Authenticity
- The past few years has seen a perfect storm happening. A collision of enabling technologies to create a well established sharing ecosystem. From iPhones and Go-Pros at the hardware end of the spectrum through to Twitter and Snapchat at the software end, the combination of these enablers mean that we are sharing our thoughts, photos, experiences and reviews at an ever increasing rate. And whilst the companies, networks and brands in this sharing ecosystem may come and go (Nokia, G+, Vine), the underlying cultural shift is here to stay.
- And Marketers are taking advantage of this. Historically brands have created ‘unreal’ ads with shiny happy people with perfectly white teeth, [CLICK] Whereas now shiny happy customers with perfectly white teach are making content for brands.
- But spending on branded content is going through the roof as brands are trying to keep up with the amount of content required to service the increasingly personalised messaging that is demanded by customers. More on that in a minute… The problem is that branded content is getting ignored. It is getting ignored by both the networks such as Twitter and Instagram who are increasingly using a pay to play model, and it is getting ignored by consumers who are demanding more authenticity and relevancy. more authenticity and relevancy.
- UGC on the other has is getting noticed, and not only is it getting noticed but it is driving trust, authenticity and ultimately sales. And it makes sense…People trust people more than brands because customer stories are genuine and believable. People are increasingly demanding highly personalised and relevant experiences and brand messages are not cutting through as they used to.
- Luckily there is a huge amount of content out there to take advantage of. 2.5 bn pieces ad ay at the last count apparently. Which brings me neatly onto the next benefit of UGC
- Discover : most social networks using hashtags, search terms, user names or even geo-location…dropping a pin on a hotel like this…which can be very interesting. Curate : this is where you organise and moderate content. Having enough content is not the problem…it is having too much. AI and Assisted moderation provides recommendations. For example Air France.. Display : All customer touchpoint, not just your website And of course analyse
- I talked earlier about the fact that as Marketers we are trying to have more of a 121 relationship with our customers. Big Data means that we have an almost infinite amount of information on our customers. But what is the point in having all that information if you only have enough content to do the very basic level of personalisation. Personalisation needs content. Big Data needs Big Content. UGC is not only authentic, but it allows you to do that at scale.
- And personalisation is no more important than in the travel industry. Travelers are inspired by experiences they can visualise themselves enjoying. The beauty of traveler-generated content, maybe we should call it TGC, is that its being created by every type of traveler you can imagine - all with vastly different styles and interests. By showing people experiences they can relate to… in other words, content generated by travellers with similar interest, tastes, profiles…then it ignites passion and drives action, and the results are exponentially better. And UGC can provide that content at scale without having to create it.
- And sticking with the them of content at scale, I talked earlier about how much UGC was out there. Which is a great thing. But it’s also a challenge in that you sometimes have too much content. And this is where an enterprise technology can help. It would be strange to have a presentation these days without an AI / Machine Learning slide. So here is mine. Using a predictive recommendation engine can help you filter or triage a huge volume of content and present to you a recommended set of content for you to publish. Freeing up time for marketers to focus on more strategic work. [CLICK]
- As you would imagine Stackla has a content recommendation engine. We call it Co-pilot. It uses automatic visual recognition to scan and auto tag images, including logo recognition and then matches it against posts that have been previously published by the client, learning all the time. In addition it analyses the performance of that content, such as views, clicks and shares and feeds that data into the machine! Clever right! One of our customers, Cirque de Soliel, ran tests and found that Co-pilot cut moderation time by 75% and meant that they could manage 10 times more content. As we say better content, less effort.
- Moving on to the final benefit of UGC…reduced costs. Since Stackla’s tag line is let your customers tell your story, I thought I would take a leaf out of our own book to demonstrate this.
- The first way of reducing costs using UGC is through more effective and impactful advertising. We have many customers including Air France, Crown Resorts and in this case Hamilton Island, successfully using UGC instead of branded content in social and display ads.
- When they AB tested UGC versus branded content they achieved 3x higher click through rates and a 2/3rds reduction in the cost per click. I think they call that a win win And the 2nd way of reducing costs is…
- …through reducing your content creation costs. Whether you are displaying real time feeds of beautiful content on your website or putting UGC into your email and digital billboards, UGC is not only effective but it is cost effective. And as I mentioned earlier, the demand for more personalised content and therefore more content is increasing, and it can get frighteningly expensive to create that ever increasing volume of content. Esther at Visit Scotland sums it up very nicely when she often tells us… “It’s impossible to take a bad picture of a castle and a loch in Scotland!”
- So finally, we discovered how powerful UGC is and that there are smart tools out there to help you filter the right sort of content for the right audience. The only thing left to say is…
- …that you can use that power to fuel the entire booking cycle. From the inspirational stage where Facebook ads and Digital out of home play a role, through to the research phase with UGC on each of your destination pages and that social advocacy at the point of booking, and then completing the cycle with sharing content back into the cycle, UGC has the ability to fuel that cycle and move your customers effectively from one section to the other.
- So thank you for your time. The future of travel marketing is already here…you just need to start curating rather than creating. My final plug is that we have just released a comprehensive guide to building an effective UGC strategy. It contains everything from how to start a UGC campaign, through to the metrics that you should be measuring and some real life case studies. It’s available at stackla.com And of course I look forward to the panel discussion where we can explore this in a bit more detail. Thank you.