SINGAPORE: The four Cs of marketing in luxury travel are “content, content, content and content”, according to a senior marketing expert in the area.
“We don’t look at content as just one part of marketing,” said Ravish Doctor, growth marketing head of Asia for Luxury Escapes, at the Digital PR Strategies conference in Singapore recently. “Content is who we are, and our content strategy has helped build us a US$251m (AU$350m) business.
That’s the decision that we took as a brand when we started off: how to use content to make money and to sell our products,” he added, (For more, read WARC’s report: Content and customer personas drive luxury travel.)
Every week, about 10 to 15 new travel deals – each fueled by a unique campaign with content linked to a hotel, such as destination guides – go live on the Luxury Escapes website. Each hotel deal that runs sets out to address the specific challenges of each property, such as increasing F&B revenue, attracting more weekend bookings, or having longer stays.
Doctor advises brands in the category to look at their customer segmentation and create highly-specific customer personas to make their content strategies more relevant and interesting to core target groups.
Looking at luxury travel as a “seven-step process” that starts with dreaming and searching, to booking the trip and anticipating, to traveling and being at the destination, and sharing about the experience afterwards, Luxury Escapes creates content for each stage with the help of content categories and segmentation.
“What we’ve done now, with a few partners, is to look at our data even more granularly, and come up with four distinct segments and create content for each of these four segments,” said Doctor, who noted the company’s segments are roughly split by age group, family commitments and disposable income.
The average Luxury Escapes customer is thought to be a 45-year-old Australian female who is digitally savvy, always on her mobile, consumes lifestyle content, and loves travel and food. However, 59% of Australian couples who took a holiday together last year through Luxury Escapes were aged 50 and older – offline media such as TV, print and physical stores are still important to this demographic alongside the digital content.
“We want to start handholding customers right from the first segment and then move them gradually for the next segment,” he said.
“We don’t look at content as just one part of marketing,” said Ravish Doctor, growth marketing head of Asia for Luxury Escapes, at the Digital PR Strategies conference in Singapore recently. “Content is who we are, and our content strategy has helped build us a US$251m (AU$350m) business.
That’s the decision that we took as a brand when we started off: how to use content to make money and to sell our products,” he added, (For more, read WARC’s report: Content and customer personas drive luxury travel.)
Every week, about 10 to 15 new travel deals – each fueled by a unique campaign with content linked to a hotel, such as destination guides – go live on the Luxury Escapes website. Each hotel deal that runs sets out to address the specific challenges of each property, such as increasing F&B revenue, attracting more weekend bookings, or having longer stays.
Doctor advises brands in the category to look at their customer segmentation and create highly-specific customer personas to make their content strategies more relevant and interesting to core target groups.
Looking at luxury travel as a “seven-step process” that starts with dreaming and searching, to booking the trip and anticipating, to traveling and being at the destination, and sharing about the experience afterwards, Luxury Escapes creates content for each stage with the help of content categories and segmentation.
“What we’ve done now, with a few partners, is to look at our data even more granularly, and come up with four distinct segments and create content for each of these four segments,” said Doctor, who noted the company’s segments are roughly split by age group, family commitments and disposable income.
The average Luxury Escapes customer is thought to be a 45-year-old Australian female who is digitally savvy, always on her mobile, consumes lifestyle content, and loves travel and food. However, 59% of Australian couples who took a holiday together last year through Luxury Escapes were aged 50 and older – offline media such as TV, print and physical stores are still important to this demographic alongside the digital content.
“We want to start handholding customers right from the first segment and then move them gradually for the next segment,” he said.
Sourced from WARC
