Brand Standards, SEO Tactics and Feedback

Travel marketers lax on brand standards

Travel brands appear to be moving targets for many destinations and resorts. We were disappointed that as much as a quarter of the marketers surveyed don’t have brand standards to help guide marketing decisions and brand executions. Another quarter of respondents have brand standards, but don’t have a person or persons assigned responsibility for monitoring consistency of the visual identity and marketing messages. In all, less than half of respondents have clearly defined brand standards AND personnel assigned to monitor compliance.

Basic search strategies are marketing staples

We were encouraged to see that about 60% of travel brands employ basic search strategies to improve the visibility of their destinations on the web. More than half use Google Analytics, targeted keywords and links to improve traffic to their sites. These results provide further evidence of the travel industry’s increasing maturity and sophistication in using the Internet as a marketing tool. Still, 16% of respondents ignored search as an opportunity to influence the purchase decisions.

Marketing metrics too often ignored

While nearly all respondents claim they know how to track results, more than half of them aren't measuring results and adapting their strategies accordingly. Responding to feedback is a powerful way to exploit successes and reduce wasted effort, so why the failure in execution? It may be caused by a lack of planning or failure to define expectations at the outset of a project. Without goals, it’s hard to know what to measure or what constitutes a successful response.