Wednesday, November 26, 2003

Ecademy - Positioning Club Newsletter: 16 Nov 2003

Answers to this would help with SEO also...

It is a traditional marketing strategy process, and one that every business, large and small, needs to execute if they want to maximise their revenue and their return on marketing spend. The steps are:

1. What is your marketing strategy issue?
2. Are you working in a single market space?
3. What is your USP (unique selling proposition)?
4. What segments will you target?
5. What are the benefits of your service/product?
6. What position will you choose?
7. What are your optimal routes to market?

Have a go at answering these questions for your own business or profession and if you don’t have answers, add your business to the participants thread and we’ll work through it together.

Google

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Travel agents sent packing: "The death of the travel agent came a step nearer yesterday when figures revealed most tourists now prefer to go it alone.

Budget airlines and the Internet have seen a boom in DIY holidays, where travellers organise their own flights, accommodation and extras separately, often at a cheaper rate...

a third of British travellers use the Internet to research or book trips, "

Google

Priceline.com: A guide to manipulating the media: "As well as capturing the heady euphoria of the Internet boom, Denny Hatch's 'PRICELINE.COM: A Layman's Guide to Manipulating the Media' is also a textbook on the art of public relations when taking a company public. "

Google

Old people like the internet: "November 17, 2003 | The number of silver surfers has risen by nearly a third in the last year, with the UK having the second highest proportion in Europe, according to new figures."

silicon.com - Old people like the internet: "Tom Ewing, market analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings, said in a statement that older internet users are still not being effectively targeted by marketers and websites.
'Site owners have an opportunity to promote their products and services to this growing audience, many of whom are already organising their finances and booking holidays online. However, they do need to research their audience in order to tailor their sites, products and services more carefully,� he said. "

Google

Friday, November 14, 2003

News: "European pay-per-click search network Espotting has ousted its major rival Overture to win a high profile deal with ITV to provide paid listings across the broadcaster's entire network of websites."

Google

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

As some will be aware P and I have been at the World Travel Mart in Docklands for the past two days. Things have gone extremely well:

First of all we signed the deal with Active Hotels to put 3000 accommodation providers on the site, excellent deals for the users and cracking coverage all over the country. Sime should be loading them up soon; it’ll add a massive amount of content to the site. Better prices than lastminute.com in 80% of cases also.

We’ve changed the sales strategy also. All non-accommodation businesses can go on totaltravel for FREE. That means every restaurant, pub, attraction and everything else will be able to get their own site for nothing. You may think we’ve lost the plot but the reasons are as follows;

Our new extranet means that the businesses can build their own listing – see here Inverlochy Castle: "Inverlochy Castle " for a nice example, we’ll charge for building it if they can’t but it’s very easy and very

The site will get lots more businesses on there making it far more useful to the user

The site gets lots more pages registered with Google and other search engines and therefore comes up in far more search engine results pages – more traffic.

We’ll sell more room nights because of the extra traffic.

The site will be unique - no other site will have the same breadth of content.

The industry loves us and is talking about us already. An excellent viral marketing strategy opportunity. It makes an excellent story, the industry press were very interested in our site today and are very keen on doing a story or two.

We’re getting some marvellous discounts because the advertising is free.

These businesses are more open to linking to our site increasing our rankings in the search engines.

Anyway to prove the point, we’ve got the following coming on board this week – this is just the start.

English heritage – 120 properties

Historic Scotland – 80 properties

National Trust – 650 properties (75% there, we need to follow up but confident they’ll be right)

25 welsh castles, 35 welsh golf courses, 40 properties from the loch ness region, 55 businesses in Docklands, London, the imperial war museums (6 of em I think from memory), Historic Royal Palaces (Hampton Court, Kensington Palace, Tower of London, Kew palace, Kew Gardens), Houses of Parliament, St Paul’s Cathedral. We’ve also got some mega discounts coming from the likes of Alton Towers, Madam Tusauds, London Eye, Warwick Castle, Thorpe Park, Shakespeare’s Globe and loads of others.

I’ve also arranged for our information to be sent out to over 50 tourist authorities like Belfast, Carmarthenshire, Somerset. They will include the free listing information in their newsletters to members

We need to get a load of restaurants, bars, clubs and other entertainment on there also. We’ll probably speak to the restaurant association about getting the message to their members. We should think about getting shops on there too as everyone goes shopping whilst on their jollies.

We’ve got some cracking search engine friendly links from these guys websites lined up too.

All good stuff.

If you know anyone with a business that would benefit from a free listing send through the details. And if any associations or other ‘bodies’ where we can get an efficient hit, come to mind, let me know. It’s looking good. We’re relying on selling rooms but if we get anywhere near the average conversion figs that Active Hotels have given us, we’ll be sweet and we’ll have by far the best travel website on the internet.

On another note Pete went round and introduced himself to the tourism authorities for the next 14 countries we intend to go at next year. He got their details, told them a little about us whilst sussing out who will help us and who won’t. Some are very keen for us to get started others like the Dutch and the Germans (who make money from their own websites) were not so welcoming and a little perturbed. At least we know our enemy now. He had one very scrumptious meeting with the Chairwomen of the ETC (European Tourist Commission) who is very keen for us to do a presentation to their new ‘body’ with regards to talking about a new European website project that we may be able to get involved in.

As soon as the hotels are loaded up, the members login and booking process sorted we’ll be going live and setting up the default totaltravel.com home page to link off to the GB, AU, NZ and soon to be Ireland, sites. We need to get this all done soon and start making some real money. Then the fun will really begin.

Very exciting times I reckon.


Google

Apple marketing story:
Making Marketing Matter: Creating Customer Focus with Overture�s Matt Strain: "working for Apple Computer in Hong Kong in the late �80s where I was hired to grow Apple�s education market. The university computer departments and chancellors were staffed with professional who had been in the field longer than I had been alive. I was selling against �safe� products�IBM�and against competition with much deeper resources.
There are two things that turned this around. I invited one senior representative from each of the five universities (the head of the computer science department or the chancellor of the university) to attend Apple�s University Consortium in Australia. Wives were also invited. This was a meeting attended by the computer science heads from the world�s leading universities.
So, instead of being the new kid on the block selling a risky product, in one case I watched the head of Carnegie Mellon�s computing initiative berate the head of one of Hong Kong�s leading universities for not having a Macintosh lab. The conversation was not about products but about philosophical approaches to education, to offering choice, to being on the cutting edge.
As a follow up to this, I identified individual professors within each of the universities who had a passion for combining education and technology. Within the year, we had Macintosh labs in each of the institutions with teachers and students committed to developing on the platform.
The lesson: leveraging influencers and focusing on customer with passion to help evangelize products. "

Google

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

FREE email list of 2.5M UK consumers! : e-consultancy.com: "So you want to spam the UK?

No problem. Just remember to budget for legal fees, a £5000 fine, & extradition (if you're overseas).

For those that don't know, the new UK anti-spam law comes into effect on 11th December. And about time too! "

Google

Maybe??
Case study search : e-consultancy.com: "We are creating a collection of case studies for UkOnlineForBusiness (http://www.ukonlineforbusiness.gov.uk), to show how technology can transform business effectiveness.

If your company has done something exciting, or if one of your clients has done something exciting with your technology, and you want it to be promoted on http://www.ukonlineforbusiness.gov.uk then please get in touch with felicia@netimperative.com. "

Google

Monday, November 10, 2003

UK online market dominated by 'big hitters' - 07 Nov 2003: "Travel websites that dominated the UK market in the first half of this year aren't being pushed out by newer rivals, according to results released by internet monitors, Hitwise.

In the airline category, EasyJet, Ryanair, British Airways and bmibaby take the top four slots (in that order) for most UK visits to airline websites in quarter 3, the same positions they took in quarter 2.

The results for the agency websites tell a similar story with lastminute.com, expedia.com, teletextholidays.co.uk and uk.mytravel.com holding off competition from the likes of cheapflights.co.uk and thomson-holidays.com.

In the top four positions for number of visits to destination and accommodation websites, lastminute takes the top slot again, followed by activehotels.com, holidaysuncovered.co.uk and superbreak.com.

Commenting on the results, Hitwise marketing manager, Jannie Cahill told TravelMole: 'The results are quite consistent at the top of the tables. The reason for this is because these bigger companies are spending a lot of money on advertising.

'On the other hand, there are other websites, like cheapflights moving up the rackings that aren't spending as much on advertising, and are getting more visits through customer loyalty; and that is good to see.'"

Google

Friday, November 07, 2003

The E-commerce for the Travel Industry Forum: "Latest inbound tourism figures released today for the three months to September 2003 suggest that visitors from North America are beginning to travel again and September alone saw a 14% increase compared to the same month in 2002. This has contributed to a rise of 2% in overall visits and 1% in overall spend for the latest quarter. (11/7/2003)"

Google
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