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An Introduction To Internet Marketing
It goes without saying that over the past decade the internet has fundamentally changed the way people buy products and services and the travel industry has been one of the main industries at the forefront of the internet’s growth.
It all started with early pioneers such as Expedia and of course the budget airlines. The big players in the industry began to realise the potential of the internet in the late 1990’s and today the dominant forces in the internet travel arena are a mix of the newer brands and established players.
Most travel companies have an online presence these days, however marketing your products and services on the internet involves much more than simply having a website and whilst many of the larger travel companies spend thousands (if not millions) on internet marketing, travel companies of every size can benefit from good and appropriate internet marketing and it needn’t cost the earth.
Over the coming weeks and months, I will be exploring the different ways you can build your online presence and market your business on the internet. We will cover all the main areas of internet marketing, which include: website design and development, search engine optimization, pay per click, email marketing and other online promotional elements such as affiliate marketing and online display advertising.
So where do we start? Well, whether you currently have a website or not, or whether you are currently using one or more of the ways of promoting your website online, the first thing to do is to take a step back and think about your business and how the internet can support what you are trying to achieve.
Not only will this ensure that what you do online fits with your overall business strategy but it will ensure that what you do online fits together.
The first step for many companies is to have a website built, yet a common mistake is to build a website without thinking about what they are trying to achieve with it and what spend on its design and development is commercially appropriate. As a result they may end up paying their website developer to develop costly functionality which has little commercial value or worse still may under-spend and not present the right image of their company.
Likewise, many companies make the common mistake of building their website without thinking about how they are going to promote it online. If you don’t have a big budget to drive paid for traffic to your site (whether via online or offline campaigns) it is crucial that you consider how you are going to maximise your chances of ranking highly on Google for natural search and to have your website built using techniques which support this goal.
We’ll cover these topics in more detail over the coming weeks, but until then sit back and have a think about your business and whether what you are doing online is working for you.
In particular, have a look at your website (and those of your competitors) and be honest as to whether it portrays the right messages about what your business offers. Also, have a look at your internet spend (including website design, hosting) and how many customers you think you have brought in through it. By looking at your cost per customer acquired, you can benchmark this against other ways in which you bring in customers.
Tim Harding
www.reallyusefulwebsites.co.uk
Tim Harding wrote this article for Travel Trade Gazzette, the leading travel industry trade publication.
Tim is Managing Director of Really Useful Websites Limited, an internet marketing company. Prior to launching Really Useful Websites Tim was Marketing Director at NCL and Senior Marketing Manager at Airtours Holidays.
