An industry practitioner interview with Rene Looper of GreaterSpeyside.com
During seven years in the hotel business, Rene Looper and Pamela van Ankeren frequently found it time consuming, and sometimes impossible, to advise guests on activities or events they could visit in the local area. They felt the lack of co-ordinated information impaired their ability to fully deliver a joined up customer experience
They also found a distinct lack of research into tourism in their local market. While most small businesses recognised the need to share information and work together towards a common goal, it was too complex and expensive to manage information individually. So after selling their hotel business, Rene and Pamela formed Tuminds Ltd, with the goal of tackling these challenges head on.
The result of a year’s research, development and hard work is www.greaterspeyside.com, which officially launched in early July 2007. Its objective – to promote and develop tourism in the Moray and Speyside area by delivering comprehensive and up-to-date tourist information and providing tourism businesses with IT advice, key information, statistics and benchmarking.
Why Tuminds are better than one
Rene and Pamela conducted their own research into the Moray and Speyside markets and found that while Speyside is a term that is associated with search engine activity of visitors, Moray is barely in visitors’ vocabulary. “So we decided to brand the site as Greater Speyside, rather than Moray – you can’t think about it in terms of administrative boundaries, you have to work to the perception of the visitor and in the vocabulary of the visitor.”
As you can see in this example that Highland Business Research has pulled together from Google Adword searches, the Speyside searches relate to whisky, tourism attractions and trails, whereas Moray is primarily domestic searches connected to council services and property.
Researching, understanding and focusing their online offering to their target market then communicating to that market in its own vocabulary is something Rene and Pamela have got absolutely right here. (I’m giving Rene a few weeks before I start grilling him about plans for internationalisation of the site!)
They’re also successfully building critical mass. As Rene explains, “90% of businesses here are small operators and many are not members of VisitScotland, so no one knows about them and no one searching centrally realises there is a anything in the area. Individually most businesses are not scoring high on search engines either. So the site is about presenting the whole package of attractions, events, accommodation and restaurants – the economies of scale mean that individual businesses gain more visibility than they ever could alone.”
What data sources are they working with?
Rene was an early small business adopter of website measurement, having attended one of the first analytics training courses run by Highland Business Research and then applying and developing his learning to really benefit his previous online business activity. So it is no surprise that web analytics tools like Nedstat and Google Analytics are a critical part of his current measurement arsenal.
Much of the focus is on using the web analytics tools to measure and drive insight into the behaviour of visitors to www.greaterspeyside.com in order to better understand visitors needs and interests across the local market. A lot of effort goes into analysis of travel related search terms and the volumes and conversion rates of different paid search terms. They’re supporting their web analytics data with tools such as Google Key Terms.
As Rene explains, “we can start to see a pattern of search terms by market interest and times of year – that kind of information we can feed back to the businesses. So if you’re a member, we can let you know that people are starting to search, for example on Christmas breaks, so you are ready and responding to what customers are interested in.” Essentially, they’re undertaking a form of simple segmentation and basic predictive analytics based on the visitors’ search cycle, the result of which strengthens competitiveness of the area as a tourist destination.
The data is showing how the potential tourist goes through the process of satisfying their basic hierarchy of information needs. In the case of greaterspeyside.com – just as is no doubt true elsewhere – people go through a needs satisfaction based pattern when searching on the site. First they research accommodation (the area of the site which has the most traffic). Then they look at attractions – a small handful of attractions appear in most people’s searches. Then visitors explore events and then finally food and drink options.
Often this process unfolds over a period of several weeks. (Research by Comscore has found that eighty-five percent of travel searchers reported that they completed a travel purchase either online or offline within 90 days of their initial search engine request).
As Rene rightly points out, with visitors taking such a holistic approach to their travel research process, it is important that a destination site links all these things and shares knowledge vital to the customer experience. Rene is constantly looking to find the words customers use and feedback this back to members. For example, the analytics shows that small businesses should be mentioning that they’re near Johnson of Elgin as that is one of the attractions that people are consistently searching the site for.
The logic? Use words your customers use and more potential customers will find you. Even at an individual business level it is important not just promote your business but tie it all together with reference to the other information needs of the visitor in order to satisfy (or at least reference) the elements of the whole visitor experience.
How are they using the information they have?
Rene is effectively channelling intelligence from Greaterspeyside.com back into the local market – enabling the tourism providers to easily access and utilise information that they wouldn’t have had time or budget to source alone.
He is also trying to open members’ eyes to the potential of benefits of a quality Internet presence. “Compared to a few years ago, tourism businesses are seeing trade being lost to those who are using the Internet well. They are becoming aware of the need, even if they don’t know how to rectify it – we can help our members with this.”
His activity is timely. 83% of US travellers used the Internet to research or book summer travel in 2006 (Source: Prospectiv CPI Poll, June, 2006) and figures for some key European markets are not far off this. The vast majority of travellers now research their trip online, even if they don’t book online. Research has found between 20% (Source Comscore) and one third (Source eMarketer/Prospectiv CPI Poll) book their travel offline, after first researching in online. Even if a business is not transacting online, they can’t afford to be missing from the visitors’ research process.
Rene is right to understand that the Internet is critical to the successful promotion of Greater Speyside. But by taking this further and pioneering a meaningful, analytics driven approach for the region that involves sharing and acting on knowledge, Tuminds might just be helping change the tourism map of Northern Scotland
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 10:30 am and is filed under Destination research, Industry interview, Online customer behaviour, Web analytics and web measurement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.