Ana Maria Alvarez Bujalil is E-Marketing Director at Grupo Posadas, one of the leading hotel companies in Latin America. Grupo Posadas owns a number of hotel chains such as Caesar Park, Fiesta Americana, and Fiesta Inn.
Customers are currently saturated with advertising, invitations, and other offers. This makes them reluctant to respond to the increasing flood of marketing messages. The most effective way for marketers to increase responses to their efforts is by offering their products and services directly to the people with the highest potential interest. The better directed, in terms of needs and interests, the greater the response of each effort. This means that customer demographics are not necessarily the most effective targeting criteria. Targeting customers based on interests was extremely expensive and difficult for marketers in the past. The Internet is now the best and cheapest way to do this efficiently and rapidly.
At Fiesta Americana we have some meaningful experiences with Internet targeting. During late 1997 we launched a banner ad campaign at Travelocity.com, a leading travel portal on the Internet. We thought that this site was the best for our hotels since its users are people interested in travel. However, being a bit more ambitious with our targeting, we asked Double Click, the company that sells banners for Travelocity, to show our banners only to people requesting information about the seven most popular destinations in Mexico. We started with three different banners. Studying the performance was very easy since Double Click has an online tracking system that allows clients to see the number of impressions and clicks for every banner, destination, time, day, and so forth. After doing some tracking we realized that we could include more filters to increase the click-through rate, which was averaging 1%. Using trial and error we narrowed the audience to people who met the following criteria: They had already bought an air ticket to Cancun, they were coming from the seven eastern United States, they were using only the latest version of Explorer or Netscape, and they were browsing only between 2 P.M. and 7 P.M. Monday through Wednesday. We used these criteria because each iteration increased click-through rates.
We continually experimented with the banners until we reached the one with the highest response rate from people wanting to stay in Cancun, Mexico. The result of this narrow targeting was an increase of 1,275% in the click-through rate: It jumped from 0.8% to 10.2%. This not only represented a greater number of people coming to our Fiesta Americana Web site, but these represented better prospects for purchasing
0 komentar