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At this year’s Search Engine Strategies: New York, there’s going to be a special vertical track – with a different approach from previous ‘vertical search’ sessions held in the past. I am currently putting together the panel for this session:
Four Paths to Success in a Tough Travel Economy
Travel marketers discuss the challenges of smart search marketing in tough economic times, when leisure travelers are hard to come by and businesses slash budgets. Experts in four key areas of travel search marketing – Organic, Paid, Social and Local/Mobile – share successful strategies and creative campaign ideas to attract and increase traffic, proving that it is possible to generate positive ROI with limited resources.
It’s a lot of content to shove into a session, but given the current economy, so many travel search marketers are looking for ways to make the most of their budgets, particularly if their funding dries up, or it becomes more difficult to secure dollars and/or time commitments to activities that are more difficult to show actual profits on (aka, social media). More importantly, some marketers are just trying to make sure they keep their jobs, and don’t suffer the same fate as thousands of other laid-off Americans.
Sure, some search marketers might argue that we’re even more valuable in tough economic times, as Organic SEO & SEM (paid search advertising) activities typically generate some of the best ROI.
SMO (social media optimization) has a slightly harder case to make on the ROI front, but since it’s the hot new trend and everyone wants to run a program, it’s got to be included as one of the four major strategies. The trouble is, most marketers a) have a hard time proving its worth or b) focusing on the right social platforms and maximizing the value out of social campaigns.
Local & Mobile search still lags behind the other areas in terms of overall volume, yet it’s one area that many travel related businesses still don’t optimize fully, and it’s become even more important as some tourism based businesses need to attract ‘local’ customers, or those within reasonable ‘drive-to’ distances.
One final note on this session: Yes, I’ll take some pitches for speakers, but I’ve already got a few invites out there to a couple of brilliant travel marketers that I would love to have participate in this session. Ideally, I would prefer to have an entire panel of in-house travel marketers talk about specific tactics & strategies they’ve employed successfully (or even not- we all learn from failure as well) in each area. But I may also consider a couple of expert consultants with solid case studies as well.
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