Understanding the characteristics of marketing channels will help businesses develop short-term and long-term strategies to cope with Covid-19. This is a question that many retailers discuss with Asia Lion. Clearly, this year they didn’t invest in advertising, not even a little on Google or Facebook, but they still received form submissions, emails, or direct calls from customers. To explain the reasons, let’s explore 3 channel groups: Paid, Earned, and Owned.
Paid, Earned, Owned
Paid media refers to paid advertising channels such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, TV advertising billboards, sponsored activities, and using money to push communications.
Owned media refers to channels that we build and own ourselves, such as company websites, YouTube channels, Facebook pages, email marketing systems, or even physical storefronts and company billboards.
Earned media & Paid media – Time-sensitive marketing channels
Earned media occurs when customers, press, and communities share your content voluntarily. Common examples include viral content, enthusiastic sharing of music videos, emotional or humorous clips, or content that evokes strong reactions.
Therefore, even if you cut advertising spending, you only lose the Paid media channel. If a travel industry company does not run any marketing activities, the Earned media group will also be lost. However, even then, you still have a group of customers who come to you through the Owned media channels. Is this the passive group of your company’s customers?
Owned media – Marketing channels in your hands
With Owned media, SEO (customers searching directly on your website), Referral (recommendations, websites linking to your company), and Direct traffic (customers typing your website name and accessing it directly) are the 3 traffic groups that customers passively access your travel business every day. It is not surprising if a business has thousands of passive visitors to its website every day through the SEO channel, or hundreds of people visiting from links on newspapers that mentioned your hotel or tour company. Additionally, if your business is a hotel, restaurant, or tour company with a good brand name that people remember, it is very normal for customers to actively seek you out through Direct traffic.
Below is the amount of active brand name searches for travel businesses in Vietnam. The higher the monthly search volume, the greater the brand recognition of your company. In Vietnam, many companies have good brands and become TOM of many tourists when they have travel needs. As shown in the chart below of domestic tour companies and OTA, Traveloka dominates with 332,000 active searches per month in Vietnam, equal to the next 14 positions combined, and surpassing many giants such as Vietravel, IVivu, and Saigontourist…
For the Ha Long Bay cruises, when checking brand name keywords, Indochina Junk is currently ranking first, followed by Paradise Cruise and Bhaya Cruise.
In Da Nang, Intercontinental Danang Sun Peninsula Resort is still a hot keyword with 5,700 direct searches in this period. Following it is Naman Retreat with 4,700 visitors per month and Hyatt Regency Danang with 2,400 visitors. If these interested and actively searching individuals can be converted into customers, the revenue would be significant.
Conclusion
Of course, there are many ways to measure success, but the ratio between brands makes us think. Many products still have visitors even without any promotion. Many products occupy important keywords through SEO, and even when the company has to cut advertising costs due to Covid, domestic customers still find them online. The result depends on the overall communication strategy of the business and the strength of the brand over time.
However, I know many businesses that have many searches, but their online customer conversion rate is still very low. This makes me wonder if businesses are exploiting the market through online channels, then is the online ordering experience of customers good enough? What can be done to increase the customer conversion rate in this Covid period with the lowest cost?
