Nurturing a relatively new brand, like BeMyGuest, in the fiercely-fought travel e-commerce category is a daunting task.

Not only does one continuously have to look at the growing clout of digital advertising and make the most of resulting data that is real-time and actionable, one also needs to decide when to go for offline campaigns to expand the reach of the brand.

A major challenge in the initial stages, however, is to establish the product’s unique value proposition and then to broaden the awareness funnel for the brand. This is the point at which one considers mass media options for step change and fast incremental reach.

Startups also face challenges relating to the fragmented media space and the number of devices being used today. Targeting and tracking takes its toll, and this is where astuteness and creativity comes in.

EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta caught up with Singapore-based Blanca Menchaca who is chief marketing officer and partner of BeMyGuest, an online marketplace for local tours and activities who shares insights about how to go about dealing with a fragmented media space, product improvement and attribution.

EFT: How challenging is it to develop an online marketplace for local tours and activities while recognising the stage of brand’s lifecycle?

BM: I’ve been fortunate enough to work mainly with new and online brands, so it has not been difficult to identify that they were in an introductory or growth stage. New brands are definitely a challenge, not many people will know them and you will receive a lot of criticism. It takes time to define brand values, tone of voice, colour schemes and even potential customers. As a marketer you need to be very resilient, learn to experiment fast and implement key findings effectively.

The niche we are currently working in ‘local tours and activities’ is definitely challenging because we’re not only trying to build a brand. We are trying to change the way the niche has done business traditionally. So we find ourselves spending as much time developing a B2C strategy as much as we do developing a B2B one.  

EFT: Considering the fragmented media space and the number of devices used today, does it require special effort to better understand the whole marketing funnel? 

BM: Let me highlight a couple of points.

·         Today it is impossible to track one customer across devices; you simply can’t follow a user from his desktop to his tablet and then to his mobile. So you do the next best thing, analyse what type of devices your customers are using the most, and focus on optimising their experience on those devices.

·         As for media, there are ad stacks (Google, Adobe) out there that can help you track various online media channels in one platform and have better control of multichannel attribution, but they won’t be able to quantify your offline media fully.

So you have to get creative and run offline campaigns that have an element that is traceable online for example with a promo-code or a dedicated landing page.  

EFT: How does data improve your online product offering on an ongoing basis?

BM: For a new brand with a limited pool of customer feedback, website analytics becomes probably the most important and reliable source of data. At BeMyGuest, we analyse every source of website traffic on an ongoing basis and utilise our findings to optimise the entire customer journey.  

EFT: How do you make the most of every digital interaction that your customer has with your brand?

BM: By having a consistent communications strategy across all media, owned, earned and paid. Visual and written content are everything for an online brand, they build the assets that your customers interact with all the time. So you really need to invest the time and effort to get them right.

EFT: When and where do you focus on improvements?

BM: We consistently look at bounce rate, time spent on page, percentage drop off rate, engagement rate, return visits, conversion rate and compare them with previous periods of time, especially if we have any UX design or marketing strategy changes.

EFT: What sort of benchmarks do you consider while improving your offering. For example, with mobile the talk of completing a transaction in few taps is quite common?

BM: Right now we are focusing on measuring the impact that our digital campaigns have on offline enquiries. It has been a very interesting exercise to use offline data to help optimise online campaigns.

EFT: The purchase window is shrinking. How ‘early’ can the customer acquisition journey for a brand start?

The purchase window is definitely shrinking for commoditised products such as hotels and flights, and precisely because they have been commoditised already dialogue will influence the buyer's decision very minimally. Price competitiveness, reward programmes and customer service will be the key drivers.

For a new online niche like ours, dialogue with our travel consultants is extremely sought after, especially for multiple day tour products. So the earlier you communicate with your customers the better your chances of conversion will be.

EFT: How do you prioritise your marketing initiatives?

BM: As a startup brand you need to be cost efficient. We give priority to channels that will give me the most bang for our buck. This doesn’t mean that we only focus on cheap media, or only on highly converting media like SEM. We have a mix of channels that combined will give achieve the reach and growth that we are after. There is no recipe that works for all and many times you need to rely on experience.   

EFT: What do you make of improvements in attribution? And how are you improving in this arena?

BM: I don’t think there have been any recent major breakthroughs in the subject, ad stacks are still limited and the best available option for brands with large budgets. For brands with limited budgets my best advice is to start with simple post-impression attribution analysis for display and social advertising and to use Google Analytics multichannel funnel reports to get a basic idea of how your marketing activities affect each other.