Does a world without cookies sound scary to you? Aside from kids and cookie lovers, business owners and marketers will likely cry in a cookieless world. 

A “cookieless world” is a term brought by Google’s announcement that it will stop supporting third-party cookies on their Chrome browser going forward. Any data transferred with these cookies are therefore lost. This means marketers will have a hard time trying to track users on your website and their actions as there is no third-party cookie anymore. Without accepting cookies, your website analytics tools may not run at all, making any customer personalization and ads optimization unavailable. 

Preparing for a cookieless world is something most businesses will need to do sooner or later. Today Convert Digital would like to share some groundworks to prepare your business for this crucial change. 

1.Have a Proper Cookie Consent Bar

In line with international GDPR or Thailand’s PDPA, a cookie consent bar on any website is a MUST. If you don’t have this “cookie bar” already, ask your website developer to put it on the website to comply. If you are using WordPress, there are plug-ins to use for free. Note that if you use this consent bar and your website visitor does NOT click on “Accept”, chances are your website analytics tools will not run at all. This not only makes it hard for you to know exactly how many users, but also leaves you in the blind when it comes to tracking customer actions on your website. 

Read more about Thailand’s PDPA here: www.convertdigital.co.th/th/how-pdpa-law-affects-on-digital-marketing

2. Build Your Own Database 

In a cookieless world, it’s all about how you can get hold of “First-party Data” from your customers. This could be through your day-to-day operations, through online forms, etc. CRM tools have become more and more relevant and how you collect your customers’ name, email, tel, and more and make use of those later on for ads. Many ad platforms need your customer data to optimize ad performance. You can think of this as a substitute for cookies when it is not there anymore. 

3. Email Marketing is Not Dead

Despite the debate that email marketing is dead, it could be a great low-cost channel you could use to get new business and retain your existing customers. It could also adapt to collect user information through built-in forms and more that your user can engage with, then you can use these data to your benefit. 

4. Build Customer Loyalty and Repurchase 

When we can’t use cookies to target, say, people who have purchased your product or people who abandon carts, building customer loyalty becomes more important. There are many CRM tools to keep track of your user retention and repurchase both of which would make a good goal to improve going forward. 

The dawn of the cookieless world and first-party data collection means that businesses will have to push a bit harder to collect customer data in an organized manner while improving retention and repeat purchase. The time is now, so start strategizing your plans and take them into action otherwise you risk being left behind with this wave of change.

Not sure how to start? Consult Convert Digital today and we will break this down to you. We offer a complete All-in-One solution along with A la Carte services that are just right with your needs. Read more at: www.convertdigital.co.th/all-in-one-digital-marketing-services/

For hotels and hospitality business owners, these few years may have been one of the biggest challenges yet as Covid-19 basically put the travel industry to a temporary halt. Some adapted and downsized, some closed down and only a handful managed to thrive through the situation by changing its hotel digital marketing strategy to 

After two long years of off and on, Thai hospitality industry finally has a glimmer of hope since Thai government announced the Sandbox program, followed by the Test & Go program and finally a full opening of the border to accept vaccinated travelers into the country once again.

As the gears began to move once again, the question now is “Are you ready to be back at full operation after two years of downtime.” and also “Are you aware of how much hotel digital marketing has changed since then.” 

Now is the time. Now is the change to reset your past practice and chart a clear hotel digital marketing strategy backed with solid data and enough budget to get you back on track faster than others – including investing solely on OTAs such as Booking.com or Expedia. 

Survey from Thailand Digital Outlook 2021 reports that more than 85.1% of Thais use the internet and spend their time six to ten hours a day. That’s almost half a day. Moving business to online is a key and a necessary thing to do. When finding the right hotel, guests not only look at OTAs but also would search for your hotel’s social media page to read some reviews and may also add you on LINE to see if you have any available offer. 

Thanks to the change in customer behavior, increasing book direct % mix to save your hefty OTAs commission is possible. But only if you do it right. 

We know you are familiar with the terms or are currently using some of them. However, in our long experience it is rare to see any hotel that could make the most out of each channel due to the lack of experience, lack of manpower or simply lack of investment to make it fly. As such, we seek to provide you with what each tool can do and how you may want to set your standards when it comes to using them. 

building a brand on social media will help promote the hotel to a broader group of people and easier. Especially when the business can provide unique contents in its own memorable style that could inspire people to choose the brand over another. 

In social, investment on good photo and video are a must. We have seen most hotels slacking off saying their graphic designer could do it but it is not up to standard. With less than top quality visuals (and perhaps snappy captions) your social media just won’t look as good as you may want it to be. One thing to note is that this is the era of ads. You cannot do social media right without ads as organic reach is getting closer to zero each day. You may need to learn how to define and test your target audiences to see which one performs better. Whatever platform you use, always remember to place tracking mechanisms such as Facebook pixel to ensure you can measure your ROI. 

Do not stop asking your team for a clear ROI on ads because you can have one. And when you see how much you gain with ads, you can manage your budget accordingly. If the team could not provide you with such numbers, another option is to do ‘Message’ ads that drives users to your inbox. With this type of ads, you can use ‘cost per message’ as your benchmark.   

How effective would your marketing be if a guest types keywords like “best hotel in Krabi” and your hotel is at the top of the list. Doing SEO right will give you just that, but it won’t be that easy in this sector because all your competitors would want to be there.

For hotels without any SEO experience, we recommend starting with keyword research. Which keywords are relevant to your hotel and have high search volume on Google? Use tools like Google Keyword Planner to find them and take note. You will need to put these keywords throughout your website where it is relevant. Be it on the homepage, in a blog post, etc. 

Then you may need further SEO optimization from a person with enough experience to tinker with your website backend. Some hotel websites may need web developer’s support in making it load much faster on mobile. 

Whichever stage you are at today, remember that SEO takes time. It needs consistency and lots of effort to keep going for a year or more to see solid results. However, once you optimize your website well enough, you may be surprised just how much quality traffic is coming through your SEO. It is almost absolutely necessary to do SEO to gain visibility and steal back shares from OTAs. 

On this subject, also look at your ‘Local SEO’ and ‘Google My Business / Google Map’. Most hotels would have an issue of not having consistency when it comes to their address, phone number, etc. on so many online platforms. This confuses Google resulting in bad rankings. Always ensure the exact same hotel address and more to start, then try to narrow yourself down to specific location to rank even better for people searching for those specific locations. 

Buy ads today and see results today. There are many forms of paid ads available for hotels such as Google search ads, Google display ads (banner) or ads on OTAs platform such as Expedia travel ads. 

Paid ads give hotels the ability to capture demand when it needs to, with tools to narrow down to specific demographics of their customers. However, depending on your hotel’s target audiences, investment may be high if you need to target large markets such as the US along with 10 other countries. 

With paid ads, you can always ask for a clear ROI which is possible with enough implementation of tracking tools. For small hotels the advertising budget could be as low as THB 15,000/mo while some larger hotels spend up to THB 100,000+/mo with a larger audience and more channels. 

Create that extra credibility and deliver actual traveling experience to your potential customer with KOLs / influencers. As long as the reviews are not too good to be true and cover your unique selling points, you should be fine. 

Selecting KOLs could be confusing as well. First you need to review if their personality and style match with your property, then you will need ones with a relatively large fan base (100k+) for it to work well. With KOLs, the larger the better. But always have a good mix of macro (large) and micro influencers. We would also recommend against nano influencers as the impact would be too small to see. 

Knowing where and how to reach a destination may be even more important than how fast you can travel. Same goes for hotel digital marketing strategy. 

With our 10+ years of experience working for 3 to 5-star luxury hotels & resorts, we know exactly what to fix to improve your hotel online presence and effectively increase your book direct revenue. Moreover, we can help fill the experience gap needed when it comes to setting high standards for each marketing channels or implementing conversion tracking – all crucial to see the exact ROI on what you choose to do. 

Contact us today and hear how we could improve your hotel revenue with digital marketing. 

See more our projects here :  www.convertdigital.co.th/th/bangkok-digital-marketing-agency-project

Do you need a digital marketing plan that works during Covid-19? It has been almost 2 years since Thailand and the world has lived through one of the great economic crises. Covid-19 outbreak has changed the way people live, do business, purchase products and services and force businesses to think how to sell without having a storefront. Creating a digital marketing plan containing digital marketing strategy that allow your business to perform in such situation maybe challenging for you.

We invite you to take these 3 steps approach on how to create a digital marketing plan that limit your budget while giving you ROI to grow sustainably in the long term.

1. Define your audiences in detail
2. Choose the right channels
3. Pick the right performance indicator

Start Your Digital Marketing Plan with Audiences

A good digital marketing plan needs a very detailed audience demographics. You should strive to define your customers age, gender, interests, job title, relationship status, etc. for each of your product and service. Audience is the foundation that could spell either success or failure of your entire plan.

Once audiences are defined, you start putting the right price, promotion, content, basically personalization to each group in your overall communication.

Choosing the Right Channels

Different channels give different results. You as a decision maker need to know which type of user are using which channels. For example, Instagram is more popular among ladies and people on Instagram in general tend to have more purchasing power than that of Facebook. Another example would be choosing to invest in Google Ads if your business serves user in urgent needs such as car battery change service. For restaurant and café, you cannot forget LINE OA as Thai people use LINE as their primary tool of ordering even more than any other channels. Thus, knowing which channel should be invested in is one of the keys to success.

Get Your Digital Marketing Plan the Right KPIs

Sometimes KPI does not come in the form of sales figure. In some business, getting more visibility share online or new client registration is their goal. In making a solid digital marketing plan, we would like to introduce these common indicators for you to choose from.

• ROI (Return on investment): ROI = 3 means for every THB 1 spent you get THB 3 in return. ROI is commonly used to see which channel gets you most revenue.
• Reach and Impression: Reach is how many people see your post or ads. Impression is how many times your post or ads has been seen. A person could see your ads twice. That is 1 reach and 2 impressions.
• Impression share: This metric is used primarily on Google Ads and it tells you how many times your client sees your ads out of 100%. Number closer to 100 is better.
• CTR (Click-through-rate): How many times your link or ads is clicked on. CTR of 5% means for every 100 people who saw your ads, 5 people clicked on it.
• Conversion Rate: How many % of people purchased or submitted lead form to your business (conversion). Usually fall below 5%.

Creating a digital marketing plan in Covid-19 situation can be tricky as you cannot spend as much as you wanted to. And sometimes you are limited to only 1-2 channels. In that case, know your audience, know your channels and know how to measure results are the keys to success.