Tourism Shapers | Building an Online Architecture

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] up next we have two very special guests nural faiz and justin reed who will be sharing with us some of the best global practices for creating smart business content and the tools to reinforce your brand and what you offer to your target market in order to accelerate your business growth and profitability we will talk in depth about effective methods to build your brand's online presence increasing brand awareness and providing visibility to your products or services in different digital uh marketing channels neural files with us a head of digital transformation at google she has 15 years of experience in digital marketing tech and digital transformation and justin reid director of media destinations hotels and growth at trip advisor europe middle east and africa prior to working at trip advisor he was the digital director for a visit to britain in the lead up to the 2012 olympics game [Music] okay thank you nura and justin for being with us today i am sure our conversation will offer our audience an in-depth perspective of their online presence having points of view from two of the largest companies in the digital world google and trip advisor justin we know about the power of uh word of mouth and peer recommendations uh take us through how you have seen this drive business for those with presence on a trip advisor you um it's an interesting one it's it's almost like the question we would have had 10 years ago 15 years ago about you know who's got a website or you know who's who's on facebook or whatever it might be the question isn't so much what companies are doing well on tripadvisor as to how you can possibly even think of operating if you're in the tourism space without being on tripadvisor um got a number of stats that are coming up but but by and large it's not an exaggeration to say that in this day and age people simply don't book or don't book a holiday don't book a vacation or accommodation without checking reviews first you know they want to know what other people are saying not what the company's saying but what other people are saying people like them about uh the experience they're about to have so again i wouldn't say who's doing well i'd say everyone's doing better because of company strike trip advisor and if you're not on trip advisor or review sites then you know you really are missing out interesting nora uh for those uh businesses operating on a budget how can google help them organize themselves effectively and establish or enhance their online presence in your opinion um so i i'd like to speak a bit more broadly than google as well um i would look at it in terms of uh four buckets um so the first one i would say is infrastructure i think the most important thing is to invest in your website but also to invest in your seo to make sure that you are discoverable and to benefit and capitalize on being discoverable without having to invest too much in advertising to be discoverable so that's what would be the first thing and of course google is a big part of that because you know a lot of the search occurs on google um the next area i would say is around um measurement so there's a lot of free tools uh you know google analytics optimize firebase google trends and a few others that are freely available make use of them take advantage of them because they allow you to kind of squeeze every extra dollar out of any investment that you're making digitally to understand your customers more optimize more effectively get better performance out of whatever you happen to be doing and then constantly learn and experiment the next bucket i would say is around your earned media so any activities you're doing whether it's social whether it's around video or youtube i would say is try to really benefit from making sure that anything you're doing is well received try to benefit from anything that could you know achieve virality or go viral any organic views or organic engagement that you can accumulate from any of your your media and that's something that's very beneficial on a budget and then finally of course is is digital advertising i would say with google the benefit with google is you only spend the budget that you allocate you will not be spending any more than that budget so that's one and stop of course spending whenever you need to stop spending the other thing is it's quite targeted so you can be very precise about the audiences that you wish to reach and only reach those audiences so you can be very economical with your budget um and then also you know with google you can choose to only pay when you know users are clicking you can only choose to pay when people are viewing your video ads and so on so it can be more manageable let's say on a budget great okay let's engage now with the poll results from earlier let's see what the audience say now okay the question was which online platform do you use at the most to engage your customers as you can see here direct outreach such as email what's up 17 percent review sites we have almost six percent six percent social media instagram almost 59 website 17. interesting well let's reflect on these numbers now justin as you can see almost six percent of our audience choose review sites like trip advisor as their preferable platform to engage with their customers not only them a lot of people around the world as well a final decision in a customer's journey can be made out of influence from a review on tripadvisor or google placing this much trust in reviews and speaking here about the power of reviews does strip advisor manage and filter real reviews from fake ones yes no absolutely we do um in fact it's one of the things we're strongest on there's a there's there's a number when i say a number of videos i can say we have 30 different checks some of them are automated uh so it will look at things like um has an account just been created and has that account suddenly left multiple reviews uh are those reviews either all five star or one star um is it reviewing places in different parts of the world at the same time that it couldn't possibly that person couldn't possibly do so all these all this machine learning all these automated reviews will kick in to begin with uh and they will get rid they will weed out a lot of the click farms and a lot of the the fake review farms that you see you know proliferating across across all sorts of sites um there's also there's a we've got a strong customer service department who will respond to you know users or owners um questions saying you know i'm not sure if this is legitimate and look into that um and and but but basically it's uh you have to create an account you have to be a captured account verified you know it's just not a simple case of going on someone clicking a button and like i say all those different uh automated processes and the human backup as well ensures that you know um not every review not every review but i think it's well over 99.9 we are confident are in being legitimate that's a huge percentage then it is accurate um and if we say uh is it possible to turn a bad customer experience into a good one just with a positive interaction about a negative review absolutely and it's one of the things we'll be talking about uh you know in in the webinar later on i mean we always say treat people online as it is offline and you know if you if you were in a bar if you were in the sorry in in a situation and you heard someone criticizing your establishment you would probably go over to them and say oh i'm sorry what was wrong uh is there something we can do to correct that and then very quickly that can turn from a negative into a positive and then the other people looking at that as well will actually see that you're a business owner that cares cares enough to respond to criticism and respond in a positive manner hopefully and it's it's remarkable i'm not saying it's easy but it's it's there's lots of examples of where we can show that you know a negative can be turned into a positive simply by acknowledging uh if necessary apologizing and looking to correct the mistake interesting okay well nura so let's say a company's reputation is one of the key factors in making the decision in a customer's journey what safeguards should you have in place to actively manage your online reputation so there are various um you know ways to do that i think you know justin touched on it in terms of you know keeping track of reviews and monitoring the customer sentiment there are various tools out there in the market not necessarily google tools but there are tools that allow you to monitor customer sentiment and i i mean i encourage everyone watching to to research them there are some very powerful tools out there um but then also and we'll talk about this a little bit later but you know understanding how people are interacting with your website looking at um how you know they're the feedback that they're giving you monitoring the monitoring even in reactions to your campaigns and how they're engaging with your ad campaigns as well and monitoring how they're reacting to your social media activities so having a place to measure and monitor all of those interactions and interactions and engagements on a regular basis and keeping an eye on this to see how that the ups and downs let's say of how that's going and being able to action against it and quickly in real time i think that is what is critical uh to maintain or and manage your um your reputation online do you think um uh the percentage of a website as the preferable platform to use the most to engage with the customer has 18 only do you think how do you reflect on this percentage i mean honestly it's disappointing but uh it wasn't surprising i know in saudi that the preferred i was i was not completely surprised i know in saudi the preferred channel is social social is easy right it's super easy to go set up your account there and run with it uh even you know being from the region i i know from friends and family that that's always the preferred channel however sometimes the easiest path is not often the best path and i'm not saying social is not good social is excellent and we should definitely always leverage it but we cannot put all our eggs in one basket and we should not be only relying on one channel and so that's the worry there i think that if you think about the analogy i like to use is that your website is like your storefront and you have to have a storefront right it's your digital storefront so it's a way to tell the world what you're about and maintain kind of your brand image and in within your uh within your framework whereas in social media it's within another company's framework and you have to operate within their rules and within their customer experience so we'll talk about this again a little bit later but yeah i think that maybe there are some sort of mental blocks for some people about the complexities around getting a website and actually it's more simpler than you would think right and um and that's something we can talk about a little bit later but i'm not completely surprised yeah okay you said that your website is your friend uh uh justin you agree tripp advisor is your friend actually yeah i think so um uh what i'd always say as well is look for specializationist areas you know if you are looking to travel um most people a lot of people uh wouldn't say all people but i think it's seven out of ten people go by tripadvisor so you know use you know make sure that the content that you've gotten and in places you're engaging with people is where they are making the travel decisions i mean yes facebook is a huge huge platform as is whatsapp as is instagram but the people on there they're not necessarily looking to travel you know they're looking to do other things they're looking to look at their cat pictures they're looking at their relatives they're looking at the thing when someone comes on trip advice they're focused on one thing well largely one thing and one thing only either to book travel or to be inspired about a new destination to travel to so i think you know it's important to put your efforts put your time in because as norah said you know there's a limited amount of time that that anyone who's running a business will have to operate online so so therefore make sure that the time you have got to spend on marketing yourself is spent in the right areas and i would always say you know if i'm looking to buy a car i'll go into a car website if i'm looking to to to discover a new bicycle i'll go on a bicycle site if i want to look at travel i'm going to trip advisor specialization absolutely okay thank you anura thank you justin ladies and gentlemen uh now we will dive into something different with nura and justin they will share with us two presentations to showcase how and where you can be found on the web to grow utilization of your online presence a quick reminder you still have the chance to ask nora and justin all the questions you have in mind while watching us and we will answer them during the panel discussion we'll start with you nura the mic to you [Music] [Music] hello everyone i'm extremely excited to be with you today to be part of such a great initiative by the saudi tourism authority um as a saudi myself i'm really proud to see the efforts that are being made to drive innovation and growth and tourism and travel in the saudi sector in the travel sector in saudi i also wanted to um just give you a quick breakdown what we're going to talk about today so uh we're going to be talking a little bit about how you can focus on developing your online presence but we're also going to think of this session more of a thought starter as we'll be sharing with you a few tools and and best practices that you can start leveraging um after the session so as you can see the world is increasingly getting connected already we are incredibly connected at 66 penetration uh largely driven by mobile with around 4.3 billion people connected via mobile around seven hours a day on average is spent online if you think about that that's a huge chunk of a person's time when you think about saudi specifically it's actually way above average with 96 penetration um and actually over the course of the last year so from 2020 to 2021 1.3 million people uh came online so an additional 1.3 million just sort of was necessitated i suppose by the pandemic so a lot of people are online and actually when you're in the travel and tourism business pretty much everyone is your audience right whether they're globally you know people from around the world or locally from from a domestic tourism perspective now covet did have an impact it was a significant impact of course it's one of the one of the sectors that was most hard to hit by the uh and by by the pandemic however we're already seeing a recovery so so people are already starting to research trips and already starting to book trips so this is promising and from a google perspective when it comes to volumes of searches we're already seeing from some of the key markets so these are the key source markets when a global perspective for saudi tourism we're already starting to see a recovery globally when it comes to tourism and specifically when it comes to tourism to saudi and if you look more specifically within saudi so of course yes it's still you know not looking great from a growth perspective but if we think about it from an absolute volume perspective 10 million searches around travel a month is still quite significant um the lion's share of that is of course around domestic tourism and the biggest categories are around air accommodation and destination activities which i think is particularly relevant for a lot of you who are tuning in today so a lot of people are searching a lot of people are online are you present when they're looking for you is the question you should be asking yourself um like whether they're searching specifically for your business or they're searching for what you have to offer and they're not finding you again going back to the storefront analogy it's sort of like your store is shut um and that's bad because then they're going to either go to one of your competitors or they're going to go to an alternative of some sort so you need to show up it's just important for you as a business it's imperative for your business that you show up and there are various ways that you can show up if you think about it there are sort of three buckets of ways you can show you can show up first of all websites which i can tell now from that lovely pool that maybe you're not super uh big fans of we will talk about this a lot because i'm a big fan of this uh but your website is very very critical and there are some various tools that you can leverage to establish a website so i've listed some google tools but of course there are other tools out there i know so there's maybe a let's say a mental block where you think oh my god i have to know how to code to build a website you don't necessarily need to know how to code to build a website actually there's a lot of tools out there there's google sites from a google perspective but there's a wix there's wordpress there's a lot of tools out there that make building a site quite simple and straightforward and you actually get a very professional looking site afterwards if you still find this complicated there are some companies like freelancer fiverr upwork where you can go and find a freelancer that can actually help you build the site for you for a relatively reasonable budget and within a relatively reasonable time frame and actually i've done this myself for maybe not a business for a hobby but i'm just telling you that the process is quite simple and very easy to do and there's a lot of great talent on these different portals to find the other thing is there are some tools to help you when you're using a website so for example google analytics and firebase are free tools that allow you to do a lot of very in-depth and granular and analytics to really understand what are people doing on your site what are they viewing what are they consuming how much time are they spending how many pages are they like are consuming um what are the things that they're interested in so there's a lot of tools out there that are very easy to use and again if you find this complicated there are lots of experts out there that can be um accessed so that you can get help with it and then the other um the other uh different channels of course social media which everyone loves and like i said i want to dispel the myth that social media on its own is enough it is not enough it's a very important channel i i definitely am not trying to diminish its value but it's not sufficient on its own and all of these three different buckets complement each other you need to do these different channels to the uh together and finally digital advertising which is a way uh to actually drive traffic further to your message whether your message is sitting in social media or whether it's on your website or you know generally to just send out promotions and offers and so on so definitely these different online channels are critical to maintain your online presence why is it so important uh to maintain an online presence and to have to engage in digital marketing so there are i would say there are four key um benefits from digital media the first is you can get real-time feedback from your customers and engage in conversations with them so actually having a one-to-one relationship with them and justin's probably going to be going into more detail about this he already touched on this but the importance of actually you know getting back to them on their feedback and thinking the feedback as a gift that can help you enrich your offering but also you think rethink maybe your business model or you think maybe your business strategy the second one is you can you can then get your messages into the market uh very quickly and in real time so if you have a new offer you have a new price you have something you want to get into the market very quickly digital media is the fastest way to do this the next uh the next advantage is around the actual targeting like i mentioned this uh earlier but you can be very precise around who you're trying to reach if you were yours your offering is for a very specific segment of the population you can specifically reach that population and not spend another real reaching any other segment and then finally you have the ability to measure very accurately in real time all the activities around your campaigns and your website all right so in terms of the um the journey that the customer takes we talked about this but the journey actually and based on this research generally starts on google you actually start your activities around planning your trips by searching so that's why it's even more important to show up as a website because if you think about it if it's very important to be showing up on the search you show up as a website if you're not if you don't have a website you won't be necessarily showing up for strip advisor as you can see is the second most important and that's why justin's going to be sharing some more information about how it's important to do that well but as you can see if you don't have a website you're not going to be showing up one of the most important points in the journey one other way to show up is through something called google my business google my business is not a replacement for a website but if you don't have a website yet it's a good way to bridge the gap but you should have both it's a great way to have things like your your office hours your like opening hours uh your uh your location your uh phone number and uh even having reviews and being able to get feedback in a very easy um tool to set up and i can tell you i set this up for my mother's shop she has a small jewelry shop and i set this up in five minutes so i'm telling you it's very easy to set up and i hope that you all do this immediately after the session because it's quite easy to do another very important channel is video and actually with video content some of you might already have some video content that maybe you've had it for tv it's quite easy to i don't recommend it because actually you should have proper content for digital but if you already have it for tv it might it's quite easy to then make it available for digital but then again making digital video content has become much easier than it used to be um because actually the the equipment that you uh you need to make video content the software to edit it and so on has become much more affordable so making video content is much more accessible than it used to be so it's very important because as you can see it's very high from a penetration perspective on key markets but it's also incredibly high in saudis one of our top markets there's 20 million plus people in saudi consuming youtube content and they consume over 55 minutes a day which is incredibly high not to mention that video content is something that is used across the journey when it comes to planning a trip from inspiration in terms of where to go to researching where you want to go all the way into to booking an actual trip so making sure that having that those tailored videos across the journey is critical for your business there are various other channels and we don't have time today unfortunately to go into all of the different channels so i'm just sharing a few of them here so when you're doing your preparation and understanding how to put your plans together please don't forget to look into all these different channels i want to spend a bit of time here before we close because it's critical and i i and based on the survey results i realize i really have to spend some time here it's incredibly important to have a website these are the three main reasons why one is having a website is a way for you to understand your customers better i mentioned this before but you will understand how they behave on your website so that you don't understand what are they interested in what services and products that you have are going to work for them what's not going to work for them i'll give you a quick example so for example let's say you're a tour operator maybe when you when you've been having a site for a while you have enough data you can use things like google analytics to analyze how who's coming to your site and you can layer on google audience data to understand oh actually i have a lot for example i have a lot of auto enthusiasts that are coming to my site all these people who love cars maybe my tours should be in interesting cars maybe i could have a sheba or maybe a gyms and i could have these cars that were quintessentially saudi cars of different eras that people like and do the tours in these cars just thinking of an idea but you can you can use these creative ideas that come out of the insights that you've learned by analyzing the behavior that's happening on your website and then personalizing all of the offers around the different people that are interested in your offering the next is around customer experience again we touched on this before but it's quite important making sure that you are delivering one seamless customer experience is not easy when you're working with otas and third parties you still have to i'm not saying you don't but you really need to make sure that you have one seamless experience across all of the touch points that reflects your brand and your brand image and your values and it's much easier to do it in a controlled way which is your website you can also personalize more easily when it's your website and build relationships like loyalty programs and so on on your website than than anywhere else and finally i know we're almost out of time so just mentioning testing and experimentation is much easier when it's your website you can test new offers you can test promotions you can even test new imagery and new color schemes all kinds of things and of course testing is critical so the best place to do it's your own platform there's a lot of different tools i'd mention some of them but we don't have time to go into all of them we will share all of these tools with you afterwards i hope you are able to make use of them i just want to mention one quick thing which is the last box on the on the right is maharaj google mahatma google is a website we have that has a lot of digital courses that have certifications attached to them that help you on various areas and will help you learn so you can manage a lot of these activities so just to recap a few of the key learnings so first of all online presence is not just social media please believe me a website is a wellspring of insights and we mentioned this several times already online personalization is a very important way to build one-to-one relationships with your customers so that they trust you and they ha and your offering resonates with them learn from experimentation that's the beauty of digital you can experiment you can test new ideas do so and then finally just launch launch and iterate go out there try new things and learn that's the best thing you can do right away and now we'll be handing over to justin who'll be talking a little bit more about tripadvisor and how you can get more value from how how are you using tripadvisor thank you [Music] hello so i'm uh justin reed the director of uh destinations for europe middle eastern africa for tripadvisor and what we're going to talk about in the next 10 minutes is a quick thing about who we are so i'm slightly disappointed to see that only i think six percent of you were using review sites but a little bit about who we are tripadvisor are more focusing then on where you are you as in saudi arabia as a destination and then the third point is like what you every single one of you know small medium large businesses can be doing right now on the platform to maximize uh your presence so tripadvisor we see ourselves as being this this trusted voice in the conversation between travelers and experiences on the one hand you've got the businesses of which uh of which you represent on the other hand we've got these millions and literally hundreds of millions of potential uh customers coming to our platform every month to ask about what's the best things to do around the world we sit right in the middle of that that intersection of people-powered travel um we've been around a while um and actually we're up to about 463 that's a number that it vibrates a little bit um during the pandemic but 463 million unique people every month coming to tripadvisor to be guided about travel around the world uh 190 different countries and 28 different languages so no matter what traveler you're you're trying to appeal to or what or where it is around the world you're trying to get them to come from tripadvisor will have a presence there and and this is so important as well there's eight million listings on the website so that's 4.2 million

restaurants 2.3 million accommodations and 1.3 million attractions the chances are even in saudi arabia where you're not you know using the platform as much as in some of the other countries the chances are your place your restaurant your accommodation is already listed on there and people are already reviewing it um you need to really take advantage of that and make sure that you know what people are saying about uh you know you're aware of what people are saying about your experience and that you can join in that conversation as well um because as we can see here it is so important travelers do trust us you know like i said the company's been around for more than 20 years and we've built up this great affinity travel they don't just trust us they actually genuinely love tripadvisor seven out of ten travellers come to tripadvisor at some point of their journey to read reviews nine out of ten travelers said a trip advisor makes them feel more confident in their booking decisions and that that's particular that's so relevant nine out of ten travelers saying that and sixty percent of them are saying that trip advisor gives them new ideas about where to travel to next so um one of the things we're noticing in this in this um you know getting towards post-pandemic world is you know people are looking to do new things different things things they might not have done before so what a great opportunity for saudi arabia to be you know the new destination on that list and i can say 60 percent of people when they come to tripadvisor saying you know what show me somewhere new sell me something different inspire me with something i might not have seen before and this shows uh if we zoom in you know this was an independent uh moripso poll and it asked various different age categories but generation z millennials gen x or or boomers you know which of these travel platforms or indeed which of these uh social media platforms do you trust more and again that is so important when it comes to something as important as a uh an annual holiday for the entire family who do you trust more and although boomers in generally trusts you know a little bit less than millennials and a little bit less than the others no matter what category we were in trip advisor ranked as number one in trust compared to those other ones um so again really important when it comes to making sure your content is there now that's us what about you so this is looking at uh the last uh two years um divided down by months obviously uh at the number of people on tripadvisor looking at saudi arabia and we can see that the red line is is is people in saudi arabia looking at saudi arabia and we can see that obviously it dominates you know your domestic audience dominates the number of people that are looking on the platform um there was that big dip uh right in the middle of the screen not surprising that represents march of of last year when the covid pandemic uh hit and and you dropped all the way down you know that is not unusual that ev every country around the world uh suffered from that um you came back up very strongly towards the end of the summer held it quite well bit of a dip again at the start of the year again that was not uncommon that is very much what uh what the rest of the world was seeing again and again we're starting to emerge in that as well if we remove the domestic view so if we just look at international views now uh again a similar pattern um the united kingdom was actually really really starting to break through as a uh a destiny or sorry as a target market of interest saudi arabia um just before the pandemic broke last year we can see right there the sort of pinkish figure um it was it was it was growing and growing and growing you hit record ever numbers of interest from the uk from the united states pakistan and the united arab emirates are your four biggest markets all four of them dropped right away in kobu but again that's nothing to do with anything that any reflects on saudi arabia at all that was a global phenomenon we can see that pakistan had a bit of a renaissance there towards the end of the summer last year but again it's been pretty flat until literally i'd say the last six weeks or so when we're just starting to see international travel again um breakout now then let me just leave you with this not leave yourself let me just really focus on this number now 29 million 456 896. okay that's the number of unique people that have looked at saudi arabia on tripadvisor in the last two years nearly 30 million really really strong numbers so what that's 29 let's call it 30 million let's round it up to 30 million 30 million potential customers right now looking at saudi arabia what are the five things i'll give you five things now that will allow you to you the small businesses to maximize your presence on tripadvisor so that you know you've got a chance of getting in front of some of those at 30 million so number one find your business and claim it as i said the chances are it's already on there very good chance it's already on there and somebody is already reviewing it if there's only one well from a trip advisor point of view there's only one url you write down today or one thing that you find it's this one here www.tripadvisor.com

forward slash owners go to that url search for your business okay if you if you're not already the if you're not if you haven't already claimed it go to that url search for your business and you'll have to obviously provide various forms of identification you have to prove that it is your business it takes uh it probably takes a week or so for it to do but then you actually become you can log in into tripadvisor as the owner of that business and you can start really engaging with these customers you can put up your website you can put up certain imagery um you know that that will appear at the start and most importantly you can start engaging in the conversations that people are having about your um attraction business restaurant whatever it is point number two and again this follows on from having claimed the business because once you claim the business you can start uploading photographs to the business and a picture it's an old cliche but a picture really is worth a thousand words have a look at this these are the top four restaurants uh in in my local well near my local hometown the first three have uploaded pictures of the food that is that is available there again people they eat with their eyes they see that and they think that's fantastic the fourth one the wild olive tree it's obviously a very good place to get great reviews but look at what image they've loaded they've already loaded up an empty what looks like a canteen again if you've got a choice of four there they've all got similar scores they've all got similar things and one of them is is and only one of them isn't showing a picture of the food that's not going to entice people to choose that one so again have a look at what is the first picture that people see when they look at your business both on tripadvisor but also online put it into google google image search see what's coming up but see what's the first image there that comes up uh when you've got it if it's not something that would entice you to visit or to stay or to eat at your attraction maybe think about about changing them um number three so so so important do reply to comments okay again having claimed the business you can now be the person that replies now then one of the big criticisms uh i i've had it everyone's had it it's one of the worst things about the internet as a whole is when comments go unfettered and they just carry on and carry on and carry on and sooner or later nine conversations out of ten they denigrate into like a bit of argue and a bit of and and people don't they can't really agree people don't really agree on the internet they prefer to throw throw a mod at each other now then what's great about tripadvisor especially for the owners is somebody can leave a review the owner can then respond to that review and then that's the end of it that's that's where the conversation ends so it's a perfect opportunity for owners to if you like have the last word be able to either thank someone or respond to them and say i'm sorry you didn't have a great time you know if they leave a poor review perhaps you know come again and we can look at like look at correcting that great example here and again i've blacked out the names of the businesses but uh two very well reviewed places in saudi arabia 603 reviews on the left of which the average score is 4.5 look at that on the right 310 reviews of which 90 what 95 99 of them have given them five stars okay that is fantastic that is brilliant this place clearly is doing a great job and people love it and they are reviewing it when i went and had a look i could see that there wasn't a single reply to any of those reviews imagine being in a room offline where 2 300 people had said your business is fantastic and you didn't even bother to acknowledge or thank any of them so again go in there and review go in there and thank the ones that have left reviews um number four um a bad review isn't wrong it's free customer research we've spoken about this before but again it it bears repeating um if someone is if there's constant criticism about a single piece of your business uh maybe have a think and then actually you know what maybe we do need to work on that so if people are saying a particular item on the menu isn't great and lots of people are saying it maybe look at taking that thing off um likewise if you're getting lots of uh good good comments for instance about a particular member of staff look at perhaps you know maybe rewarding that member of staff and then the last point very quickly because i think we have to wrap up is that the world is ready to experience uh saudi arabia are you ready to welcome it if we look at these numbers okay this was 2019 before the pandemic 110 000 people clicked to book accommodation in saudi arabia in june of 2021 last year practically nothing same thing in the world over practically nothing look at what's happening already in june of june of this year we've already surpassed the numbers we had in 2019 in terms of people clicking to book saudi arabia people are excited people are ready to come let's make sure that you know all your digital platforms especially perhaps fifa guys i'd be biased let's make sure you're ready to really welcome the world uh in all its shapes and formats so we're gonna um look at move on to the panel discussion in a minute but a quick wrap-up from me in one second so once again five things you need to do one find your business and claim it without a doubt www.tripadvisor.com forward slash owners number two use great imagery to tell your story you've got the great imagery i'm sure you have if not it's easy to take pictures of it make sure that what people see when they look at you online is reflective of what it is that you're offering number three please reply to comments even if it's just to say thank you it's good manners and it shows that you care about your business and uh a bad review uh you know a bad review is free customer research if lots of people are telling you the same thing maybe take that that advice on board and and look to to really improve what it is that they're offering and be ready be ready and be ready to welcome new visitors in 2021 second half the year is starting to look good 2022 is really going to be the year that tourism bounces back let's let's really make sure saudi arabia is ready to welcome all those people thank you [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you nura and justin for sharing with us your views and emphasizing on the importance of online presence as a key factor for business growth and sharing the best ways to engage with customers throughout their journey i'm sure our audience will use these learnings to support the development of their own businesses really you have done an excellent job in simplifying the complexity of digital transformation for a business with a very well-structured accessible and effective approach and now it's time for the panel discussion we received a lot of questions from our audience thank you all for your interaction and participation we'll try to answer as much as we can depending on the time left so the first question from our audience is it will appear on the screen as you can read it how do i start building the online strategy for my business to start with you nura all right um so i would for this i would i think as a starting point your actual business so first i'll try to understand what is your business strategy what are your objectives what are you trying to achieve um and in order to achieve that what who do you need to reach what is the journey to to reach that right so it depends so for example if you're a tour operator what you're trying to do is you're trying to get more people to book tours and you're trying to maximize the revenue you make from selling those tours if you're a hotel and it's about maximizing occupancy so define what those goals are and then the best way to achieve them and then what are your who are your who's your audience right so who are your key customer segments what are the best ways to reach them and then define the key uh online channels that they predominantly would be there where would they be and then define um you know what like where to what campaigns to execute against where so it's much more complicated than that this question would take hours to answer thoroughly but as a starting point always start with what actually is your business strategy what are your business goals and then how you can translate that um into into the digital realm um and then and then also really be very clear on who are you who's your audience so how do you reach that audience and digitally and then make sure you translate as well your your kpis from a measurement perspective so make sure whatever you're doing whatever you decide to do you're measuring it so whether it's through analytics or google analytics or whatever analytics platform you decide to use make sure you're measuring everything you're doing so that you can understand if you're achieving those goals perfect okay the second question was requested by a few of our audience members it will appear so the question in arabic testified how do you make the most out of the information and data available to shape your digital appearance justin um good question these are these are good ones um i would i i would i would i would start with the reviews obviously i'm going to be biased there i'd say i would start with the reviews and look at what people are already saying because that's the greatest that's the greatest research you can have in the greatest stage you can have if you've got as we saw with that previous place in saudi arabia 2 300 of views all saying you've got a five-star uh rating then you probably don't have to do too much in terms of um modifying what it is that what it is that you're doing um if however you find that you've got a lot of uh a lot of mixed reviews then find out what those mixed reviews are saying because that's that's the best customer research you can have consistently people are saying there's one item of stuff that you're doing wrong uh that that's uh that's that's a pretty strong thing to focus on the other thing i'd say is is use the data that's around you right now and um look nora's got got the wealth of information about you know building your website presence stuff like that i'd i'm not going to try and add to that i just want to say get five people around you and say right how do you book a holiday or how did you last uh purchase something and and see what they say you know take yourself out of the equation and see what other people are telling you and if they four or five of them say okay but i started off with google google took me to tripadvisor and then from tripadvisor i looked at the reviews and they went on and booked that's a pretty good indication that you know that might be the way that uh you know the wider audience will work as opposed to maybe on social media absolutely and uh since every uh experience um with a customer impacts the overall perception of a brand uh taking up an approach that focuses on the relationship with customers is always a wise move okay now we have the third question our audience wanted to know more about how can i best use insights to shape what my digital presence should be interesting go ahead yeah i'm happy to take that one um so we talked about it a little bit as well in the presentation uh but i would say yeah i think so there so there's different types of insights right so there are insights that are more broad in terms of understanding what uh what's the general population searching for so things like google trends and market finders things like that which we'll share with you afterwards so tools that under make you understand that what the general population are interested in which allows you to narrow down like narrow down your offering so i i don't know why i keep using tour operator example but maybe i want to go on a tour i think maybe subconsciously but for example like i miss traveling um i think uh subconsciously like i'm thinking i saw that but let's say for example if you're looking at searches right so for example if you go if you go on google trends and you look for tourism and you see um what are people searching for and you notice they're let's say you end up noticing their trends a lot of people are looking for food tours a lot of people are looking for historic tours a lot of people looking for shoppings i don't know retail therapy then you realize okay maybe i should you know package my tours in those categories so those insights allow you to understand how you should structure your offering and package your tours but then once you launch right so let's say you decided based on understanding general trends you launch and then you start understanding okay who's signing up for what what feedback are you getting maybe on tripadvisor some people are complaining about some things right you collect all of those insights from tripadvisor from social from your website everything all together then you tweak maybe you do maybe you discover that okay so the people who are interested into history are specifically interested in history from eleven hundred to fifteen hundred i'm just making it up right like they're very precise there's niches yeah you make that you make that tour even more precise right or maybe you find out that the people who are interested in shopping are into i don't know couture very high end fashion so you make it more precise so going back to what i was saying about uh learning and experimentation is you can use insights at the from the when you have zero data use those general insights but then the most valuable insights you can get are from your own activities and constantly use them so it's not set and forget constantly use those insights to then enrich your presence and make yourself much more relevant to your audience amazing i like the approach justin you have anything to add on this um well nothing well only to add not to contradict and the only thing like that is languages you know it's pretty clear from both our our research and also uh google's research via nura that like you know arabic and english that's going to take care of 95 of people who are looking at the site you know so if you are a time poor or recess poor you know probably taking care of those two languages whether it's on your website or whether it's like in the materials that you have you know within your experience itself that's going to take care of even more than 95 percent of your potential visitors so you know that's a pretty good uh uh tool to to to go forward with absolutely okay now we'll go to the fourth and last question let's see it will appear now on the screen so the question in english do negative reviews and opinions uh affect project and business uh performance yes they do um in it well they can do really good anecdote we've got here which is a global hotel chain huge hotel chain uh was looking to replace all the bed linen in all their hotels around the world would have been a multi-million dollar um project that they undertook they worked with us and they did a sentimentality analysis on the reviews that they had across all their properties um globally we're talking literally tens of thousands of reviews i don't think it was a single one positive or negative that even mentioned bad linen um but what did come up particularly on the one and two star reviews was this overriding comments about the poor wi-fi within the hotel rooms so they immediately stopped the project and they channeled all that money into upgrading the wi-fi facilities within the hotel rooms having done that within six months of that going in we did another uh uh review of like what the average host or the average score had been and they went up by half a uh half a bubble rating or a half a star over the course of that period and most of that had gone because like with it it had been sifted out all this like bad reviews about people saying yes it was a lovely concierge yes it was a great hotel yes the food was great but the wi-fi was terrible so again just using that information is great for uh you know turning well it's great business intelligence returning what could have been a negative into what is a what in their case was a multi-multi-million dollar improvement that really improved their brand and their reputation with the all-important customers i couldn't agree more uh justin well uh since we're talking uh about the importance of online presence and we're out of time as well to close this session i just wanted to share a bill gates um quote uh when he said if your business is not on the internet then your business will be out of the business and this is what actually our audience reflected in the poll question with a zero percent okay thank you uh nura ali faiz and justin reed for sharing uh with us your rich experiences it really has been eye-opening having both of you uh with us today i'll be back shortly but after this video show to showcase what adria has to offer as a destination [Music] so foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

2021-08-29 20:04

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