EUROPE cannot be treated as a homogenous market online, and the customisation of digital content is key to capturing greater share across the continent’s diverse markets.
Speaking at the Digital Innovation Asia E-Tourism Asia Boot Camp in Bangkok yesterday, Hraben Suknaic, managing partner of S.T.A.R. Digital, a Swiss-based agency specialising in marketing across digital channels, pointed out that Europe is a “complex patchwork of regions”, made up of 50 countries home to 740 million people, of which 65 per cent are online.
“For example, German and Dutch are process-driven people who like to plan, and this translates to their travel bookings (often made in advance), unlike Italians who tend to do things last minute,” said Suknaic.
An understanding of a market’s booking patterns will thus enable travel players to better evaluate and decide which part of the travel chain they should appear in to increase their relevance and likelihood of converting traveller interest to final bookings, he elaborated.
Furthermore, Internet penetration and technology savviness also vary, with Scandinavia coming up tops as the most developed market – some 90 per cent of the population is connected and a person on average makes one e-commerce transaction each month. This knowledge is especially important for a destination like Thailand, where Sweden is among its top five source markets.
Travel marketers should also pay attention to regional differences, especially within bigger countries in Europe. Citing Italy’s German-speaking South Tyrol as an example, where the local population uses Italian and German media and favour local portals like Stol.it, “it would be a mistake to target them as Italians,” Suknaic contended.
Russia, in particular, stands apart from the rest of the continent with “its own online ecosystem” such as Vkontakte (the Russian equivalent of Facebook) and Yandex (top search engine), and any content published in Latin-related languages would not be ranked highly in the country, pointed out Suknaic.
Against a backdrop in which peer-to-peer networks and social content are key drivers for FITs, Suknaic stressed: “Localise, localise, localise when it comes to online content in Europe. Especially for review sites, it will help to have the local language for non-English-speaking countries.”
