Royal Coach Tours launched their new website today designed by uTrackWeb and powered by TravelManager. The website is search engine friendly, has a content management system, a live chat client and reinforces the quality of Royal Coach Tours with high quality photographs.
Royal Coach Tours - New Website
**The website uses the customizable TravelManager quotation widget to insure Royal Coach Tours customers get the highest level of customer service.
The “Conversations Among Consumers” survey, which drew on the responses of 1,000 online shoppers, found that while 46 percent of e-shoppers find value in product recommendations from their friends, 47 percent look to onsite customer reviews when making a decision.
-Manage Smarter, September 2009
So consumers are now looking farther afield for their product / service reviews.
What are your customers saying about you online? On you on top of it? Do you have a properly thought out online strategy which covers Social Networking etc..
With the increasing number of ways for customers to express their opinion about your product or service there’s a new trend to monitor sentiment on the Internet. Basically it’s about tracking whether the crowds opinion is positive or negative in blogs, social networks, news articles, online forums etc.
Good and Bad Sentiment Online
What does this mean for the Motorcoach industry? Well not a whole lot at the moment, but there’s an opportunity here to get and stay ahead of your competitors by starting to invest in your online reputation.
This is more than optimizing your website for search engines and more about really listening to what’s being said about your company good and bad. In fact as often is the case with dealing with traditional customer complaints, dealing with the negative effectively can often turn into a positive experience for the disgruntled customer.
Over the next few weeks I’m going to share my experiences about Twitter and similar tools you can use to manage your online reputation.
Regards,
Eamonn
*Data mining and connecting with services like Facebook and Twitter will be part of TravelManager in 2010 to help our users connect with new customers and retain existing ones.
Don’t just take my word for it! Recent Article in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emotion.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all
Just when you thought that you’d figured out search engines and pay-per-click advertisement the market is starting to change. Yep, you’ve heard it here 1st, all things that worked well in the past are not going to provide the same ROI into the future.
Like the smart companies that starting using Google Adwords ahead of their competition it’s time to another step forward by using social media to get in on the conversation with you potential customers.
Social Media Conversations
**It’s no coincidence that Facebook has hit 300m+ users and a profit.
Regards,
Eamonn
**Here’s a great article that while applies to the Hotel industry is quite applicable with the Motor coach and tours industry: Future Trends
So now that you’ve created a Facebook page it’s time to start promoting it. This can be done several ways:
Irish Coaches Facebook Page
1) Paid Advertisement
2) Inviting Friends to become a Fan of your page
3) Promoting your page off Facebook
We’re going to try all 3 techniques to see how effective they are and we’re going to share the results over the coming months.
Social Media Marketing
Paid Advertisement:
This is probably the fastest way to get your page out there and infront of your target audience. It involves creating a advertisement that will be listed on facebook users pages that fit your profile. So for example you can have you advertisement displayed to specific age ranges, genders, countries etc.
You can pay per impression (number of times you’re advert is displayed) or pay per click (like Google Adwords). For the initial campaign Irish Coaches are going to use pay-per-click.
Inviting Friends to become a Fan:
One thing that has annoyed a lot of people promoting businesses on Facebook is that you can’t invite people directly to become a fan of your page. They have to be a friend and then you can use the “Suggest to Friends” facility to promote your page.
This means that you won’t be able to start sending invites to all your customers or mailing lists, rather you have to either become friends on facebook or promote your page without using Facebook.
Promoting your page off Facebook:
What I mean by this is NOT using Facebook to promote your Facebook page. This has surprized a lot of people that Facebook is quite restrictive on helping you to promote your page. Apart from inviting your friends to become fans or by adding a “Badge” (link from your website) they’re is very few other tools you can use.
Regards,
Eamonn
**Useful Diagram:
Sales Funnel using Facebook
We have now rolled out to live the Polish, Finnish & German versions of the quotation widget.
An example can be found on the GPN site.
Regards
Dean
I read a great article in Fortune Magazine yesterday that really captured the conflict that nearly every business finds itself today regarding pricing for 2009. By using a Pricing Power Matrix smart companies are using this tool to analyze their customers perception of their product or service.
Getting your customer to pay more
It works by identifying two things are your services a Commodity or Unique and are they Discretionary or Necessary?
With a lot of uncertainty for 2009 it’s so important that the Motorcoach Industry resist the pressure on pricing. Short-term pain of falling revenue is leading Motorcoach Operators to discounting, which can impact long-term effects on customer perceptions.
So what do you do to increase your pricing when everyone else is dropping them? You need to looking becoming more:
1. Unique: Make your Service as unique as possible with lots of value add that your competitors are not willing or capable of doing
2. Necessary: Focus on the customers or sectors that need your service more than ever
As TravelManager focuses on Customer Facing side of your business we can help you do both by marketing more effectively, increasing the understanding of your customers needs, identifying new opportunities for your business and more..
So are up for the challenge? By updating the software every week we can make you more UNIQUE 
not to mention with all the rising costs of Travel (environmental and financial) the Motorcoach can become very NECESSARY!
Tomorrow sees the start of the first annual International TravelManager (iTM 2009) developer conference in Sheffield, UK.
We will see developers from many different countries (UK, Ireland, Netherlands, India, China, & North America) come together (both physically and via video uplinks) to discuss some of the exciting technical developments occuring right now and how they may be best implemented into the TravelManager platform for the benefit of our customers.
High on the agenda of iTM 2009 is API extensions using Open Standards, iPhone / Android development, next generation video platforms & GPS systems.
More information to follow soon…. 
Regards
Dean
Today, we have purchased a whole suite of Apple Mac equipment for the office and signed up to Apples iPhone Developer program in anticipation of getting our first iPhone native application for TravelManager out of the door within the next couple of months.
Let us know what features and functionality you are looking for. We are currently thinking along the lines of;-
Regards
Dean
