ST LOUIS — Companies that manage their digital presence well, including a user-friendly website and active social media engagement, stand to benefit from the investment, speakers said during technology-track seminars offering digital tips and best practices at UMA Motorcoach Expo.
“Social media you’ll probably find is going to be a much better converting channel for your marketing dollar than any of the other channels that are out there. That’s my feeling,” said Steven Valley, general manager of BusRates.com, a charter and group travel directory owned and operated by UMA.
“We get a 3-to-1 conversion ratio for every dollar that we put into social media advertising.”
Valley cited a study by SocialMedia.org of about 5,000 companies of all sizes asking why social media marketing worked for them. The top six answers: increased exposure, increased site traffic, development of local fan base, qualified leads, improved search ranking and reduced marketing expense.
“The more links you have going out, the more links you have going in,” Valley said of improved search ranking. “So if you have a YouTube channel, if you have a Twitter feed, if you have Facebook, all of (those) are links going out and then if you have them driving back to your site, you’ve now sort of doubled your links. It’s important to remember that this is a huge circle.”
As for reduced marketing expense, Valley stressed that social media marketing is free.
“You might not have the time or the resources to be across every single social media platform – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn – but you want to have whatever you’re doing, have a great presence in it,”
However, he added, “When you do social media marketing, the one thing you have to be aware of is the fact that it’s going to cost you if you don’t keep on doing it. So don’t go into it sort of haphazardly. Don’t think about it as something that you’re going to try and then not do anymore.
“There’s nothing worse,” Valley said. “You go to a Twitter feed and the Twitter feed’s been dead for the past eight months. What does that tell you? It tells you that somebody’s asleep at the switch, nobody’s paying attention.”
Tending to one’s social media accounts is important, Peter Rudnik, sales director at Trinity Transportation in Wyandotte, Mich., said at another tech seminar, part of the technology track launched for the first time this year at Expo.
“You might not have the time or the resources to be across every single social media platform – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn – but you want to have whatever you’re doing, have a great presence in it,” Rudnik said.
Going to a social media page and not seeing six months of activity shows disinterest, he said.
Two-way street
“That to me shows you’re not engaging with the customers that way,” he said. “Social media’s actually a great method to reach those customers, because it’s a two-way street, it’s an open dialogue. And that’s what you want, you want to engage with those customers, those that are commenting, reaching out to them.”
That’s especially important in responding to reviews, particularly negative reviews, various panelists said.
A reply lets other people see your positive response to a negative review, said Jodi Merritt, president of H & L Charter Co. Inc. in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.
“I think the way you do the rebuttal can really show a lot more than the deletion of a bad review,” Merritt said.
Valley, in his presentation, also cited the importance of responding to negative reviews. Many times, the reviewer simply wants to vent and, after engaging with that person, he or she could be asked to change their review, he said.
“Don’t fear the negative reviews, they give you legitimacy,” he said.
Reviews are often the first thing potential customers look at, Valley said. He suggested talking to customers before their trip and giving them a checklist of things to evaluate while on the trip, adding that the operator will be sticking its neck out, but reviews become golden.
“Try and engage them upfront,” Valley said.
Gene Wright II, general manager of B & W Charters Inc. in Kalamazoo, Mich., sends a personal thank-you email to customers after a trip and asks what did or didn’t go well.
If something didn’t go well, it’s a chance to communicate directly, he said.
“They just want accountability, they want to know that you care,” Wright said. “Simple emails can make all the difference.”
They also can head off the customer posting a potentially bad review on social media, he said.
Cute babies
Wright said he posts more than testimonials. He looks for interesting stories and photos to post online, whether they are happy brides or cute babies on a bus, a team mascot posing behind the wheel or happy kids at a game. He posts bus equipment photos on Instagram.
The more things a company can post, the better, he said.
“It’s constantly pushing out more content, so when people look up your company, the more inbound links you have, the more links from other sites, the more content you have and the more relevant you are, the more it increases your organic listing” in searches, he said, referring to search engine optimization (SEO).
H & L’s Merritt also will pay to “boost” ads on Facebook or Instagram, for example, to promote a special or an advertisement for drivers.
“You can choose what audiences to boost that to,” she said. “Normally, I boost mine for about $60 and we will get a lot more views doing it that way.”
“(Website) content is king” in SEO, Trinity’s Rudnik said. “Then comes traffic because if you’re not getting traffic to your website, Google will think you have no authority on the subject.”
Web pages need a good mix of content and key words potential customers would search for, he said.
While SEO refers to naturally occurring results on a search engine, search engine marketing (SEM) involves paid advertisements on the search engine, Rudnik explained. In searches, the ads come in on top, above SEO results.
Wright added that if a company’s site is listed atop the organic SEO listing and also has a paid SEM listing above that, the double listing is more likely to result in a click. A high organic listing indicates an operator must know what he’s talking about and a sponsored link suggests the operator cares enough to advertise, he said.
“It definitely is good to be in both,” Wright said.
To help with SEO and traffic, Wright suggested getting as many landing pages as possible for a website. Those pages should include photos that tell the company’s story and not be burdened by too much verbiage, he said, and a quote-request tab should be readily apparent.
Short and sweet
A website’s purpose is getting users to the quote-request page, he said, and it should be short and sweet.
“Don’t have a quote request form that just goes on and on and on. Nobody’s going to fill it out,” Wright said. “They can go to one of your competitors and make sure they don’t have to scroll down the screen to see the end of it. It’s easier for people to fill out stuff that they can see the end to right away. You’re going to have a higher percentage of return on that and that is the point.”
A mobile-optimized website also is critical, Rudnik said. “(It) can be the difference between you keeping the customer and getting them to that quote-request page, or it can say, ‘Hey I don’t look like I’m very authoritative in the space and I didn’t pay enough attention to my website,’ ” he said.
BusRates.com’s Valley underscored the importance of a good website.
“To me, a website is well worth the investment and it’s well worth the time, and it’s going to become probably the single most important thing that you have in terms of your arsenal, so I would devote a lot of time and a lot of resources to it because that’s where you seal the deal, that’s where you’re going to wind up having people coming and … really making a decision,” he said.
To check a website’s performance, operators can tap Google Analytics, a free software, as a service, Valley said.
“It gives you a lot of really good insight into how your site is behaving,” he said.
It’s important to develop key performance indicators for one’s site, Valley added.
If the website is older, run as many analytics as possible, ask specific questions, and as the answers come in over a couple months, reassess, he said, adding the site might have to be retrofitted or rebuilt.
A site can be changed without being disruptive, Valley said. BusRates.com has a development server, where changes can be created that are then tested on a test server before being pushed onto the production site that customers see.
The production site “produces your interactions with the clients that are out there, it produces business results,” he said.
Changes can be pushed to the production site on a slow day so if there is a problem and the production site goes down, it’s not at a critical time.
“So it’s important to understand that there is this way of making it so that your site can actually have a lot of changes done to it and you can do it in a very safe and effective way,” Valley said. “So it will save you resources, it will save you time and money.”
What about apps?
If they’re running seniors to casinos, operators probably don’t need apps, Wright said. If they’re operating a line run for college students, providing an app that students can check frequently for bus status and location would be helpful, he said.
Don’t get an app just to have an app, Wright said, because “your money will be much better spent paying for sponsored links.”
Austin Arksey, Trinity Transportation’s chief operating officer, said the company has one app, RideHop, which works well for a college shuttle bus service it runs, allowing students to track buses in real time.
At another seminar, a pair of hoteliers praised technology for its lead generation, but urged listeners not to overlook the intangibles that go with good communication ahead of booking a trip.
“I think the biggest message . . . is that the technology has the ability to educate us, to make us think of different ideas, to make us ask more questions. But it doesn’t have the intuition to make sure that you have a really good experience,” said Laura Elkin, global sales director for Crescent Hotels & Resorts.
“These are awesome resources and we’re both very excited about working with BusRates.com and you should be excited, too, because it gives you a very good solution to share with folks,” Elkin said.
“But what we have to keep doing is communicating. We have to keep educating, because if people jump on that resource and they have a really bad experience, it’s a reflection back to you,” she said.
Amanda Thibeau, national sales manager at Pillar Hotels and Resorts, said is important to take advantage of all that technology has to offer.
“There’s so much out there and it’s also still very important that motorcoach operators and hotels continue to partner together,” Thibeau said. “We’re here for you, so we just need to keep that communication open.”
