New media offer MICE targeted ways to promote
The meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions industry and the luxury travel industry are turning to digital solutions to promote themselves, according to leading businesses in the industry.
In China, the social media scene is booming, bringing many new patterns to the MICE and travel industry, said Kevin Wang, general manager of the sports department of evente.cn, a Chinese technology service company that helps people sell and promote events online.
Wang gave a speech on these new patterns during the 2015 China Incentive Business Travel and Meetings Exhibition on Wednesday in Beijing.
The CIBTM is the industry's leading event that promotes the Asian MICE market to buyers around the world.
Wang's company is now tapping into different sectors of events and tourism, such as sports and entertainment. Their mission, he said, is to develop new digital platforms and find good projects for these platforms.
Wang said many Internet companies in China pay a lot of attention to content - what they can sell to the audience and how unique the content can be. However, he said, for travel and event products promotion in China, finding a niche target is more important than creating content and trying to push that content on an audience.
Wang suggested that, as his company promotes, for travel and events businesses to succeed in the new era, they must first identify their target audience and their interests, then find products best tailored to suit the customer and the context that will trigger their motivation to buy, and finally market and promote the products.
He said that in the era of social media and mobile devices, to make these steps work, there should be new organizers; a new audience, in this case, tourists; and new platforms.
Wang gave WeChat, the most popular messaging app in China, as an example. The new organizers, he said, could be official accounts on WeChat and the new audience could be a niche group with specific interests. The new platforms could be WeChat subscription accounts where regular product information is provided to subscribers and interaction is possible. An additional platform could be the Moments feature on WeChat, where users can post text, photos or videos to record their daily life. Users can divide their friends on WeChat into groups and choose a certain group as their audience before posting anything.
Wang said the Moments feature is a perfect platform because it is the best "word-of-mouth communication" context in the digital era.
He also emphasized the importance of a direct approach to customer data. By running their own online or mobile platform, travel and events product providers can engage with their target audience directly and retain the valuable data generated. In China, online service providers or agencies control most data but evente.cn is not such an agency, he said. It helps businesses take control of their data and interact directly with their audience.
Zubin Bhettay, vice-president for international business for DoubleDutch, a mobile event technology company based in San Francisco, also spoke about digital platforms.
During his speech on the evolving landscape of social media and technology in meetings, Bhettay said that probably the most exciting and important technologies in the events industry are the "mobile and social ones".
He said that events are like social media, where people who share the same interests connect, communicate and engage.
Social media also provides a digital way to extend that experience and also the experience of events, he said.
fuchao@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 08/08/2015 page10)
