We attended the Adventure Travel World Summit in Whistler last week. This is the premier international event for the adventure travel industry with executive level participation, excellent networking, and just a cool venue (Whistler). It turned out to be everything we expected, and more. The most energizing thing for us was the lively discussion with customers (ranging from tour operators to destination marketing companies to resorts to publishers….), which is refreshing compared to so many other industry events where industry people talk to each other about what customers are asking for and need. But where’s the customer in all that discussion?
First why Adventure Travel and Mixpo? We have been working with ATTA over the last few months and have a strategic partnership in place to be their online video marketing solution. And of course, Richard Bangs is on our Advisory Board. But the reason for this is that adventure travel is all about the experience. It’s involves exotic locations, exciting adventures, a little bit of a fear of the unknown, a niche market today but expanding to much broader audiences….but it also happens to be a high-touch sale that is increasingly starting with some research online. We went to Whistler with the belief that Online Video Marketing has the potential to revolutionize sales and marketing in this segment. How better to ‘experience’ the destination and trips than Video? Text and even static photos just can’t do this justice. And this was completely validated at the conference. We had numerous conversations involving the words ‘Experience’, ‘Authentic’ and ‘Emotion’. No question that at some point, every single business involved in adventure travel will be using video to market themselves online.
The underlying theme of the conference was ‘Conversion’. How apt for what we are trying to do. What does conversion mean for online video marketing? Of course, the overall promise is ‘converting lookers to bookers’ but this manifests itself in all different customer touchpoints online, e.g.
To the last point, I was invited to speak in a panel discussion about the Web’s advances and how it can help businesses. I gave a 10 min presentation on Video and some of the trends. The thing that was the biggest eye-opener for all was Universal Search (i.e. the trend for Google, Yahoo and others to combine text, image, videos, maps etc in the main search results). Imagine if your videos can start appearing in the Search results contextually and help differentiate your listing from others. How many people go to Youtube to search for a trip? None. This is a hot new trend that points to the emerging area of Video SEO. But the key is to be able to connect search results with lead generation, as it’s all about the results and ROI. Mixpo is very heavily focused on this and we believe that this will be a huge factor in online marketing in the next few years. Certainly many of the early adopter businesses at the conference were extremely excited about this.
A few such businesses we met were the owners of Matava (Fiji), Tui Tai (Fiji), and Roam (Canada). They are all extremely passionate about the Internet as a sales channel, and took the leap of faith early on to move their entire marketing online, and are now extremely knowledgeable and creative to make use of its full potential. In fact Stuart from Matava mentioned “We realized 3 years ago that there was a freight train coming. Brochures, DVDs etc weren’t working. We decided to move 100% online especially as Fiji is so remote. And now our growth is better than ever. This has been fantastic for us. It truly is the world wide web”. Pioneers such as Stuart, Tige and Brian from these 3 companies will continue to push the boundaries with emerging technologies. We have a lot to learn together in this exciting journey.
Finally, I was pleasantly surprised at how many businesses were talking about ROI and effectiveness of marketing spend. The beauty of the Internet is that everything is measurable. It’s not opaque like other forms of offline marketing. Scott Adams from the Ontario Paddling Alliance summed it up best: “Why market if you can’t measure”? Absolutely. That’s what we believe at Mixpo for sure. Overall a great summit, and we hope to contribute a bit to how this industry will do its sales and marketing in the future.
