More Evidence That Timeshare Sales Pitches Don’t Work
Friday, January 6, 2006
Two recent conferences send a strong message: that travel and tourism consumers are fed up with traditional advertising and timeshare sales pitches, leaning more toward online information-gathering.
This past December, two conferences were held in San Francisco, the Hotel Electronic Distribution Network Association (HEDNA) conference and the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMAI) conference.
Two conferences in San Francisco. At first glance, this doesn’t seem like spectacular news. What’s the big deal here?
At these conferences, marketing research professionals dealing specifically with the travel, tourism and hospitality industries basically announced that conventional marketing tactics don’t work anymore.
Sounds familiar, right? I’ve blogged about this subject before. Only now, it seems like some portions of the industry are slowly catching up to where SellMyTimeshareNOW was two years ago.
What do I mean by conventional marketing tactics? Television commercials, pushy salespeople, junk mail, email spamming… you get the idea. People are sick of invasive marketing, and are finding alternative ways of getting information about products or services. Most of the time, this happens online.
People aren’t stupid. Whether we’re talking blogs, social networking sites, product review sites, or syndicated feeds, the modern consumer is absorbing as much information as possible from as many different sources as he or she can find.
What does this mean to timeshare buyers, sellers, and renters?
Get with a company that’s ahead of the times, not behind them. Blogs, syndication, consumer-generated content, and search marketing have all been proven to be more successful ways to generate timeshare sales – compared to email spam, telemarketing, slick TV ads and mountains of junk mail.
I sincerely believe that the opportunities afforded by these new marketing techniques come at an ideal time in the history of timeshare, when the industry is slowly but surely ridding itself of bad apples. By assigning long-term customer satisfaction a greater priority than making a fast buck, a wide range of remarkable men and women are making sweeping changes in our field.
Let’s keep up the good work!