Lockdown is subsiding, are you dying to start booking for your next travel? I am!
Offline to Online, O2O Social Orientation Service.
What is it?
The millennials are spending more than 30% (more than 5 hours per day) of their precious time engaged with UGC. with the demographics shown in Instagram’s as 55% of online adults between ages 18 to 29. Thus, you would see AirBnB is actively establishing UGC in its marketing efforts. And, in less than a decade, this big name has taken over the travel industry. James the GM of Northern Europe once said, “Your community, your customers, are the best marketing asset you have”.
The China tourists are rising rapidly for the past 5 years, putting aside the current pandemic aftermath which remains a challenge for the tourism industry to-date. However, tourist hot spots in Southeast Asia are noticing the trend of china tourists arrivals. Meituan Dianping has over 6.2 Million active merchants which sums up to 450 Million annual transaction users as this super app covers more than 200+ business categories. F&B, Hotels, Tourist Attractions, Spa and Leisure, Food Ordering, Flight ticket purchase. and many many many more. Merged in year 2015, this platform has always featured with obvious social media label, highlighted by user-generated content UGC toward merchants.
Users or visitors could check in the location or to create the Point of Interest upon visiting a new spot, grade their service or food, upload their comments and photos upon that. other users could filter and make purchase decisions online according to those history comments, grade scores, popularity and etc. This app puts forward some point systems so that the visitors could continue to contribute, star users would be selected for free meals or free SPA services thus forming a cycle of key opinion leaders; Whist this selection would be based on diversified factors such as location, taste preferences and interests. Platform then develops a sales package to merchants, to improve merchant’s ranking in interest, grades and comments. Such business model forms a solid 020 service of consumer-driven by geographical merits. Whilst creating and sourcing contents would be costly, this chain is efficient, convenient, safe and easy; It trims down so much of the effort to search for new merchants, new users, sales and with all the organic datas in this fast pace life in the mobile internet age.
Aside from F&B and Tourism related business, Meituan has also Hotel and Movie tickets under their roof. Now, Meituan Dianping has become the biggest localized life service 020 platform in China. This UGC-driven strategic company not only drives engagement with its audience, it brings values to brand, creating real experiences sharing, the complete circle of content-worthy! It has not only bring in the growth to Instagram just like AirBnB, it brings more than just information to its own stock value.
It is almost impossible for this super app to develop so rapidly without using this 020 pattern, it starts with “location” and this app will identify the user’s current location and will suggest a cut-point, ten radiate the geographic areas based on local’s attractions ranging from food, shopping, hotel and also transportation. This facilitate the users to locate and search based on their interest, and maximised the flux from online to offline consumptions direct action. Those comments and grades from history would be the signs of increasing selection values; Users will navigate via the GPS point, and links with e-wallet payment solutions upon billing. After that this user would post his/her user experience back to the platform. Super app Meituan Dianping proves endless possibilities of O2O pattern.
Below is the Merchant main page. Just like Foursquare.
2. Brand Zone
3. Voucher / Reservation
4. Opinion Zone
Users’ experience;
5. Community Zone
We are no longer booking our travel via agencies, having ourselves with a tour guide that might only bring you to spend on souvenir purchase rather than to explore the travel at your own interest. You decide your travel with alot of research online, aside from Tripadvisor, AirBnB, oriental travels we have Mafengwo, Fliggy, Dianping, CTrip…
“At the first interest stage, 86% of consumers are influenced by photos posted by friends, family or peers. At the research stage when visitors are browsing travel, hospitality and destination sites, again user-generated visuals are coming out on top at 59%, compared with 55% for professional images from a destination site. As far as driving bookings is concerned, the trend continues, with just over half (52%) of the consumers included in the study saying that they’ve made plans to visit a specific destination based on an image or video from friends, family members or peers. More importantly, they’re not just influenced by this content but they’re perpetuating the cycle by creating their own authentic content to inspire others.” (cited from Simplevieweurope.com)
When it comes to creating content for your marketing, it is now more important than ever to bring in interaction with the target audience, in order to improve the quality of the branding and at the same time to create opportunities for conversations. Regardless that would bring in sales (some may beg to differ this point), marketing is about building relationships, trusts, then it generates measurement on how far we could go in terms of strengthening partnerships between the brand and their communities. Personalized experiences are the key for today’s travellers. However, have you figured out your SPECIFIC target audience?
