Four Countries In Asia-Pacific Account For 20% Of Global Travel Spending. Is Your Brand Prominently Represented In These Markets?
While the purchasing habits and experiences of these respective four countries may differ from one another, their approach towards overseas vacation, such as directly reviewing at overseas hotel and travel websites, discussing with family, exchanging notes with friends and colleagues, or in choosing their preferred destinations, are somewhat common traits.
How to Gain Higher Eyeballs & Conversions in These Four Countries?
Language – The Precursor That Resonates
First and foremost, it is to identify the language of communication for your online engagement strategy with these countries. By having content that speaks in their preferred language, they’re more likely to spend with you.
By the way, it’s not English, nor Spanish or French, but Chinese (Simplified Scripts for China or Traditional Scripts for Taiwan), Korean and Japanese.
Branding and marketing content needs to be localized with creatively-edited translations (aka transcreation, or in simpler terms, Creative Translation). Be it in Chinese (colloquially written for China or Taiwan audiences), or into Korean ( ‘Hangul’, with emphasis on honorifics and speech levels), or into Japanese (using a combination of ‘hiragana’, ‘katakana’ and ‘kanji‘ writings).
Understand the Peculiarities of Your Target Audiences
Unlike Westerners, the outbound travelers from China, South Korea, Japan or Taiwan would mostly want to go to new destinations – to discover something new, to experience and to indulge in something different.
Hence, it presents equal opportunities for global hotel and travel establishments to showcase their destinations as well as properties or amenities – to drive their interests such as, ‘local attractions’, ‘things to do’, ‘unique things to see’, ‘local food eats’, ‘walking trails’, ‘historical sites’, etc., or even by offering regional itinerary packages.
Marketers should also consider the noticeable shift amongst these Asian travelers who once valued shopping and purchases as important aspects.
Today, they are more into experiential-oriented travels and prefer those unusual and ‘authentic’ encounters in observing as well as hands-on with the local community’s lifestyles.
They want to immerse in the local culture, tasting local delicacies and activities, etc., particularly a destination’s hallmarks, things or events that made the city or country famous.
Another key point to note is, most consumers from these countries have already shifted to alternative payment methods, such as e-Wallet, QR code, real-time bank transfer, and direct debit, instead of cash or card.
In the ‘Travel Payment Guide 2019’ report commissioned by Amadeus (travel technology) and PPRO (cross-border payments), it cited 58% of travelers from Asian countries chose cashless modes of payments.
Be Equipped with Relevant Linguistic & Project Management Support
It is imperative for brands and businesses from the Hotels, Hospitality, Travel, and Tourism industry to have adequate support – whether it’s in-house or outsourced – in a range of creative content localization expertise, namely:
- Implementing local Language Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): encompassing research and analyze on high-probability keywords amongst users of your target demographics.
- Populating Website with Keywords: incorporating specific words/phrases into your localized web content, so as to improve the ‘search’ algorithms for keywords/phrases that the target audience might be using.
- Managing approved translated content and monitoring for content consistency throughout Websites, Chatbots, Microsites, Booking Portals, eDMs, Ads, Training Materials, etc.
- Creating localized language versions of advertisements, banner ads, advertorials, travel vlogs, press releases, social media blogs, etc.
- Launching customized social media marketing on commonly-used mobile apps and travel-related platforms.
- Strategizing attraction marketing as well as in-country publicity activities with KOLs, prominent influencers, PR events, etc.
In Summary
For businesses in the travel, hotel and hospitality industry, there are no better times than now to initiate localized content-marketing, in order to tap into the millions of outbound travelers from China, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. The key focus is to be linguistically visible, in order to resonate with potential audiences. This can only be achieved by providing content colloquially written in their local languages.
An imperative strategy to enhance discoverability amongst these target communities includes attraction marketing created for mobile apps. This is because they are mostly relying on their mobile devices to browse at social media platforms, review overseas destination tourist facilities and services, sourcing for tips at online travel sites, etc.
