On March 29, Ctrip Group held a press conference in Shanghai Center. Liang Jianzhang, the co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Ctrip Group, announced the "Tourism Marketing Hub" strategy. The strategy aims to use Ctrip's "Planet" as the carrier to aggregate the three major sectors of traffic, content, and commodities to create an open marketing ecosystem. Sun Bo, Executive Vice President and CMO of Ctrip, elaborated on the implementation path of this strategy. Since then, business leaders of Ctrip's live broadcast, community, planet, commercialization center, etc. will appear in sequence to explain in detail the "tourism marketing hub" strategy in product and Specific implementation in operation.
All of the above have released a signal: Ctrip has begun the market segment of Nuggets tourism marketing with an unprecedented level of investment.
Travel advertising has become the industry's "100 billion track", Ctrip is full of stamina
Fastdata's related research shows that with the recovery of China's tourism industry and the increase in the advertising investment intensity of tourism suppliers in 2021, it is expected that China's tourism advertising market will reach 80-100 billion yuan in the whole year, and tourism advertising will become the tourism industry in the future. The new "100 Billion Track". Ctrip has always used agency commissions as its main income, and now it has shown strong strategic intent in tourism marketing revenue. This may mean that Ctrip will no longer be a pure OTA in the future, but will iterate into a more complex For pan-tourism commercial entities, the capital market may also reassess its value.
In fact, there are already many players focusing on the tourism marketing market. Companies such as Mafengwo, Meituan, and CYTS in the tourism industry, and content platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu in the Internet industry are all exploring here in their own ways. gold. With the gradual enrichment of travel content products such as travel notes, guides, reviews, communities, audio, short videos, and live broadcasts, the competition around this market has become full of gunpowder. Why is Ctrip opening up here?
"Compared to other platforms, Ctrip's traffic has stronger monetization properties." Liang Jianzhang, co-founder and chairman of the board of directors of Ctrip Group, said that traditional content platforms are more purposeless users and need to spend a lot of money. The cost of the purchase will happen. The users who come to Ctrip have a higher purpose, which stimulates their travel inspiration, and the difficulty of guiding the completion of consumer purchases is relatively reduced. At the same time, Ctrip's travel scenarios and data algorithms can better match users accurately; booking and transaction capabilities also promote the increase in traffic realization conversion rate.
At present, the first step of Ctrip's Nuggets tourism marketing market-the construction of the content ecology has achieved initial results. In October 2020, Ctrip raised its content business to the level of the group's strategy for the first time, and released its "deep content cultivation" strategy. As of the end of 2020, Ctrip's content channels contributed twice as much to APP traffic as it was at the beginning of the year, and the length of visits to information streams has also increased by more than 200% from the beginning of the year.
Ctrip has released its "tourism marketing hub" strategy this time, pushing the gameplay of content ecology to a new level. What is worth looking forward to is that Ctrip uses content to connect destinations, traffic conversion, brand marketing, and a new commercial form of tourism content is being constructed.
Ctrip's content marketing is fully upgraded to create a tourism marketing hub
The core of the "tourism marketing hub" strategy released by Ctrip this time lies in the planet. To put it simply, the planet is an "integrated marketing platform" for travel businesses and content creators on Ctrip. It can use all officially permitted methods, including live broadcasts, post graphics, create short videos, initiate topic interactions, and challenge activities. And so on, to create momentum for marketing your own brands, products, ideas, etc.
Chimelong is the first "crab-eating" partner. As of March 9, 2021, the Chimelong Planet has gained more than 20,000 fans; as of March 5, the total number of exposures on and off the site was 150 million, the content produced a total of 65 articles, and the number of content views exceeded 1.5 million, the number of user interactions reached 20,000, and the total content interaction rate was 1.25%. Currently, Planet is a directional invitation and cooperation system, and provides customized services to industry partners and destination governments. In addition to Chimelong Resort, MGM Resorts Sanya Yalong Bay, Macao Sands Resort, and the Department of Culture and Tourism of Jiangsu Province have also launched Planet.
On the basis of the planet number as the core, as the value export of carrying content, Ctrip Live and the Ctrip community are the first to bear the brunt, supporting the skeleton of the content system with a comprehensive upgrade attitude. Ctrip data shows: As of the end of 2020, Ctrip has conducted 118 live broadcasts, and 200 million consumers have booked travel in the live broadcast room, driving Ctrip's total pre-sale GMV to exceed 5 billion yuan.
On the basis of the original BOSS live broadcast and sale channels, Ctrip will open up a platform-based live broadcast to form a matrix of Wednesday BOSS live broadcast, all-day special sales broadcast, brand daily exclusive live broadcast, merchant live broadcast, and ecological chain personal live broadcast. The platform-based Ctrip live broadcast mechanism is increasingly similar to Taobao live broadcast. At present, new official live broadcast brands such as "All Day Sale Lianbo" have been officially launched on March 25, and the platform-based live broadcast products have also been successfully tested.
Another carrier of the content ecology, the Ctrip community announced the launch of the creator program. This means that this community has officially entered the 2.0 era. This time iterative upgrade, in addition to KOL, Ctrip will introduce KOC, merchants, cross-border organizations, etc. as content creation groups. The content has expanded from travel strategies to the areas of lifestyle, eating, drinking and having fun, and check-in evaluation. While upgrading the online gameplay, hundreds of offline activities were carried out, including concerts, destination carnivals, cross-border performances, etc.
In the planning of Ctrip's entire marketing hub strategy, there are still several products and tools that are still in the process of landing, but what is certain is that there are not many obstacles in the direction Ctrip is working on. "Looking at the world, none of our peers can make this business. Ctrip's marketing team is constantly investing, recruiting, and working overtime. There are many things that need to be fueled. After the epidemic, you can go wherever you want. Where to go, I think this matter is of great significance to the industry." Liang Jianzhang said.