Dragon Trail is the premier brand engagement firm to help travel and tourism organizations to connect to Chinese consumers by leveraging the Chinese online and social media landscape to develop and seed relevant content, executing results-driven digital marketing campaigns, and enabling innovative technology solutions.  In collaboration with COTRI (China Outbound Tourism Research Institute), the partnership offers an integrated “China Solution”, including technology, marketing, trade sales, and research, as well as service training, combined with specific industry expertise and local knowledge.  Together, both Dragon Trail and COTRI co-publish the resource website and community ChinaTravelTrends.com.

Both Dragon Trail and COTRI jointly organize seminars, workshops, and speak at conferences (such as at ITB Berlin 2010) all over the world to discuss the opportunity of marketing travel to China, and catering to Chinese tourists, from China Outbound tourism research, digital marketing and social media, travel trade sales distribution, to Chinese consumer behaviours and tourism product adaption.  Dragon Trail is also the founder of the China Travel Social Media Forum, which is now being produced in partnership with TravelDaily, the organizer of the China Travel Distribution Summit.

The Opportunity:

China is one of the fastest growing travel markets in the world. Thanks to rapid urbanization, rising disposable incomes and relaxations of restrictions on foreign travel, outbound trip volume has grown by an annual average of 22% since 2000 and just under 15.5% since 1995 – reaching 34.5 million in 2006.

The Internet penetration in China is 22.6%, higher than the world average of 21.9%. The growth rate of rural Internet users was 60.8%, much higher than that of urban users which was 35.6%. China is now way ahead of the United States in terms of the number of Internet users. The United States has an estimated 223.1 million internet users, with a penetration of 71%. However, the financial size of China’s online market is still smaller than that of the United States.
China has 390 million broadband consumers (2009). More interestingly, 92% aged 13 and above, contributed to social media. This compared to 105 million Americans, or 76% of that country’s broadband population. 43% of Chinese broadband users communicate via forums/discussion boards, and 41 million Chinese are “heavy” social media contributors, meaning they participate in six or more activities and connect with at least 84 people on a “one to many” basis in a typical week.
Merging these two trends, results in the power of the Internet leveling the playing field between brands and consumers in China. Brands can directly learn from and connect with targeted, relevant, communicative, and empowered consumers by going directly to online social communities. Brands can look to consumers directly for Insight, Inspiration, and Collaboration.   This is the biggest global opportuntity for international and domestic Chinese travel companies to increase brand awareness in the lucrative and growing Chinese consumer market, increase revenues by opening a new market by implementing innovative marketing strategies that leverage technology and new media.  Research by ACNielsen has also shown that, within the 18-40 age groups in the major cities, the market penetration level of internet users is 60-70% – and among university-educated Chinese, the level is over 90%. Further Chinese consumers heavily use the Internet to make their purchase decisions, while still using travel agents for final transactions for the most part due to convenience, including visa processing.

Goal:

To increase and develop a brand presence for travel and tourism brands in China and to create demand for a brand by empowering the Chinese consumers in order to be informed about the specific brand, which leads to sales via offline and online channels.

Chinese consumers heavily use the Internet to make their purchase decisions, while still using travel agents for final transactions for the most part due to convenience.  Travel agents in China, for the most part, recommend travel packages that they have either known for years and offer them the greatest incentive, if the consumer has no specific destination or hotel in mind. This is why it is vitally important for brands to be top of mind with Chinese consumers BEFORE they contact a travel agency. You don’t want to leave it up to the travel agent to recommend your brand by chance but educate the consumer to request your brand by choice. In order to start a conversation with consumers you need to have an engaging website where you can invite your potential customers to talk to about your brand and also listen to their feedback.  The second step is to leverage social media websites as a cloud to build various touch-points around the engagement platform that drive traffic back to the website, but also spread the word about the brand, and start conversations.

Strategy:

Leverage the Chinese digital marketing and social media space to connect with Chinese consumers. Utilizing Dragon Trail’s “Ring Strategy”, content will be aggregated and syndicated to increase content touch-points and increase visibility and presence in the Chinese web.

Starting with an engaging website, content will be re-written for Chinese search engines, as well as increasing relevance for Chinese consumers.  The site deploys appropriate Web 2.0 tools, including Dragon Trail’s proprietary technology solutions, as well as multi-media content. Making content easy to share is vital in order to encourage virality.

Leveraging the Chinese social web where users are already investing their time in order to further increase touch-points and develop a broad online footprint, and then building a powerful link building strategy, as well as syndicating content to third party website will not only increase eyeballs, but also organic search engine ranking. It is important for the site to be hosted in China in order to achieve that goal.

• Kaixin & Renren (instead of Facebook and Myspace)– Chinese social network sites
• Youku & Tudou (instead of Youtube) – Chinese video sharing site (like Youtube)
• Yupoo & Bababian (instead of Flickr) – Chinese image sharing sites (like Flickr)
• BBS forums – Seeding information in more than 50 relevant BBS forums to encourage interest.

Content will be updated and maintained by Dragon Trail’s core content team, consisting of Chinese PR communications professionals to achieve message relevancy, and Chinese social media experts to develop content visibility.

Rationale:

China is one of the toughest markets in the world for foreign brands to be successful, especially if marketers don’t do the right due diligence. Chinese consumers are fickle, demanding, price-conscious and often more educated about your company’s brand than consumers in the West, thanks to the rapid growth of the internet. China’s media are also fragmented and complex, and it is important to understand local consumers and grow their brands in China.

The Internet is quickly replacing traditional media as brands and companies seek to connect with their consumers in new and different ways.  International platforms, including Google that offer a cut and paste version of their American or European sites simply fail and often get banned. Popular sites such as Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and Twitter have fallen victim to the Great Firewall of China. While young innovative Chinese Netizens can find a way to get to these sites, why would they want to? Chinese social media is simply way cooler, and the online engagement in China is twice as high compared to the US and Europe, according to Forrester Research (2008), where a high percentage contribute content by uploading videos and pictures, as well as writing and commenting on blogs. The Internet in China is dominated by long-running, multi-service portals like Sina, QQ and Sohu that have been offering social networking, discussion forums, blogs, instant messaging and other “socialised media” long before Twitter and Facebook.  As the nationally preferred form of social media, bulletin board systems (BBS) are available in every imaginable topic, and in these forums, Netizens can be extremely vocal, resourceful, risk-takers, subversive and sometimes a little worrisome.

In China local Internet companies rule the digital space, and the numbers are staggering. Currently, the Internet in China is home to over 340 million users who are online for an average of 16 hours per week, the same amount of time they spend watching television. There are 111 million people managing a social network profile, and these numbers are growing daily. The power of the Internet in China has never been stronger and has not even begun to be realized.

It is no secret that the Internet in China has been an agent for reform, and it is serving as a valuable tool for people to explore a world often beyond their reach. The Internet is not only serving China’s growing set of Netizens though. It is quickly replacing traditional media as brands and companies seek to connect with their consumers in new and different ways.

China is one of the fastest growing outbound travel markets in the world. Thanks to rapid urbanization, rising disposable incomes and relaxations of restrictions on foreign travel, outbound trip volume has grown by an annual average of 22% since 2000.

How will Dragon Trail assist international travel brands?

Dragon Trail does not replace the travel agent, either online or offline for transactions, but we increase the awareness of your brand by leveraging social media, and digital marketing. We make sure there is a buzz about your products and services via online influencer marketing and content penetration so that the Chinese consumer has made up their mind before going to the travel agent.  Dragon Trail focuses not on pushing your message out into social media space; but rather pushing it out, and then pulling the right traffic into an engaging brand website; this traffic is then measured based on pre-defined success metrics to gauge success. The competition for Chinese travellers is expected to increase over the next few years, and it is important for companies to build their brand awareness now. (http://www.chinatraveltrends.com/2009/05/01/competition-for-chinese-travelers-increasing/). Dragon Trail executes by executing its unique “Ring Strategy”, and leveraging proprietary technology, as well innovative content seeding techniques.

Services:

Section 1: Strategy

1. China e-Marketing and Social Media Strategy
   Goal: Develop a customized execution strategy by leveraging best practices, new trends, emerging technologies, in order to build an execution plan to strategically penetrate the Chinese market.
   Understanding of the Chinese Online Travel and Social Media Industry, and how to leverage conversational marketing techniques to engage with consumers and build brand awareness. The report will include: (1) Social Media Overview (discusses the importance of social media and how to build a foundation to create a strategy), as well as the Chinese Digital Media Landscape; (2) Social Media Strategy Execution (includes various best practices and case studies to illustrate the various strategy building blocks from company domain, content syndication and aggregation, campaign planning and execution, measurement, blogger relations, and strategy management and maintenance); (3) Case Studies of other comparable brands from within and outside the travel industry; (4) Roadmap to execute a possible market entry strategy and resource allocation and budget requirements; (5) Assessment of current situation, and recommendations for improvement.

2. China Internet GSA & Trusted Advisor
   Goal: We act as a trusted advisor, and vendor agnostic “Internet GSA” to penetrate a company’s brand, aggregate voices and sentiments about the brand from Chinese social sites, to increase revenues and get insights. This retainer-based service allows a company unlimited access to the two Executive Partners, as well as other senior managers of the firm. We become an extension of your strategic team, advice on anything from media buying, strategic partners, competitive analysis, consumer behaviour, industry trends, as well as assist with training and recruiting of employees in the area of marketing, e-commerce, and social media.

Section 2: Marketing

1. China Social Media Pack
   (Presence on 5 Chinese Social Media websites + Chinese branded blog)
   Goal: Increase brand awareness and revenues by setting up a brand presence on relevant social networks in China, in Chinese, including blogs, social networks, image and video sharing, and BBS.

2. China Social Voices Monitoring
   Goal: Monitoring of the brand awareness of the brand, by extracting brand sentiments from the actual text in consumer-written reviews and comments from millions of customer reviews across the Internet – from both popular and niche web sites. 

3. China Influencer Marketing
   Goal: Leveraging extensive relationships with the Chinese celebrity blogging community to invite highly targeted bloggers to experience the brand, in order to tap into networks of influencers to increase brand awareness.  These bloggers are influencers in their own specific domain (i.e. fashion, sports, arts, music, culinary, technology, etc.).

4. Chinese Expert Blogger Insight
   Goal: We conduct online focus groups with expert Chinese bloggers to provide clients the necessary information to make smart decisions. The network of bloggers spans a variety of industries and has been handpicked to represent some of the top, independent thinkers in their respective fields. This gives bloggers a new method for monetizing their knowledge while providing clients a cost effective way to get tailored, independent advice. This can be very effective to get opinions on market entry, product development, service feedback, and brand positioning.

5. Online Advertising & e-Marketing Campaign Execution
   Goal: Place media on Chinese portals, travel and lifestyle websites, social networks, and blogs. Business Models include CPM (Cost per Thousand Impressions), CPC (Cost per Click).
6. China Online Affiliate Program
   Goal: Turn virtually any personal website and blogger in China into a travel agent by placing media, text links, and widgets onto individual websites. This model is very powerful as the affiliate program provides an incentive for bloggers to write about the respective brand.

7. Social Media Campaign Execution
   Goal: Developing innovative campaigns to increase revenues and brand awareness, by leveraging the above tools and programs.

10.  China Translation & Content Copy Writing
Goal: Make sure that the content on the websites, press releases, and promotional materials is relevant and engaging.

Section 3: Technology
(all technology tools are language agnostic and can be implemented across all types of market websites)

11.  Chinese Website (Engagement Platform) & China Hosting and Technical Support
Goal: Having a relevant website presence in Chinese in the cornerstone to build brand awareness and to do any marketing, branding, public relations, and promotions in China. A relevant site does not include a site that is well designed, but also engages users, and has content that is not just simply translated from the native language. The content needs to be kept fresh and relevant.

12.  Travel Professionals e-Learning Platform & Online Community & Online Gaming
Goal: Engage users with relevant content to increase brand awareness and achieve goals. Solutions include developing an e-Learning platform for Chinese travel professionals, and gain preferred status upon successful completion of the online course. Preferred status may give access to special deals, higher commission, as well as access to the online community to drive sales.

13.  Personal Trip Planner
Goal: The personal trip planner is a sophisticated trip planning tool, which will increase engagement on the website.  The application lets the consumers save various items into a personal itinerary, which is bookable, or can be printed out to be booked at a travel agent.

14.  Group Social Trip Planner
Goal: Similar to the Personal Trip Planner, the Group Social Trip Planner adds functionality for group travel, such as member profile, member forum and collaborative itinerary building. Especially for Chinese vacations, traveling in small groups with friends and families is a big trend, and the ability to collaborate online in planning the trip is a competitive advantage.

Note: Our technology was licensed to develop Groopvine by Groople based in the US. GroopVine was the first travel industry tool to offer customers one place to plan, share, shop and book trips. Many innovative technologies were introduced as part of GroopVine. Groople was able to stay competitive and remain the leader in the group trip planning and booking space.

15.  Mobile Website and Application Development
Goal: Mobile website and application development for the top five platforms, including  Apple iPhones, Nokia (Symbian), Android, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry devices, or other mobile platforms.  Customized Mobile Content Management System (M-CMS) enabling clients to easily modify their mobile website in real time. Development of applications that integrates booking systems as well as CRM.

Local Knowledge

There are huge cultural differences between Western and Chinese user behaviour and industry practices. This often results in Western companies struggling to make their mark. We can give you insight into Chinese online culture, advertising, marketing, and communications. What works in the West won’t always work in China. We offer customisation of your online communications for the Chinese market.

Our team includes experts and specialists in hospitality, tourism, online travel commerce and distribution, e-marketing and revenue management – in Europe, North America, and Asia.

- Management roles in marketing, operations and information technology in the global hotel industry (Fairmont, Hyatt, Choice)

- Hands on working experience with National Tourism Organizations

- Consulting experience with Hotels and Tourism Destinations

- Developed distribution technologies and Revenue Management systems and related strategies to leading hospitality companies including Choice Hotels, Omni Hotels, La Quinta Inns, Ian Schrager Hotels, Fairmont Hotels, and Harrah’s Entertainment

- Strong relationships with Chinese celebrity bloggers

- Strong background in traditional and online public relations, including relationships with Chinese online and offline media

- Company Start-up Experience in the travel and lifestyle category, targeting both in B2B and B2C markets

- Created and evangelized cutting edge internet technologies in Silicon Valley, USA

- Relationships with many of the main Chinese portal, travel, and social media websites

- Has strong contacts with Chinese NGOs and Chinese Government

- Has strong relationships with Chinese travel agencies and tour operators
- Global Client List includes organizations in Canada, USA, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia, Pacific

- Solid relationships with industry associations, such as UNWTO, PATA, HSMAI, HEDNA, IFITT, DMAI, ETC.

Senior Management Team:

Strategy: Jens Thraenhart, Executive Partner & Chief Strategist – jens<at>dragontrail<dot>com – T: +86-134.264.20591
Technology: George Cao, Executive Partner & Chief Technologist – george<at>dragontrail<dot>com – T: +86- 139.118.10000

PLEASE VISIT WWW.DRAGONTRAIL.COM FOR MORE INFORMATION AND THE LATEST NEWS.