With consumer confidence and the number of people in employment at an all time high, Germany is experiencing it’s best economic growth (3.6%) since it’s reunification in 1990.
With this in mind Tourism Ireland is in the process of rolling out it’s €2.5 million advertising campaign across Germany, front loading it to coincide with St. Patrick’s Day festivities and the crucial decision making period for this market.
The campaign kicked off in January with a TV Campaign blitz, airing at prime time across seven top German stations. It will also focus on Co-Operative Campaigns with Groups and Associations; Monthly Consumer & Business Tourism ezines; In Market Consumer Events along with a Trade and Press website.
Tourism Ireland’s ad campaign will be front-loaded as according to Niall Gibbons, Chief Executive of Tourism Ireland “two-thirds of Germans decide on their destination six months in advance of their holiday, so it is essential that Ireland is highly visible across a range of media, including TV, radio, online and in social media, during that important decision-making period.”
Our Analysis
We had a look at some data from Google to see what impact this Ad Campaign is having on the German Market in relation to looking at Ireland as a tourist destination, here is what we found.
Searches for Ireland:
‘Ireland‘ - 201,000 German Searches per month
‘Irland‘ – 368,000
We then looked at how searches in January 2011 compared to previous searches to give us an indication of whether the German consumers awareness was increased:
We can see from the chart that searches for the keyword ‘Ireland‘ from Germany, in January 2011, are the highest they have been since April/May 2005.
Next we wanted to see whether this increase in searches was for the brand name ‘Ireland‘ (in blue) as opposed to the German spelling of ‘Irland‘ (in red) which would indicate an increase in the brand awareness for the ‘Ireland‘ brand in the German market.
We can see that searches for ‘Ireland‘ continue to outnumber searches of the German spelling ‘Irland‘. While this would lead us to believe that “Ireland” as a brand is getting stronger in the German market, it could also mean that Germans, due to their high fluency in English, feel they will get better information from searches in English than the results that show for a German search.
The Impact For The Tourism Industry In Ireland
Well it’s not rocket science, more Germans are going to come to Ireland, the hard part is how you are going to gain more of a share than your competitors:
- Translations – Make sure your website is properly translated into German and is Search Engine Optimised for the phrases this market is searching for.
- Advertise – Analyse where in Germany the most amount of searches are coming from and target these areas with PPC ad campaigns.
- Get your customer service in order - Germans tend to define customer service chiefly in terms of reliability but also place value on empathy and responsiveness from service employees. So if you are slow or neglect to respond to email enquiries etc. you need to remedy this as soon as possible.
- Segment Data – Have you segmented your database so that you can send a personalised eZine to your German customers translated into German? No…we didn’t think so!
- Appeal – Are you appealing to your German Market? The two major driving forces for the German tourist are escapism and a search for novelty and experience. Other factors include: being with friends, adventure and excitement, being able to ‘zone out and do nothing’ and prestige. Are your offerings to your German customers appealing to any of these…or a are you still wrongly fixated on price?
This push by Tourism Ireland presents operators within the tourism sphere in Ireland with a fantastic opportunity to gain repeat, highly affluent customers. Make sure you don’t miss out on this opportunity, start today and implement a high level strategy that covers all your consumer touch points, from your website to your front desk phone and email enquiries.
…And remember this is just the German market, how well do you know and service all your other demographic markets?
germany, tourism
