2022: The Year of _______

2022: The Year of__________

There’s no denying that it's with trepidation that we launch into 2022. The last two years have been hard going on every front, with more u-turns, highs, lows, lies and confusion which has confounded the public and driven business mad.

We’ve previously talked a lot about changing customer behaviour during the pandemic, and  the leap in technology with more data now available than ever before -now they just need the customers. One thing is for sure, consumers have made new brand allegiances, and are still susceptible to further change as they too return to normality.

I also believe there’s a new nurtured kindness that has developed over the last couple of years. People are looking out for each other more, and with this, I believe that with the right actions and better communication, brands can attract (and win) new customers that will remain loyal for longer by showing their human side and how they treat their customers, teams and suppliers.

So, we’ve pulled this minifesto (much shorter than a manifesto) together to help steer us as a business and keep our customers informed. We want to be transparent about our development schedule and recognise the frustration sometimes felt when tools are not quite there…

This is our minifesto for 2022.

Thanks for your support and best of luck for the year ahead, I hope you have success with your own Year of ____________.

Dan Brookman

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2022: The Year of Making Data Greater

Surely it's time that data was at the heart of marketing. There’s more now than ever before, platforms are working together more seamlessly, customers are utilising order and pay, WiFi is still widely used, there are some cracking feedback providers offering some real deep analysis and, due to the pandemic, customers are booking in advance more than ever before.

We help our customers bring more focus to their data through our PoP (Proof of Presence)  metrics and by building customer profiles. We are working on connecting more data, most importantly basket analysis, to understand lifetime value.

Product: At the beginning of February we’ll be rolling out Airship Pages, our form/landing page builder into the platform. This will enable customers to build their own forms quickly and deploy them to drive more data.

We are also working on developing an insight dashboard, this is a live project and phase one should be live by the spring.

Finally, we are working on an SLA for any integration that we complete in 2 weeks. We’ve had some success with Accreditation in the last year or two on both platforms; building out better APIs,creating a bigger team and introducing processes to integrate new partners.

Success: We’ll be working with more Professionals to roll out Flight Plans (a short series of sessions where we all get together and learn how to do a particular bit of hospitality marketing amazingly)). We’ll be repeating this throughout the year with other Professionals and Partners.

We are already on our way with the DataHawks Flight Plan, where Vic Searl is educating the marketeers of hospitality on how to use their data in order to maximise ROI. Additionally, our Customer Success teams are here to help you get the most of your data by advising on segmentation forms, targeting criteria & reporting.

2022: The Year of Knowing Your Customers

It’s time to build your base. Customers need a reason to engage. The route to sign-up is often paved by an action i.e. booking, feedback, WiFi, pay at table BUT the magic comes when you engage with your customers with an overarching campaign, which we call the Value Exchange.

Our goal is for all your customers (not just a small segment) to be part of your loyalty program).

The data that is driven through this central campaign will yield more engaged customers. We will help our customers mould their own Value Exchanges through the launch of Airship Rewards. Read on.

Product: In the spring we’ll be launching Airship Rewards, a web application that encompases Toggle, single use vouchers and the customers profile.

In addition, later in the spring, we’ll be enabling our customers to push data into their social channels to create audiences. This will begin with audience export before something more integrated.

Success: Our teams will help mould your Value Exchange and work with you to get set-up. We’ll be planning a Flight Plan to help guide you through the process.

We want to be better at case studies, so if you are up for some measurement and are happy to share the findings with the sector, we are happy to provide expertise (and maybe some funding).

2022: The Year of Automation & Personalisation

A good CRM should deliver revenue from day one as it builds customer profiles, understands behaviour, triggers communication based on context and creates relationships with your customers.  Our flat rate commercials are based on locations, rather than the volume you send. This means that you can broadcast through Airship without hefty invoices. We encourage you to build multiple highly personalised customer journeys.

Product: We’ll be launching a first phase of our simplified automation mapping solution, so you can clearly understand your revenue journeys.  

Success: Our customer success team are experts in creating these journeys and advising what will work best for you. We run regular Flight Plans to help you map out the perfect journeys for your brand.

Where you use both Airship & Toggle, we encourage you to serve up Toggle vouchers within your journeys. The redemption of these vouchers can be traced back to individuals and contribute to PoP.

2022: The Year of Driving New Visits

Airship’s PoP (Proof of Presence) metrics allow our customers to understand the frequency of visits for all its customers from all available data sources. It’s pretty smart. We drop customers into segments that help you understand who they are and then create personalised automations that encourage return visits.

Product: After a couple of sprints on Toggle we’ll be dropping on to a new promotions manager, this will enable our customers to take control of promotions that include both Toggle Cards and Single Use Vouchers. It’s a beast of a project and will include some new POS integrations.

Toggle Product: We’ll push out Toggle Tickets and also a multi-brand dashboard for those customers who want a single store with different brand skins.

Success: We’ll be surfacing the workings behind our weekly health scores to help you push your marketing forward.

2022: The Year of Rocketing Your ROI‍

Over the coming months, you’ll get a new insight dashboard that’ll help you understand your customers in a much deeper way, drilling down into what makes them tick. We’ll be linking broadcasts to PoP metrics to show a delivered visit and linking that to basket data to understand spend and lifetime value.

Product: Alongside the insight metrics, we are pulling more and more data into Airship, taking basket data from EPOS systems and linking it all together to prove ROI and understand customer value.

Success: Our customer success team will work with you to help understand PoP to drive up visits and understand the metrics within our insights metrics to prove an ROI.

We will be working on cross platform benchmarking across different metrics so you can see how you are doing against your peers.

2022: The Year of Learning

As with 2021, we’ll be continuing our series of Flight Plans as well as introducing even more training by industry experts. Broken up into bitesize sessions, these monthly plans will be recorded and published through our blogs so you can refer back to them when you need support or ideas.

Success: We will continue to add at least one article to our Academy every week. In addition, we can add you to our facebook group to where all our Flight Plan recordings are stored

2022: The Year of Being a Better Marketeer

We know that you are pulled every which way in your job. Marketeers in hospitality have the widest roles and seem to pick just about every task that doesn’t have an owner. We are going to build the tools and provide the help and support to make you a better marketeer. We are committed to this and will regularly check in through our teams to help you make more of our platforms.

Success: We are here to help you be a better marketeer, whether that’s with support through our Academy articles, face to face meetings with our account managers, or our proactive support around your platform health score.

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Product: Our key developments this year are all around making the platforms easier to use, with great tools to engage with customers. The key focus is measurement and ROI.

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