Marketing Insight From The 2019 Travel Marketing Awards Winner: Laura Stone

Author: Abra Dunsby Acting Features Editor, TTG Media

Laura Stone, Senior Marketing Manager at Princess Cruises, won the Tomorrow’s Travel Marketing Leader award.

What inspired you to choose a marketing career?
I loved the appeal of a job that would allow me to pull together my creative and organisational skills.

Marketing highlight?
As part of our GDPR preparations last year, we worked with agency VideoSmart to create personalised, emailable videos for re-permissioning our database. The videos used data about the guests’ previous holiday with Princess Cruises to create a sense of nostalgia and included a call to action to opt back in, so as not to miss out on future offers.

What were the results?
The campaign not only produced great opt-in results, but the video also went viral on LinkedIn.

What qualities do you need to be a marketer of tomorrow?
Creativity and innovation – the marketing landscape is constantly changing and consumers have decreasing attention levels, so achieving standout for your brand is paramount. Being a team player is key – very few marketing campaigns can be achieved alone.

Stone's top trends to look out for...
1. Keep up to date. Influencer marketing will continue to grow but become a lot more regulated and measurable.
2. Go interactive. This type of video is still fairly new, but I see more brands engaging their customers with it over the next couple of years, especially with the first interactive film recently airing on Netflix.
3. Get the message out. Automated communications are now expected by consumers, so marketing teams need the right systems to manage their customer data and messaging to the right person at the right time. It sounds basic, but in reality is hard to achieve.
4. Target. As more types of media become available programmatically, smaller brands can invest in the likes of broadcast or out-of-home in a much more targeted fashion on modest budgets.