When working on hotel marketing campaigns the first question we need to address is this:

Have revenues been good over the last few years because of our marketing… or because of the economy in general?

We need to get stone-cold sober with ourselves on this point, first and foremost. Because if we aren’t, management will always behave with a certain sense of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. Worse, they might even be taking credit for rising revenues over the past several years (due to all the compression in the area!)
The problem with this perspective is that your hotel might be making each and every one of the mistakes I’ve listed below… and yet every time you come up with ideas to produce new, engaging marketing campaigns – it falls on deaf ears.
That’s why I’ve included this first chart from Bloomberg to explain why guests are willing to spend more on hotel nights these days, even in the absence of an engaging marketing message. Make sure the GM sees this one, ASAP.

As you can see in this monstrous chart, discretionary spending is up simply because there’s so much more money going around. But realize – this is just credit card money. And when the economy takes a hit, just like every time China has another mini-melt down, so will consumer spending.
Unfortunately, that won’t mean that OTA competition dries up as well, as you can see in the following chart.

This is why we have to engage our online communities and create loyalty, now, so we can maintain our current room rates, occupancy and keep commissions down when the hens come home to roost.
To do that – and to do it well – we need to have a clear picture of what’s really working in our marketing and what’s not.
That’s why I urge you to spend the next 30 minutes to ask and answer these tough questions. If you skim through this article, you might as well just stop reading now. Because the simple fact is that you need real answers if you want to gain the real business intelligence you need to move forward strategically.
As the saying goes, “What got you here won’t get you there”. (Especially not in a bear economy)

Take this test to find out if you’re really engaging prospective hotel guests

Are you really engaging your audience?

1. Likes are nice. Shares are great. But opt-ins are where it’s at.

Do you have anything (with a high perceived value) that you can offer visitors to your website in exchange for their email addresses? If not, your audience hasn’t given you permission to speak to them directly. This is a big, practical and psychological barrier to engagement, one that you should try to overcome as quickly as possible.

2. Immediate follow up

Guests say that their opinion of a hotel improves 20% or more when the hotel responds to their comments on TripAdvisor. And that response also has the ability to sway other’s booking decision by 68%, according to a study by Forrester and TripAdvisor. But only 4% of hotels even bother to respond to negative reviews! So, ask yourself: Do you make TripAdvisor part of your daily marketing routine? If not, I’m sure you know how important it is. Remember, when someone complains they’re really giving you a valuable opportunity to show that you care. And by doing that, you’re marketing the message that your hotel has a friendly, small business feel. This is a message that has an amazing appeal to almost any target audience.

3. Tailored promotions

I’m not talking about creating so many packages that your front-desk staff feel like they’re working at Starbucks… I’m just saying that engagement only really happens when you’re matching the right offer to the right demographic. Do you have packages with tailored images and messaging to your different age segments? Have you created different landing pages and offers for your corporate travelers? Have you created VIP offers to send to your mailing list…? Or do you rely on one-size-fits-all promotions? Remember, shotgun marketing only works in a target-rich environment. Engagement is when you’re creating your own niche environment. So don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because your Valentine’s Day promotion is working this year, it’s because of how well you’re engaging your audience.

4. Brand ambassadors

Do you have a system in place to figure out who your happiest guests are and encourage them to become brand ambassadors? If not, you’re ignoring one of the most powerful marketing approaches ever invented – peer to peer testimonials. The best thing about this approach is, once you’ve identified these brand ambassadors, incentivized and made it easy for them to spread the word about your hotel – they’re doing most of the work for you, so you can focus on finding the next brand ambassador. At the end of the day, real engagement is when others are passing your message along to friends and family. Until you reach this point you’re talking at your audience, not with them.

5. You could pick up the phone any time you like

Do you have a reason to follow up with your guests on non-reservations related topics? If not, that means your marketing isn’t actively listening to why your guests decided to visit your area in the first place or what they did during their stay. This lowers conversions because it probably means you’re your marketing theme is focused on ‘me-myself-and my hotel’, instead of the guest’s interests. And it creates long-term problems because you aren’t able to follow up with guests over the course of the year to let them know about things and events they might be interested in attending. The point here is to build the ‘know-like-trust’ factor into your marketing activities because if you can do that, your guests will become so loyal that they might even feel guilty staying anywhere else. You’ve become like a friend, after all.

6. Your hotel personifies the hero’s journey

The Greeks invented the hero’s journey with the Iliad and the Odyssey. Since then, this same character arch has been used in almost every movie you’ve ever seen… and in many of the most successful advertising campaigns. But to do the same thing in your hotel’s marketing you need to create a compelling narrative. To do that, ask yourself: Is your hotel the agent of change that helps your guests save their marriages, brings their families together, reward them for a lifetime of hard work, signs the deal that puts their sales department over the top or gives their sons and daughters a wedding day that they’ll never forget? If you don’t have these stories built into your messaging, you aren’t engaging anyone with a reason to set out on a journey in the first place. You’re only getting reservations by chance.

7. You have dragon-slaying authority

One of our recent clients, The Keating Hotel in San Diego, was designed by Pininfarina, the same design company responsible for Ferrari and Maserati. This is one type of awe inspiring, authority. But there are many other types of authority that you can take advantage of. To start, you need to be crystal clear on your unique selling proposition. Ask yourself: what is it that your property, your staff or your affiliates can offer that no-one else can claim? This could be a unique amenity, service or simply because of your location… but until you focus on what that is, you won’t be able to build authority around that into your marketing message. And if you aren’t doing that, unfortunately, it’s also a lot harder to justifying higher room rates.

8. You’re everywhere

These days, people expect to be able to find you with ease. They expect you to own brand name, instead of handing it over to Booking.com. And they expect you to publish regularly. But his is a very difficult thing for most hotel managers to accomplish, ad-hock. We all know how easy it is for the week to get away from us, right! That’s why it’s important to have a system in place so you can do your all your marketing in batches. For example, you should be able to sit down and in one day, put together all the social media posts that you’re going to do for the month. Do you have something like this in place? If not, your social media presence is making you look out of touch… and why should anyone follow you if your last post was 3 months ago? Simply put, if you aren’t involved with the conversation that’s going on right now, there’s very little reason for anyone to engage or, even, listen to what you have to say.

9. Everyone knows that booking direct is the best price and greatest value

I was looking at the revenue report from one of our clients last month. I’ve attached it, below, so you can be just as shocked as I was.

First please notice that they were spending $3,000 per year on their website, and that’s helped them generate €458,079 euro in direct reservations. This cost only represents .6% of their gross.

Second, please look at the ‘penny smart, pound foolish’ logic that’s allowed them to throw away nearly 200 room nights on Booking.com while they only generated €445,000 and payed €89K in commissions!!!

Not only is this whole-sale foolishness – because of the chunk it takes out of the hotel’s bottom line – it’s almost suicidal to spend this much money to propagate the myth that people can always get a better rate if they check the OTAs first. This is the complete opposite of engagement. It’s actively pushing people away.

I know. I know. The OTAs have a lot of traffic. And a lot of hotels rely on this to fill rooms during the slow season.

But if you’ve got a lower rate on your OTA channels than on your own website, we need to talk. We need to have an intervention, in fact.

Because engagement, just like love at first sight, means that you know how to stand out from everyone else, even in a noisy, crowded room. It means you have a certain confidence in your approach. When you walk up to her you find that you’ve got a lot to talk about, because you’re an amazing listener. And, of course, she’s happy to give you her phone number when you ask…

Now imagine how her heart drops when she finds out that you’ve got your profile on 3 or 4 dating sites! In fact, she just spotted a pictures of you on Booking.com, Expedia and Orbitz! And your rates are All at $9 less than on your own website!

Should she call you tomorrow? Should she fall in love and book direct?

There’s no reason to.

In fact, she just found another hotel right down the street that’s $20 less expensive than yours… And they’ve got really good reviews…

 

Conclusion: If you aren’t focusing your time and energy on sending the message that booking direct is the best way to go, then even if you’ve got steps 1-8 down pat, you aren’t engaging your audience.

We’ll maybe a little… But it doesn’t pay for the cost of your marketing, because at the end of the day, that 20-30% commission is going to Booking.com, not into your bank. Who’s the genius now?

 

– Jeremiah
HospitalityCopywriting.com