The Promise of Digital Marketing for Hotels - Duetto

• Updated on: 2017-06-03
• Read original article here

Compared to some business sectors, the hotel industry is ahead of the curve in employing digital marketing techniques. Compared to some other industries, however, hotels are still playing catch up, says Tim Peter, president of Tim Peter & Associates, a hospitality digital marketing strategy consulting firm.

“We do a very good job in digital in tracking last-click kind of stuff and understanding the return on spend on things far down in the hotel booking funnel,” he said during a recent phone conversation. “We have a ways to go in terms of understanding what’s happening closer to the top of the funnel. We also could be doing a lot more in terms of (customer relationship management) and how we make use of our customer data to attract repeat business and leverage those customers to find new guests.”

Peter said because many marketers in the industry are putting so much emphasis on optimizing the late-funnel game there exists a lot of opportunity in the middle to top areas.

“Some industries are doing very well with this aspect,” he said. “Travel could be doing better.”

Peter has been operating his consulting firm since 2011, and before that he headed digital marketing for Cendant Corp. (now Wyndham Worldwide) and The Leading Hotels of the World.

You have to understand as much as you can about your guests and how it is they find you. Click To Tweet

Here are other highlights of the conversation:

What can hotel companies do to put their marketing and distribution focus nearer to the top of the booking funnel?

One is you’ve got to build your database. You have to understand as much as you can about your guests and how it is they find you. You have to understand the value of search beyond it being transactional—not just when people are searching your hotel name or searching your destination—but when people are finding you in the early stage and where they are finding you. Putting a lot of emphasis on the quality of your reviews and selling your destinations to people earlier in the funnel can attract them to where you are and begin to choose you.

What other things should hoteliers be doing?

Obviously, doing more to tie sales and digital marketing together so you can make these strategies work for group business more effectively than we have done.

We need to be doing more with social. That might sound a little odd because a lot of hotels do a fair bit with social, but actually more in terms of valuing social appropriately: What is it doing in terms of attracting people to your property in the first place, even if they don’t buy immediately but subsequently turn into a late-funnel conversion?

As the hotel industry seems to be evolving into a new phase of its cycle, what advice are you giving to clients regarding what they should be doing in this environment?

Be very focused on not leaving too much on the table right now. Focus on driving occupancy and driving rate in particular. Don’t skimp on trying to get more rate. Invest in improvements in your service quality. Make sure you’re building up a good base of reviews. Make sure you’re doing a good job of differentiating the property in the marketplace.

Also being very focused on not letting cost structures get out of hand. If we know things are about to tip at some point in the not-too-distant future we suddenly don’t want to be in a position where expenses are way out ahead of where revenues should be. It’s focusing on tightening up the bottom line while pushing the top line.

Do we really understand the depth of the mobile trend in the hotel industry?

We’re underinvesting in mobile because we see that people don’t book via mobile, but people don’t book because we’re underinvesting in it. This goes back to the idea of top of funnel versus mid-funnel versus late funnel.

Nobody books on mobile because the booking experience in mobile is generally terrible. We have a long way to go to make it useable. People don’t have a problem booking on mobile from a comfort perspective; it’s just too damn hard to do, whereas the (online travel agencies) are doing a great job.

Mobile has a variety of meanings. How do you define it?

When people are genuinely in a mobile context and on the go, which is a time when people actually do research, and it’s very hard to do. If I’m running through an airport or standing on a street corner in New York City and dragging my suitcase with one hand and holding a phone with another hand, and trying to pull out my credit card with a third hand, and type in the numbers with another hand; wait, I ran out of hands a couple of hands ago. That’s mobile in context.

You’ve been quoted saying content is king, but context is queen and data is the crown jewels. What does that mean?

Content matters to guests at various points in their process, but different content is going to matter based on each guest’s specific context. If we look at a guest who is truly mobile, what are the things they are most likely looking for? They’re most likely looking for directions to the place, your phone number, a quick booking, and everything else becomes secondary. It’s emphasizing the content that matters at the right points of a journey.

From a hotel perspective, what does it mean that someone is coming to me on mobile, what are the things they most need to know? My phone number, how to get to the hotel, to modify existing reservations and then they might need to book.

And that’s where data is the crown jewels because if you test versions of content and context you’ll see which ones deliver the best results for your guests. That’s how you tie that all together.

The industry is hell-bent on boosting direct bookings. How can digital marketing help drive direct bookings for hotels?

There seem to be two crowds of people in the industry. One crowd is the torches and pitchfork folks who believe OTAs are evil or, at best, a necessary evil. I’m not one of those people. I believe OTAs absolutely have a value. What you don’t want OTAs doing is fighting with you for guests you’re going to get anyway.

Where digital plays a role in that is in communicating with your existing guests, and in helping find guests who have already decided they want to come to your area, and in helping give you broader reach to get in front of people who might not yet have considered your area.

Are review sites more or less important than they once were? What’s the future of guest reviews?

They are critically important, and they will remain critically important. We’re due for some shake-up. I suspect any day now we’ll start to see some innovation in the review space, either with people posting videos or possibly people transitioning to SnapChat-like features or Instagram to review product and service.

TripAdvisor is the dominant player and likely will be for awhile, but we’re seeing more people commenting about hotels and telling their stories about hotels on other social networks, so it’s important to be aware of those and understand that a review can happen anywhere in any place.

What advice would you give to GMs, revenue strategists, marketers and owners to keep current on the digital world?

We live in a world where you have to keep learning constantly. At the same time, don’t chase fads. If you focus on the larger trends you will do fine. We focus on a core and explore model. Here are the things we know that worked for a long time, which sometimes just means the last few years. That’s where we put the bulk of our efforts, but we leave a little bit of effort, 15%, 20% of our budget and our efforts, around testing new things to see how they work.

You need to be clear about what your objectives are. They shouldn’t just be conversions or reservations; they should be finding new guests, extending your reach among core customer segments and measuring your activities against those and then doubling down on the areas that work and testing new things in that excess 20%.