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Every year we come up with a best practices in allocating the additional
marketing funds and we are helping our hotel clients to defend in front of
management, in front of ownership certain budgets which are again custom tailored
for which of the properties but every year we advise them to focus on fundamentals first
and the fundamentals and not some again
out of whack very complicated things but that is very simple.
Fix your website.
Change the - you know the imagery they are looking for design of your website.
Upgrade the technology on the website.
Upgrade your SEO, then allocate enough sufficient funds to do paid search called
SEM, Search Engine Marketing. I mean mind you 56% of website revenues
across our client portfolios since several thousand hotels come from search engine referrals.
Organic or paid search 56%, with that in the age of Facebook, of social media,
of all of this next big thing stuff that is being thrown in the face of our hotel
clients 56% of revenues come from the good old fashioned search engines.
So in this sense focus on the fundamental
first, email, email marketing generates 3 to 5% of revenues across our client portfolios.
We have many clients that oh email doesn't work you know it is so old nobody
has the time to book. 3 to 5%, we have branded franchise
clients where the brand contribution is less than 5%.
So in this sense, so after you take care of the fundamentals, the websites, SEO,
SEM, email marketing then you must do all of this new hybrid advertising formats
that require real time availability and pricing and what I mean is the new CPC
model Google finder, Trip Advisor meta search, Kayak, CPC, you have Trivago
the new European which is the hotel Kayak
of Europe coming to the United States.
I mean if you are a hotel and resort on eastern board and you rely on European
travelers you must be on Trivago for example and the same applies to all of
this new advertising formats that Google is coming up with dynamic pricing being
inserted in Google app words, in banner advertising and so forth.
So you have to allocate sufficient funds
to take care of this revenue generating initiatives and then online media.
I mean retargeting when people come to your website and they spend, I mean
typically, they visit four, five, to six pages on your website, they spend several
minutes on your website, and they leave
you start following them.
You start following them intelligently,
you start servicing - serving banners that
focus and customize to a client who knows
your property someone who has already been
in your website and you bribe them,
you give them 10% off.
You bribe them come back and complete the booking 10% off special deal 101
and retargeting Google display network has a very robust retargeting program.
You have other add networks where
retargeting works big time.
So all of these, these are the
fundamentals and in the meantime you have to maintain your presence in the social
media channels, your Facebook,
your Twitter of course all of the Pinterest and the Instagram and so forth but these
not are not distribution channels. These are custom engagement channels.
This is branding channels and this are custom service channels epecially Facebook
and twitter has become one of the main custom service channels so in the same manner that you
manage your trip advisor reviews and you monitor them, you have to monitor what
people are saying on your own Facebook and again customer service issues
and addressing them immediately.