So you are the marketing director or the hotel manager and you have budgeted 50,000 $€£, whatever your
currency is, in activities to market your hotel online: how do you spend it?
How do you decide where to allocate this budget?
And I know we all love easy answers or easy solutions, but this is quite a complex and complicated topic.
But simple as that, there are no easy solutions. And so, if that is what you’re after, please read no further.
Instead, if you’re looking for some honest feedback and honest exchange, in this first video out of two, we’re going to see together some of the things and some of the principles, logic-based principles that I will always suggest anyone to be following in order to avoid wasting your money, your budget and in order to make the most out of your dimes.
Logic driven because these videos, both videos, are not going to be any technical.
It’s literally logic over technicalities.
So, without further ado, let’s dig in.
An Important Premise
First and foremost, I mentioned before, there are no easy solutions and easy answers.
However, if you want to play the easy game, well, be sure to play the easiest game amongst all.
Meaning: go to Booking, go to Expedia, go to HotelBeds or any other bed banks… and go all in with them, being aware though, that in there you only play the price-war game.
To be crystal clear, there is nothing wrong with working with third party channels of course, I guess we all agree, we all need them.
But let’s be honest, the hotel distribution game is becoming a real jungle, a real mess, and it’s becoming more and more complex every single year.
And that’s why either you accept to play the game the right way, knowing that this game is not always easy, or you better give up giving all of your distribution and marketing to third party channels, but also accepting that they will be driving your results.
Which again, it’s fine, there is nothing against them. But do you really think that you can play this game by simply relying on those plug-and-play solutions like, for example,
a pricing comparison tool, or by just being, for example, on Google Hotel Ads with a pay-per-stay model?
Plug-and-play solutions do not exist, or better say… They do exist, but they simply don’t work.
On an OTA site, you’re just a number.
So, if you run and manage a 5-star property, your hotel will look exactly the same as a 2-star property.
OTAs are the exact opposite of branding, of uniqueness, of differentiation, and
thus price is not an important factor… it’s probably the ONLY factor that matters.
That said, let’s jump into the ten points I wanted to share with you today.
#1 Know Your Budget.
Typically, the approach is the other way around, in the sense the many hoteliers approach marketing, asking the marketing expert what the return is going to be if they invest XYZ.
But marketing is no magic, especially in these times.
Predicting what the future is going to be is very difficult.
And if someone promise you that, well, I will actually suggest you to stay
away. Budget first and strategy later.
Only after knowing and deciding what you can invest and how much you can invest, you can build up a proper strategy… based on that budget.
Which leads us to point number two.
#2 If you have a small budget, don’t split it too much.
In the second video of this mini series that I’m going to be releasing very soon in a few days, we’re going to be talking about the different types of marketing,
or marketing disciplines.
And so, if you have a small budget, it’s quite useless to narrow it down or to split that budget between SEO, SEM, PPC, Metasearch engines, and so on and so forth, because every single marketing activity or discipline needs some sort
of consistent initial budget.
And thus, instead of spreading horizontally your budget, go vertical
into one or two different disciplines and no more.
#3 Advertising doesn’t add value where there is none.
This is probably one of my favorite.
Before we mentioned Google Hotel Ads, but it can be any Metasearch engine activity, it can be Google Ads, it can be Facebook ads, it can be Bing ads, whatever.
Advertising is an amplifier of what already works organically.
And thus, what doesn’t work organically is not going to be working on a paid level.
When there is no intrinsic value in what you offer, advertising is just another way of exposing yourself.
Speaking of which, I’ve talked about the difference between marketing and exposure in another video, in which I explained how exposure is just a tiny little part of marketing.
And once again, this leads us to the next point.
#4 The Value Ladder.
The very old topic of value versus price.
It’s a very burning topic.
How do we add value?
How do we bring more value in front of a customer as opposed to just bringing better rates and better prices?
The Value Letter simply states that you can add value on a very high stage
of the funnel. And conversely, the lower the stage of the funnel, the
more difficult it is for you to give value.
Let’s think about it: when someone is close to making a booking,
he or she already went through the dreaming phase and the planning phase,
and thus he or she has already made up his mind and he’s just focusing
on the best possible deal.
There is very little else that you can do in order to add more value
at that point of the funnel.
And opposite to that, the farther people, prospects are from the booking moment, the less important price becomes as a decision factor.
Which leads us to…
Aka discounts, special offers, great price deals, and that’s it.
Again, the farther they are from the booking moment, the less interested they are in you, specifically, in your hotel.
In the planning, and even more so in the dreaming phase people are interested in the overall experience that they want to be having when traveling to your locality,
to your destination, and thus talking about the locality and the destination becomes way more important than talking about your hotel your rooms and your services.
And if you don’t have anything that talks about that, there is no impact that you can make.
Eventually just work with low prices, discounts, special offers, packages and super cheap deals, or even better, play the easiest game: the OTA game.
#6 Segment your audience based on traffic volumes.
Very often, in my previous videos, I talked about how you can further narrow down your audience, meaning people, for example, visiting your website,
your social media pages, and so on and so forth, and how, for example, you can create a very specific custom audience like people searching for only three nights, three or more nights, or only people visiting certain pages, or only returning customers,
and so on and so forth.
But if your website, for example, drives only, let’s say, 100 visitors per day, in marketing terms, 100 visitors per day is nothing.
And therefore, narrowing down an audience that is already so small is not going to deliver and not bringing you any benefit.
In that sense, you should definitely be focused on driving more volumes and only at that point you can focus on what is going to be today’s point number seven.
#7 Find the bottlenecks that kill your direct booking revenue and strategy.
In other words, know where you lose the potential customer. As in the example before, low
traffic? Then focus on volumes.
Instead, if your traffic volumes are good, but your conversion rate is pretty slim, then probably focus on your value proposition.
Or again, if you check your funnel statistics, you may find out that you have a very high exit rate or drop rate in the rooms-and-rate booking step, meaning when people see your rooms and your rates in the booking engine.
Or again, you may be seeing that people drop in the guest-details booking step and therefore probably the reason is because you’re asking too many questions.
And this too, leads us to point number eight:
#8 Numbers say a lot, but they don’t say everything.
Now, typically there are two big problems when it comes to numbers.
On one side we may fall under the analysis-paralysis problem, and on the other side we may fall into the just-do-it problem.
The analysis-paralysis usually happens when you try to explain everything with numbers.
When you look around in your reports and your statistics and you try to find
the real reason as to why, for example, you don’t get enough volumes, you don’t get enough direct bookings and direct revenue.
And on the other side, the just-do-it approach usually happens when we are surrounded by so much data, big data, micro data, that is too much for us to digest and to
work with, and therefore we just give up.
Just-do-it… and we just play by heart.
Needless to say, that the right approach is in the middle.
And even though the super-analytic approach may sound like the right way to go, always consider that people take decisions based on their emotions.
90% up to 95% of people’s decisions happen in the subconscious.
And just to give an example, think of all the times that people end up booking on Booking or Expedia or any other OTAs, even though you have better rates on your direct channel.
This is not logic, yet this is what happens.
#9 Speak your customer language.
We just talked about emotions, and people want emotions.
I’ve talked about how to write, how to communicate, how to speak, in another video that I’m linking here on top.
So eventually I will not go into much detail.
But long story short, how many times do you end up looking at a hotel website that simply talks a very cold language.
Like “situated here, here and there”. Or “our rooms are so and so and so”…
This is just ultimately describing a product and nothing more.
It’s way more beneficial, effective and efficient to talk about how we are going to make them feel.
Point number ten: Be in control. Now, if you work with a web marketing agency, for example, being in control doesn’t mean that you should know every single aspect and every
single detail and every single activity that they deliver to you. That is oppressive
control and that is preventing the agency, meaning the specialists,
from doing their job.
Being in control is something that has to do with you and you only: it’s too
easy to say, “I’m not a marketing expert”, “I’m not a social media expert”, and therefore “I just rely on someone else to do the job on my behalf”.
That is exactly the opposite of being in control.
Being in control means you being aware of what you’re talking about, even though there are other people, either internal or external people that will deliver and that will do the job in details.
But you should be aware of what they do.
You should be aware of what the topic is about.
If we talk about social media, you should know how social media works on a very general level, but you should know that.
Analytics? You should know that.
Advertising? You should know that.
SEO? Guess what? You should know what it is about and how it works, again, on a general level.
But that is what it means “being in control”.
And if you’re not, you’re just being driven by others… and it’s a hit or miss: good luck with that!
And that is finally connected to our last point for today…
#10 In-house vs. External Marketing Team.
Typically what I have personally seen working as the best approach is a sort of mix between people working in house, meaning people from the hotel, and external people, for the very simple reason that your in-house team knows better than anyone
else your hotel, your services, what you can deliver and more importantly,
your potential customers.
On the other end, the external team should be able to deliver that external view, because he’s not involved emotionally speaking with the business of the hotel.
And finally, typically an expert working as a freelancer or a marketing agency work with many different hotels, many different properties, with many different needs in many
different scenarios and contexts.
And therefore they may be bringing this experience to your own advantage.
This was it for the very first video we’re gonna see again in the next episode.
