Digital marketing: Pre-stay about engagement
HTFO | Mar 25, 2015 | Comments 0
In part one of Hotel News Now’s series on digital marketing trends, marketers share the latest tools and techniques to make your hotel resonate with potential guests during the pre-booking phase of travel.
NEW YORK CITY—When it comes to reaching guests through digital marketing channels, hoteliers have three critical windows of opportunity: pre-stay, while the guest is on property and post-stay.
The pre-stay phase is all about engaging potential guests and convincing them—often by using digital marketing tools—to make that critical purchase, said speakers at the recent Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International Digital Marketing Strategy Conference.
The biggest challenge when it comes to engaging potential guests through digital marketing, though, is cutting through the noise and delivering messages to guests that are relevant without crossing the line into “too much information” territory.
Tiffany Miller, head of industry, travel at Google, shared some of the search company’s data as it relates to trip planning: “We know that about 50% of travelers start their trip without a (hotel) brand in mind, and we know that so much research and dreaming happen between planning a trip to actually booking it,” she said.
“On average, guests visit 18 sites, make six clicks during eight sessions over a period of two-and-a-half weeks to make their travel decision,” she said.
Content marketing matters
During that active acquisition period, Miller said it’s important to market to potential guests using targeted content marketing strategies that reach guests where they spend their time online.
She cited two examples of travel companies that are using content creation successfully to build engagement with potential guests online:
- Marriott International’s Content Studio recently created a short film for a 10 March release called “Two Bellmen” ; it launched the industry’s first branded Snapchat programming; and it inked several partnerships with notable travel bloggers on platforms including YouTube and Medium.com.
“Marriott knows that it’s beyond just getting the guest impression; it’s about engagement,” Miller said. “People don’t want to see advertising; they want to see content that inspires them and makes them share and chat about it.”
- She also mentioned Airbnb’s “Hollywood & Vines” video partnership with six-second video platform Vine. Airbnb solicited its followers and fans to contribute video snippets, which the sharing-economy home-stay company used to turn into consumer-generated content.
Reviews as user-generated trusted content
Chris Anderson, associate professor at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, shared data from several studies showing the importance of guest reviews during the pre-booking process and how hoteliers can use this type of guest-generated content to their advantage.
He used TripAdvisor’s TripBarometer as an example: The review site conducts an annual survey of travelers for its business users to show how property reviews influence the property’s success.
“Online reviews are about the text, too, not just the overall score,” he said. Potential guests who are considering a hotel are more likely to book that property if its online reviews not only meet their ratings expectations, but also if they include positive content and plenty of responses.
He cited Cornell’s research published in 2012 on the impact of social media on hotel performance that established many benchmarks when it comes to the influence these review sites have on hotel performance.
In particular, he addressed the impact of user-generated content about hotels during the consideration phase as it relates to chain scales. The result: Positive content on user-generated review sites has the most impact on economy to midscale hotels, he said.
“Users look at (that content for those hotels) specifically to reduce any uncertainty they might have about a lower-scale hotel,” he said. “We as an industry have embraced that and now we’re all interacting with reviewers on TripAdvisor, not just encouraging guests to make reviews.”
Put it to work
To tie all the theories together, Jason Thielbahr, senior VP of revenue optimization and distribution services for Red Lion Hotels Corporation, shared details about a recent marketing campaign the Spokane, Washington-based hotel company did to boost bookings during a recent quarter.
“Our challenges were that we knew guests go through a lot of touch points before buying. We know there’s a lot of channel proliferation, cross-device shopping and consumers operating in a constant state of distraction,” he said. “Our solution was to be everywhere the traveler is at each point in that purchase cycle.”
However, that goal of omnipresence is “very daunting,” he said. “It requires consistent brand messaging and controlling that messaging, particularly if you have a mix of owned and franchised hotels.”
So for Red Lion, the answer was a multichannel campaign around the topic of “resolve to explore,” that had a New Year’s resolutions theme, he said.
“We built a mini-site; customers could share their stories and the prize was a vacation giveaway. And in return, we got traveler emails and information,” he said.
The campaign included mobile apps, rich photography and interactive quizzes. The company did blogger outreach and sponsored social media postings.
Thielbahr said the campaign’s 20% discount offer was on its online-travel-agency channels as well as its direct-booking site, for continuity.
“This was our most successful campaign ever,” he said. “Multichannel campaigns are the only way forward. There is no single-strategy playbook anymore.”
Source: http://www.hotelnewsnow.com/Article/15408/Digital-marketing-Pre-stay-about-engagement
Filed Under: Marketing
