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A collection of contributions from marketing experts at hotel chains, properties, vendors and consultancies globally.

4 Welcome

9 Chapter 1 Education & Learning

20 Chapter 2 Marketing Performance & Metrics

28 Chapter 3 Website Optimization

W H AT ’ S I N S I D E

43 Chapter 4 Optimal Channel Mix & OTA Strategy

55 Chapter 5 Storytelling & Social Media

64 Chapter 6 Targeting & Personalization

72 Chapter 7 Technology

7

Meet the Experts

88

Final Thoughts

W E B E L I E V E that the major changes in the hospitality industry and the constant evolution of digital marketing have created a demand for a truly definitive guide to hotel digital marketing, so we set out to create it.

To make the guide as valuable, credible and definitive as possible, we decided to source the content from an elite group of experienced hospitality marketers from different areas of the hospitality industry around

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# H D M G U I D E

If you’re a hotel digital marketer or eCommerce manager, you’re bound to be inspired by what you read in the pages that follow. To all of the experts featured, thank you for sharing your insights and advice to make this guide come to life.

John McAuliffe President, WebCanada

A P R E V I E W O F W H AT YO U ’ L L L E A R N

the world. We can truly say that this guide has been created for marketers by marketers as it is made up of advice and soundbites straight from the minds of experienced hospitality marketers who have “been there, done that.”

We asked each of the experts featured in this guide one question: “If I were new to hotel digital marketing, what would you suggest I focus on for success?” This question sparked many insightful conversations, unique responses and 10,000+ words of valuable hotel digital marketing advice, which we’ve compiled for you.

How some of the top hospitality brands are staying competitive in the complex and quick moving digital landscape

2

Best practices and ideas that will set you up for success in hotel digital marketing landscape

3

What hospitality industry experts believe today’s hotel digital marketers must focus on to achieve success

1

T H E D E F I N I T I V E G U I D E T O

H O T E L D I G I TA L M A R K E T I N G W E L C O M E

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# H D M G U I D E

H O W T O R E A D T H I S G U I D E

S P R E A D T H E W O R D

We would love to hear what you think about this guide. Please use #HDMGuide whenever you mention this guide online.

J O I N O U R P R I VAT E L I N K E D I N C O M M U N I T Y

Get answers to your most pressing challenges

Learn from an elite group of hotel marketing experts

Network with successful and like-minded hoteliers

BY T O P I C Choose a topic you’re interested in. Using the table of contents, click or skip ahead to the page number indicated and enjoy the read. Then repeat with another topic.

BY E X P E R T Turn to the next page and choose an expert. You’ll see the chapters they’re featured in on their photo. Click on the chapter numbers or flip through the book to see what they said.

F R O N T T O B AC K Get comfortable and start reading.

JOIN US NOW


H O T E L D I G I TA L M A R K E T I N G W E L C O M E

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https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12061304

SERDAR KUTUCU

Vice President Brand, Marketing & Communications at Design Hotels

I N C H A P T E R S : 3 & 6

JOHN MCAULIFFE

President at WebCanada

I N C H A P T E R S : 2 , 4 , 5 , 7

DANIEL KERZNER

Senior Marketing Leader for Global Luxury Travel & Hospitality Brands

I N C H A P T E R S : 1 , 5 , 7

FLO LUGLI

Principal at Navesink Advisory Group

I N C H A P T E R S : 1 , 3 , 4 ,6

JOSH HERMAN

Director of Marketing & PR at Fontainebleau Miami Beach

I N C H A P T E R S : 1 , 3 ,6 , 7

M E E T T H E E X P E R T S

MICHAELA PAPENHOFF

Managing Director at h2c GmbH

I N C H A P T E R S : 3 , 4 , 7

ALAN YOUNG

President & Co-Founder at Puzzle Partner

I N C H A P T E R S : 2 , 5 , 7

MARK WONG

Vice President Asia Pacific at Small Luxury Hotels of the World

I N C H A P T E R S : 1 , 3 ,6 , 7

M E E T T H E E X P E R T S

MICHAEL BENNETT

Senior Vice President Global Marketing at Cendyn

I N C H A P T E R S : 1 , 2 , 4

01Education & LearningCHAPTER 1

BENJAMIN FR ANKLIN

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest”


H O T E L D I G I TA L M A R K E T I N G

# H D M G U I D E

C H A P T E R 1

E D U C AT I O N & L E A R N I N G

O U R E X P E R T S S U G G E S T that in order to be successful, hotel digital marketers must

commit to continuous learning and education. What you will

discover is that, in addition to learning new digital marketing

skills, there are many different areas of education and learning to pay attention to.

O N LY 8 % of Fortune 500 companies and digital

agencies identify their team’s digital marketing skills as

strong across all areas. This comes as no surprise given

the lightning fast pace at which digital marketing evolves.



C H A P T E R 1

8%

# H D M G U I D E 10



# H D M G U I D E

C H A P T E R 1

I N S I G H T S F R O M

Flo Lugli Navesink Advisory Group Mark Wong Small Luxury Hotels of the World Daniel Kerzner Global Luxury Travel & Hospitality Brands Michael Bennett Cendyn Josh Herman Fontainebleau Miami Beach

I N T H I S C H A P T E R YO U W I L L L E A R N

Strategies to stay current on hotel digital marketing

Hands-on ways to learn more about

your hotel and your guests

How learning from other departments and industries can give you an edge

What you can learn from the customer

data you collect

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# H D M G U I D E

C H A P T E R 1

Digital marketing is constantly evolving. Google is frequently changing their algorithms and Facebook is regularly changing what they’re offering, so you need to stay up on what’s going on by focusing on continuous education. The hospitality industry is not known for being the most innovative or forward thinking. We tend to be followers and not fast followers at that, that’s why I suggest staying current on what other,

faster moving industries (like retail) are doing. The retail industry

does a lot of testing on their websites and there’s no

sense in reinventing the wheel in our own industry.

S U B S C R I B E T O B O T H I N D U S T R Y A N D N O N - I N D U S T R Y P U B L I C AT I O N S

F L O L U G L I

You can do this by subscribing to hotel industry publications as well as non-industry publications about digital marketing and consumer trends for some of your insights. It’s also a good idea to build up a network of folks to interact with, compare notes and share best practices, bounce things off of, and basically debate what’s going on. By networking and educating yourself throughout your career, you’ll always be learning more about digital marketing and finding ways to apply trends and initiatives in retail and other industries to your marketing strategy.


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# H D M G U I D E

C H A P T E R 1

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that you really need to understand the science behind the digital distribution channel and the art of hospitality. The ideal combination for success as a hotel digital marketer is to have a good understanding of the e-commerce eco-system, plus customer service experience in the hospitality space. But I understand that not everyone has that mix and that’s why constant education on the job is still crucial to success. This is particularly true in Asia. Overall, we are trying to catch up to the level of sophistication of the North American space. There isn’t any curriculum that specializes in hotel digital marketing. Hence, a lot of it is on the job training or learn-as-you-go. As a result, many digital marketers don’t have the basics down.

U N D E R S TA N D E - C O M M E R C E A N D H O S P I TA L I T Y

M A R K W O N G


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# H D M G U I D E

C H A P T E R 1

The hospitality industry is made up of people who have often been in the business for generations. I’m not one of those people. To help get acquainted with the business, I spent my first two weeks going from working at the front desk to housekeeping, to bellman

L E A R N T H E O P E R AT I O N S A N D T H E P E O P L E S I D ES O F T H E H O T E L B U S I N ES S

D A N I E L K E R Z N E R

etcetera. I seriously thought, ‘Do I have the wrong job? I’m actually here to work in marketing.’ So, if you’re coming from another industry, the first thing you need to do is learn the hotel business from the ground up and the inside out. It was ingrained in me from day one that

you really needed to understand the business in order to market it.

The people have given me the greatest understanding of the industry. At the end of the day, hospitality is a people business. If you don’t learn the people


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# H D M G U I D E

C H A P T E R 1

side of it, you won’t be successful. When I first moved to London, I spent two months living in the Sheraton Grand Park Lane Hotel. I made it my mission to sit in the lobby observing and talking to guests in the evenings. The knowledge that I gained was invaluable.

Still to this day, I try to connect with guests no matter where I am in the world. Whether it’s going for a coffee, a drink, or breakfast, sitting in a lobby or pulling together a casual focus group, I’m constantly making a point to hear what guests have to say and watch what they do.


L E A R N T H E O P E R AT I O N S A N D T H E P E O P L E S I D E S O F T H E H O T E L B U S I N E S S

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I F YO U O P ER AT E I N S I LO S T H E H OT EL I S D ES T I N ED TO FA I L . AC T U A L LY, I T ’ S A L M O S T G U A R A N T EED TO FA I L . I ’ V E S EEN I T H A P P EN .

When you work together with both revenue management and sales, you can make smarter, better educated decisions about how to spend your money and what type of business to drive, which your hotel owner will love because it’s good, high rated, more profitable business.

Revenue managers have a wealth of data and successful digital marketing is all about data. You need to get to know your revenue manager because they will be able to share information about the rate, the demand, the market, who your competitors are and what they’re doing. They can tell you things like, ‘There’s x demand in the market so we think we can charge x.’ Ideally, you want to leverage their data with

C O L L A B O R AT E W I T H R E V E N U E M A N AG E M E N T A N D S A L ES

M I C H A E L B E N N E T T

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# H D M G U I D E

C H A P T E R 1

what your agency is telling you. If you can marry the two together, you can get pretty sophisticated and improve conversion. While there are some very specific disciplinary things that a revenue manager does in terms of turning the dials and a marketer does in terms of creating campaigns, I see the lines between digital marketer and revenue manager becoming more and more blurred. It’s really all about driving demand and rate.

You also need to talk to sales. Their job is to lay the base business in the hotel. So, if 50% of your hotel’s

business comes from group sales, they’re going to lay it in and then they’re going to tell you where the gaps are. They will tell you things like, ‘We’re slow in September. We’re slow around Christmas. We’re slow around X.’ This intelligence lets you build a marketing calendar around the right promotions to fill these gaps. If all goes well, you fill the gaps and then everything on top of it is gravy.

You don’t have to spend hours and hours in meetings. Start a routine of getting together once a week with a

set agenda. That’s all it takes to get it started. You’ll develop a cadence over time especially when the hotel or corporate leadership is committed to holding the teams accountable. For example, at White Lodging, marketing, revenue management and sales had KPIs that crossed over and bonuses were impacted.


C O L L A B O R AT E W I T H R E V E N U E M A N A G E M E N T A N D S A L E S 17



# H D M G U I D E

C H A P T E R 1

Start by getting to know your customers. We see millions of customers a year come through our doors at Fontainebleau, but I bet if we lined up a dozen of our leaders and asked them to describe our ideal customer, you’d get a dozen different answers. Everyone would paint a different picture of the customer – it’s impossible not to.

That’s why it’s so important to use our data to get a clear picture not just of our customers, but our best customers.

G E T T O K N O W YO U R C U S T O M E R S T H R O U G H DATA

J O S H H E R M A N


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# H D M G U I D E

C H A P T E R 1

I can tell you that for us, we focus on the following:

What kind of experiences does the guest engage in on property? Where do they spend their money? What do they like to do? What feedback do they give us?

We assemble all of these data points together to paint the picture of our ideal customer which becomes the foundation of every piece of marketing.

“The customers that you may perceive or assume to be the biggest spenders may not actually be once you look at your data.”


G E T T O K N O W Y O U R C U S T O M E R S T H R O U G H D ATA

The data really takes the guesswork out of understanding our customer. I’m a strong believer that you can’t always judge a book by its cover. The customers that you may perceive or assume to be the biggest spenders may not actually be once you look at your data.

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02Marketing Performance & Metrics

CHAPTER 2

SETH GODIN

“Measurement is fabulous. Unless you’re busy measuring what’s easy to measure as opposed to what’s important”



C H A P T E R 2

# H D M G U I D E

M A R K E T I N G P E R F O R M A N C E & M E T R I C S

AC C O R D I N G TO H U B S P OT 4 0 % O F M A R K E T ER S I D EN T I F Y P R OV I N G T H E R O I O F M A R K E T I N G AC T I V I T I ES A S A TO P C H A L L EN G E .

Based on our conversations with our experts, it’s a challenge that hotel digital marketers need to face head-on. Doing so requires keeping your end goal in mind, continually measuring your marketing performance and letting metrics be your guide. When you take this approach, you have the power to make more informed marketing decisions that maximize your ROI.

40%



C H A P T E R 2




C H A P T E R 2

# H D M G U I D E


Alan Young Puzzle Partner Michael Bennett Cendyn John McAuliffe WebCanada


What question you need to ask before you develop

a marketing strategy

How to evaluate your hotel and your agency’s

current marketing performance

Why a metrics driven approach to marketing is

an absolute must

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B E G I N W I T H YO U R E N D G OA L

A L A N YO U N G

Digital marketing is multi-faceted and means different things to different people and companies. Regardless of how you define digital marketing, what really matters is that you know what you want it to do for you. So, before anything else, you need to figure out what your priorities are and be able to answer this question: What is the end goal of our digital marketing strategy?

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C H A P T E R 2

# H D M G U I D E

S I N C E T H E M A J O R I T Y O F A H OT EL’ S M A R K E T I N G S P EN D TO D AY I S D I G I TA L , TA K I N G A LO O K AT YO U R D I G I TA L M A R K E T I N G P ER F O R M A N C E I S YO U R F I R S T S T EP.

I would assume your property has an agency partner because they don’t have a brand supporting the marketing so you’ll want to connect with your agency and get access to the digital media plans and results right away.

When I worked at KSL the properties were all independents. While I was on the corporate level, my property level marketing teams were almost all teams of one. If this is the case for you, your agency is your team.


A S S ES S YO U R AG E N CY


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C H A P T E R 2

# H D M G U I D E

industry is a 10 to 1 stabilized return over time. It gives them confidence in their forecasts and the ability to report out to their investors and/or the street. You want to be in a position where you can go to your executive team whether you’re at a property or a corporate and say, ‘We spent two million dollars this year and it generated 20 million.’

“You want to be in a position where you can go to your executive team whether you’re at a property or a corporate and say, ‘We spent two million dollars this year and it generated 20 million.”

You need to know how the agency and campaigns are performing right off the bat. If they’re underperforming, you need to address that first and foremost. It’s the peel-off-the-band-aid mentality. It might hurt, but you just have to do it fast.

At the end of the day, you will be held accountable for driving business. So, if you have an agency partner that is spending money and you can’t connect what they’re doing back to revenue, it’s time to find a new agency.

The expectation of any owner in the

A S S E S S Y O U R A G E N C Y


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P U T M E T R I C S I N T H E D R I V E R ’ S S E AT

J O H N M C A U L I F F E

You need to understand what your costs to acquire a customer are. Once you understand that, you can put money where its best spent, where it’s most effective and efficient. I recommend setting up a framework for acquisition effectiveness and acquisition costs for both direct and indirect digital channels and even beyond digital to front desk, call center, etcetera.

It doesn’t have to be sophisticated but it does need to help you understand the value of each channel, where you’re spending your money and your return on that money.

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C H A P T E R 2

# H D M G U I D E

Let the metrics drive your decisions. It goes back the whole argument about whether marketing is art or science. I think that over the last few decades the balance between art and science has shifted—particularly for digital marketing. Digital is much more direct response oriented than brand oriented in nature so the science side of it is much stronger than the art side.

You need to understand, what are these things we’re doing actually costing us? What are they doing for us? It goes back to that whole “what gets measured gets done” so if you’re not

measuring things you don’t know what to do, you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve.

The demise of any marketer is when the CEO asks, ‘What’s our return on marketing investment?’ And the marketer has a blank stare on their face.

“You need to understand, what are these things we’re doing actually costing us? What are they doing for us?”

P U T M E T R I C S I N T H E D R I V E R ’ S S E AT


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03Website OptimizationCHAPTER 3



C H A P T E R 3

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6 1% O F U S E R S W E R E U N L I K E LY T O R E V I S I T A M O B I L E S I T E I F T H E Y H A D T R O U B L E AC C E S S I N G I T, A N D 4 0 % G O T O A C O M P E T I T O R I N S T E A D, AC C O R D I N G T O M C K I N S E Y & C O M PA N Y.

Your hotel website needs to be mobile optimized, but mobile optimization is only one small component of an effective website today. As our experts reveal, a high performance hotel website is built on data, provides relevant content and is constantly tested and optimized for booking conversion.

W E B S I T E O P T I M I Z AT I O N



C H A P T E R 3




C H A P T E R 3

# H D M G U I D E


Michaela Papenhoff h2c GmbH

Flo Lugli Navesink Advisory Group

Josh Herman Fontainebleau Miami Beach

Mark Wong Small Luxury Hotels of the World

Serdar Kutucu Design Hotels


What the basics of a high performance hotel website are and how to

implement them

Why data, analytics and testing are so crucial to driving direct business

Why having a website doesn’t guarantee you top rankings on Google

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C H A P T E R 3

# H D M G U I D E

A LWAYS S TA R T W I T H A N A LY T I C S

M I C H A E L A PA P E N H O F F

Always start with analytics. Your website analytics tool and your booking engine analytics will provide you with the information that you need in order to understand: Is my website performing? How good is it in terms of usability, information, revenue conversion and so on? Is my website responsive? Is it easy to use? Is it fast enough?

Once you’ve looked at the analytics and have your action points generated, then you can go ahead hire a developer or agency to build your website.

“Once you’ve looked at the analytics and have your action points generated, then you can go ahead hire a developer or agency to build your website.”


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C H A P T E R 3

# H D M G U I D E


I need to emphasize that before you start this process, you need to do your analysis. We see it done the other way around too often.

Website conversion rates differ depending on the market, region, specific location and property

type. It helps to benchmark your conversion rates with your

competitive set (if it exists).

H ER E A R E S O M E T I P S O N H O W TO M E A S U R E P ER F O R M A N C E:

Always define your website KPIs so you have criteria to measure performance against.

Analyze your website reporting based on your pre-defined KPIs regularly.

Use heat maps to understand how to improve your website’s usability and where to position your booking link.

Remember, ease of use is always more important than sophisticated features!

A L W AY S S TA R T W I T H A N A LY T I C S 32



C H A P T E R 3

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K N O W W H AT ’ S H A P P E N I N G W I T H YO U R W E B S I T E

F L O L U G L I

Just because you have a website doesn’t necessarily mean people will visit it. I always say if you don’t have budget to market your hotel, then having a website probably isn’t going to generate a big return. One of the reasons for this is because Google is pushing organic search results further down the page and sometimes onto the second page (the entire first page is typically ads and paid search). Even if you have a really great fully optimized website, it may never make it to the top of the page. Plus, there’s no way an independent hotel (or a hotel brand for that matter) can compete with the marketing dollars that an OTA is spending.


“If you don’t have budget to market your hotel, then having a website probably isn’t going to generate a big return.”

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C H A P T E R 3

# H D M G U I D E

The only way you’re going to know what’s happening on your website is by having a good understanding of

your website analytics tool. You also need to be able to understand what the analytics are telling you. If you

don’t, I would look to engaging with a third party to do a website assessment for you.

Once you’ve completed a website analysis and can see the areas that need improvement, do some very simple A/B testing to see how the results change. You would be surprised how simply

changing the color of the book now button can impact performance.

K N O W W H AT ’ S H A P P E N I N G W I T H Y O U R W E B S I T E


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B U I L D YO U R W E B S I T E O N DATA

J O S H H E R M A N

The Fontainebleau website is built on data. We have so many rooms and so many room types. Many of them are suites, which carry a certain price point. We’ve built our imaging and messaging around things that appeal to the type of customer that is affluent enough to purchase suites and higher categories of rooms as well as on-property experiences and services. We know that lot of the beverage and wine and the

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C H A P T E R 3

# H D M G U I D E

high-end restaurant program really appeal to the affluent customer. That’s why you’ll see a lot of imaging around dining.

Using our data and really focusing our marketing spend on the best type of customer for the hotel has allowed us to be so much more efficient with our spending and drive increases in market share. Our digital marketing efforts and the customers that we target online produce such a significantly higher ADR than customers that we’re not targeting or customers that book direct without seeing our ads, or book through an OTA, wholesaler, or any type of third party.

“Customers that we target online produce such a significantly higher ADR than customers that we’re not targeting or customers that book direct without seeing our ads, or book through an OTA.”

B U I L D Y O U R W E B S I T E O N D ATA


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D I G I TA L M A R K E T I N G H A S B E C O M E S O M U C H M O R E C O M P L E X

In the past, it was just about having a website. Now, we need an integrated approach to our digital assets. Our website is just a starting point. As we learn something new, something new always crops up. It’s a constant educational process in this space.

I see that hotel companies are very attracted to “hot topics and trends” in the digital marketing world and tend to forget the basics of good website design, search engine marketing, and search engine optimization – the fundamental things that are taken for granted nowadays.

If you look at statistics year after year, they say that 70%

G E T YO U R W E B S I T E B A S I C S R I G H T

M A R K W O N G

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C H A P T E R 3

# H D M G U I D E

of website traffic still starts from search. That’s significant. Yet search engine marketing and search engine optimization are being de-prioritized in favor of “sexier” social media listening and reviews, programmatic media - things like that. We need to bring it back to the basics.

For example, when I speak about hotel digital marketing at conferences, I always cite the 80:20 or 70:30 rule. What I mean by that is: the basics of the website need to be

in place so that 70-80% of the traffic is coming from organic search results.

We should only be paying for the remaining traffic, not the other way

around.

Unlike the OTAs who have the capacity to basically buy the whole search results page, most hotel brands (even the luxury

ones) have very small marketing budgets. So, a smart digital

marketer should focus on the basics, meaning a search engine optimized

website before anything else.

“The basics of the website need to be in place so that 70-80% of the traffic is coming from organic search results.”

G E T Y O U R W E B S I T E B A S I C S R I G H T


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S E L L T H E E X P E R I E N C E

S E R D A R K U T U C U

We’ve built the Design Hotels website in a way that makes navigation easy for the visitor. People don’t want to lose time and you actually lose people if you don’t give them the right guidance. We cluster the hotels into motives for traveling or interests from our guests’ point of view, including city hotels, modern hotels, beach hotels, etcetera. This way, we can give them easy access to the experience they’re seeking.

You’ll see this on the homepage and the section called “Original Experiences” where we actually present the experience and not the product. When you click on

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C H A P T E R 3

# H D M G U I D E

“Community” you can see our culture blog where we provide information from the world of Design Hotels — it can be about a designer, it can be about an owner, it can be about an event that happened in one of our

hotels.

What I am trying to say is that we’re not trying to punch people in the face with a discounted offer. We’re trying to sort the products by motive for travel and give them interesting stories about our hotels.

Digital marketing has become so complex with so many opportunities. It’s time for us to filter and focus. We don’t

need to do everything, but we need to do something very well. We focus on what is key to us and the right way to

position the brand. It’s quality over quantity. That’s our strategy at Design Hotels.


S E L L T H E E X P E R I E N C E

“We don’t need to do everything, but we need to do something very well. We focus on what is key to us and the right way to position the brand. It’s quality over quantity. That’s our strategy at Design Hotels.”

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T ES T, T W E A K , R E P E AT

M A R K W O N G

Doing a deep dive into the analytics of your website and the user experience

should really be the first step. I don’t see enough focus on analysis

today. If your hotel information is not properly presented,

your website takes too long to load or the

user experience is just poor,

you are losing

potential business. All those things have to be taken into consideration in your analysis. Then you can map out the next version of the website based on what the analytics tell you.

As with any website, our website is constantly being improved. We’re always testing. For example, when we launched the search bar on the homepage, we tried many different placement and design options to see which would help visitors find what they’re looking for


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more effectively. Adding new content is also not a random process; it is a decision based on country-specific yearly search patterns and trends.

We’re continuously experimenting different ways of enhancing the experience including balancing the hosting around the world so the website always loads instantly and launching our new Chinese website within the China firewall so that the Chinese audience can easily access it.

Again it’s going back to the basics of understanding who the primary user of the website is and applying relevant techniques to make the website more efficient and effective.


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04Optimal Channel Mix & OTA Strategy

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W H E N A G U E S T B O O KS A R O O M T H R O U G H YO U R W E B S I T E , T H E B O O K I N G I S M O R E P R O F I TA B L E T H A N A B O O K I N G M A D E O N A T H I R D - PA R T Y W E B S I T E O R O TA .

This is true in theory, but it’s not always that simple. Today, with the complex and ever-evolving hotel shopping journey and the numerous channels that play a role in it, digital marketers need to see the bigger picture in order to achieve maximum profitability. Our guests explore a variety of different scenarios and strategies for achieving an optimal channel mix, even one where it may be more profitable for all of a hotel’s bookings to come through OTAs.

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Michaela Papenhoff h2c GmbH

Flo Lugli Navesink Advisory Group

Michael Bennett Cendyn

John McAuliffe WebCanada


Why less is sometimes more when it comes to

managing multiple channels

How building positive

relationships with the OTAs can benefit you

Why taking a proactive approach

to your channel mix yields better

results

Questions to ask that will help you optimize your conversions on

all channels

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Talk to your OTA market managers, they have access to data that can really help you understand the dynamics of your market. This is one reason I always advise clients to treat the OTAs as partners, not enemies.

In working with chains, we often find that they’re only managing content on three or four of their most important distribution channels, while the

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(depending on how many room types you have) you could have more than 4,000 - 5,000 different fields that need to be updated. That’s something that hotel chains simply don’t do. Neither do independent properties for that matter. It’s a lot of work, it’s time consuming and there isn’t a technology solution that does it for you yet.

others are being left behind. We suggest that they focus on managing their content on the most relevant channels for them, beyond the three or four major channels that bring them revenue, ideally 10 or 12.

Trying to manage content on more than 50 channels is a waste of time, mostly because there’s really no central database for managing content on all of the distribution channels. If you manage content on 10 different OTA extranets


F O C U S O N Y O U R R E L E VA N T C H A N N E L S 47

I always tell people to look at what the OTAs are doing and what they’ve done in the past. The OTAs were the first to come out with strikethrough pricing. They were the first to come out with things like ‘three rooms left at this price’ or ‘14 people have looked at this hotel today.’ Just like retailers, they’re doing thousands of tests every year so there’s no sense in trying to figure out the best way to optimize your hotel website for conversions. If you see it on an OTA, you can be quite sure they’ve done the tests to show that it drives higher conversions.

B E F R I E N D T H E O TA S

F L O L U G L I

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“It’s all about determining your optimal business mix, perhaps making OTAs a bigger part of the mix in low periods and smaller in stronger periods.”

I don’t subscribe to the theory that OTAs are enemies. Quite frankly, there’s a lot of rhetoric out there from the major brands about the OTAs, but I know for a fact that every single one of them has commercial agreements with OTAs. In fact, they have relatively cordial discussions on a day-to-day working basis.

In your specific case, if you’re paying an OTA commission of 18% (it’s probably higher for most independents) and your effective commission rate on your digital marketing is 30%, it may make more sense to allow that booking to come

through the OTA. Regardless, I’m a firm believer that having a strong, positive relationship with the OTAs is in your best interest.

You need to think of OTAs as channels to be managed just as you manage wholesale business, corporate contracts, and so on. You want


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to think about what your optimal RevPAR is relative to occupancy and rate and determine how OTAs can contribute to that mix. That said, I don’t think it’s wise to base your entire distribution strategy on OTAs and have them deliver 60% of your business all the time. It’s all about determining your optimal business mix, perhaps making OTAs a bigger part of the mix in low periods and smaller in stronger periods.

Ultimately, you have to understand your cost of sale and the ROI on your digital marketing. Only then can you understand better what your optimal channel mix should be. Work with your local OTA representative to help you identify opportunities that can drive more business for your hotel.


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B E P R OAC T I V E


I’d say you need to make sure you understand your media mix and proactively look at your results. In most agency situations, the hotel gives the agency 10,000 dollars. They spend that money during the month and they come back 15 days after the month end and say, ‘You got a five to one return on that. You made 50,000 dollars back in revenue.’

The first question you should ask yourself is, ‘Is there anything we could have done differently with that money to maximize

the return?’ Our account managers at Cendyn look at our customers’ activity on a weekly basis. Conversations with our customers often sound like, ‘Hey, here’s what we’re seeing—and by the way we’ve moved some money to TripAdvisor metasearch and we’ve seen a massive increase so we’re going to continue to shift until we see a


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diminishing return. We’ll re-allocate the budget from this other channel because it’s not performing.’

The idea is to be proactive around your media mix so there are no surprises

and you don’t have to sit in front of an owner and say,

‘Sorry we’ve missed the return estimations by

five points.’ Instead, you can say with confidence, ‘We did everything we could

and we got to an eight to one return. Now we’re going to look for additional opportunities to try and get a couple of those points back.’ That’s an example of a conversation that inspires confidence that you know your business, how guests are booking, where you’re spending your money, and so on. It’s about being proactive.


B E P R O A C T I V E 52

I know that direct bookings are all the rage today but I think every marketer must look at their own hotel and determine the best mix of direct and indirect channels to maximize the effectiveness and cost efficiency of acquiring a new guest. By understanding what it costs to acquire a guest you can focus your efforts on those channels that are most effective.

Once you’ve determined the right channel mix (which you should be continually monitoring and adapting), your next step is to optimize conversions. You want to maximize the effectiveness of how your hotel is presented on its most important channels.

O P T I M I Z E C O N V E R S I O N S O N YO U R T O P C H A N N E L S


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O P T I M I Z E C O N V E R S I O N S O N YO U R T O P C H A N N E L S

O N D I R E C T C H A N N EL S , YO U WA N T TO C O N S I D ER T H I N G S L I K E:

Is your story compelling?

Is there a clear path to booking?

What are your conversion metrics?

What strategies and tests do you have in place to improve upon those metrics?

Do you have a re-marketing program to motivate visitors to return to your website?

O N D I R E C T C H A N N EL S , LO O K AT:

Are all your text descriptions complete and up-to-date? Are your photos current and compelling? Are you participating in the right programs to drive appropriate rankings?


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05Storytelling & Social Media

CHAPTER 5



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C H A P T E R 5

W E U S E D T O C O M M U N I C AT E BY PA I N T I N G T H E I N S I D E O F C AV E WA L L S . C O M M U N I C AT I O N H A S C H A N G E D D R A M AT I C A L LY, W I T H T H E E XC E P T I O N O F O N E E L E M E N T - S T O R Y T E L L I N G .

Today we post photos of our lunch on Instagram, we tweet to express our opinions on current events and we share our travel photos on Facebook. On top of that, we value the stories shared by peers far more than brand stories.

In fact, a study found that groups shown the photo of a hotel room next to a story from someone who had stayed in the room thought it was worth 5% more than a photo of the same room with only a technical description. Our experts explore how to leverage the power of social media and storytelling for your hotel.

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https://twitter.com/?status=RT:%20Communication%20has%20changed%20dramatically%20with%20the%20exception%20of%20one%20element%20-%20%E2%80%99storytelling%E2%80%99%20%23HDMGuide%20https://goo.gl/FmbwLP



# H D M G U I D E

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John McAuliffe WebCanada

Daniel Kerzner Global Luxury Travel & Hospitality Brands

Alan Young Puzzle Partner


How to uncover your hotel’s story

A great example of how to empower

guests to tell your story

Steps to take to empower guests to

be spokespeople for your hotel

What happens when you start sharing

stories about your hotel and your

guests

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D E F I N E YO U R S T O R Y


Think of your hotel’s story as the foundation of a house. Understanding the attributes and benefits your ideal guests derive from your hotel will help you write your hotel’s story. This story will drive how you “talk” in the marketplace, what you focus on in your marketing, how you present yourself and so on. It sounds simple but in reality, this is the hardest part of a marketer’s

job.

I like using a technique called the Five Whys, which is

an iterative interrogative technique used to explore

the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem. As an example, I have adapted it to better understand things like why a Tempur-Pedic mattress is important to a guest.

What it comes down to is that you need to invest the time to define your ideal guest and understand what value or benefit that guest gets from staying at your hotel that they are willing to spend money for. Think beyond the cursory features of your hotel to the real benefits.


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I would say empowering guests to tell your story is the “must.” Guests’ social networks are often larger and more credible than a hotel’s social network. I believe that our role as marketers is to empower our guests to tell our story. The reach and value that you’ll get through the guests telling your story is much greater than telling the story from the hotel’s perspective.

The Four Seasons at the Avenue George V in Paris is a great

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E M P O W E R G U E S T S T O T E L L Y O U R S T O R Y

example of how to empower guests to tell a story. This hotel over invests in their lobby flowers because they want people to be “wowed” and tell that story. Guests (and people who walk in off the street) are always sharing photos and videos of the flowers on social media as you can see on the hotel’s Instagram.

Every hotel has a unique selling proposition - whether it’s their view, their food, their staff that come from around the world, and much more. That unique selling proposition needs to be front and center and guests need to know what that is when they walk in the door. I don’t think that there’s a hotel in the world that doesn’t have a story to tell. Know what that story is, tell your guests that story, and empower them to be your spokesperson.

“I believe that our role as hotel marketers is to empower our guests to tell the hotel’s story.”

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https://twitter.com/?status=RT:%20Our%20role%20as%20hotel%20marketers%20is%20to%20empower%20our%20guests%20to%20tell%20the%20hotel%E2%80%99s%20story%20%23HDMGuide%20https://goo.gl/FmbwLP



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C H A P T E R 5

F L O L U G L I

Today, guests start sharing stories as soon as they arrive. They take pictures and videos and create content that they share with their social networks. We can direct those conversations without the guest knowing that we’re even directing them.

H ER E A R E T H E S T EP S I W O U L D F O L LO W:

Know your unique selling propositions Put them out there front and center Enable and give connectivity to your guests to share with others

Help articulate the story for them with cues and clues Leverage technology to measure and see the impact


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T U R N G U ES T S I N T O A DVO C AT ES

A L A N YO U N G

I suggest using social media to empower your guests to become advocates of your property by sharing their photos, videos and stories.

Our industry looks at guest engagement as being a communication methodology and they’re not really engaging with the guest, they’re talking to them not with them. Digital marketing is not about servicing guests, it’s about engaging them. We’ve forgotten how to engage with guests.

What’s the difference between a standard room in a Marriott,

“When you use your guests’ photos to tell your hotel’s story, you start creating fans of your brand.”

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their brand or property and start encouraging and embracing it - good, bad or indifferent. It’s one thing for someone to rant or rave about a hotel in a written review, it’s another to post a picture that says it all.

Kimpton has always been great at telling stories about their properties and guest experiences. Progressive hotel companies like Two Roads Hospitality are much more “open” while public companies never want the truth to be out there. No matter how big your brand is, we live in a world where the information will get out.

a Hilton, a Hyatt and a Starwood? They’re all 350 sq. foot rooms. They all have flat screen TVs. They all look basically the same. So how do you differentiate your hotel?

By telling stories. Very few hotels post guests’ stories on their websites but it’s stories that help build relationships and engagement between the brand and the guest and differentiate the hotel from the rest.

The hospitality industry as a whole needs to start sharing stories about their hotels and their guests. When you use your guests’ photos to tell your hotel’s story, you start creating fans of your brand. This only happens when hotels stop being fearful about what guests are going to say about


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06Targeting & Personalization

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W H O I S S TAY I N G I N YO U R H O T E L? W H Y A R E T H E Y S TAY I N G AT YO U R H O T E L? W H AT L E D T H E M T O B O O K YO U R H O T E L OV E R T H E O N E D O W N T H E R OA D ?

TA R G E T I N G & P E R S O N A L I Z AT I O N



C H A P T E R 6

It’s a marketer’s job to know the answers to all of these questions, and more. Making assumptions or asking your staff isn’t the right way to get the answers. Your data is. It will give you the intelligence you need to deliver targeted, relevant, personalized messages to your target guests, resulting in better conversions. Our experts share their opinions and experiences on effective targeting and personalization.




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Josh Herman Fontainebleau Miami Beach

Serdar Kutucu Design Hotels

Mark Wong Small Luxury Hotels of the World


How to make sure your marketing is appealing to the right types of guests

Tips for keeping your content relevant and

interesting to your target guests

Why you need a 360-degree view of your

customer journey

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TA R G E T YO U R M ES S AG I N G

J O S H H E R M A N

Fontainebleau has a young, hip, ‘cool place to be’ image in the marketplace. It’s a true celebrity “see and be seen” destination, and an image we’ve worked extremely hard to build. I was surprised that our data told us that certain times of the year we do a significant amount of family business. Or, certain times of the year our customer base can really vary in age or geographic location. So, we

adapt our marketing programs and messaging accordingly.

It’s our job as marketers to make sure that we’re appealing to the right

types of customers and its data that helps us allocate our marketing budgets toward targeting the guests that have the highest propensity to book and have a great experience. Everyone has a target customer base, regardless of property size, image, etc.

As a luxury property, if we attract customers that can’t afford to be here or are not going to take advantage of all the great amenities then shame on us because we’re not doing our job from a marketing perspective. The same applies to any property.


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S E R D A R K U T U C U

I think the most important thing today is that consumers become part of the business. We need to start seeing consumers as partners and look for ways to collaborate with them as opposed to market to them. We can see clearly that consumers have a very high influence on public perception of brands, products and services across the board. This is a signal that we as marketers need to engage consumers in different ways than we have in the past.

There’s no button you click to change your entire digital strategy. As an example, we’re really focusing on engaging

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consumers through meaningful and relevant communication. There’s so much information available to people today. Your message needs to be meaningful to peoples’ lives and relevant to them personally in order to capture their attention. This implies that you need to know who you’re talking to. We’re always working on creating more relevant content for the consumer and talking to them about what we believe will interest them. To do this, we invite them to participate actively in letting us

know what’s important, interesting and helpful to them.

Our next step is to improve the relevance of the content in our

email marketing. This is a very simple example I always use: It doesn’t make sense to send a newsletter offering weekend getaways in South America or

Europe to someone living in Tokyo. Instead, offer a weekend

getaway in their region. This is just one example that involves information

about the consumer’s country or city of

“We need to start seeing consumers as partners and look for ways to collaborate with them as opposed to market to them.”

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residence. The more information we can gather, the more relevant the message can be.

Going back to what I said in the beginning, as long as you receive meaningful and relevant information for your individual needs, you will engage with that channel. The more information we have about the people we’re talking to the sharper we can be in our content and communications. That’s how we earn their engagement with our brands, products and services.

One way is to do this is by tracking user habits through the website and booking engine. At Design Hotels, we see the behavior through the customer journey on our direct channels. For example, we can see which hotels a person books,

which rates they book, how often they book, how long they stay and which destinations they travel to. We’re currently considering data warehouse model where we can feed and actually enrich profile information from other data sources.

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C O N S I D E R T H E C O M P L E T E C U S T O M E R J O U R N E Y

M A R K W O N G

I think e-commerce has evolved from just being an online booking platform to more of a customer relationship management (CRM) channel. This is because we need a 360-degree view of our customer journey and the website is only one touch-point to interact with our customers. The way I see it, e-commerce has expanded beyond its transactional purpose (from an online store) to a more customer-centric relationship tool where we know every contact point and interaction our customers have with our brand.

“E-commerce has expanded beyond its transactional purpose (from an online store) to a more customer-centric relationship tool.”


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07Technology CHAPTER 7



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J U S T G O O G L E “ D I G I TA L M A R K E T I N G T E C H N O LO GY ” A N D YO U ’ L L Q U I C K LY B E C O M E OV ER W H EL M ED BY T H E N U M B ER O F S O L U T I O N S YO U F I N D.

There’s a technology solution for just about anything you would ever want to do from a digital marketing standpoint, with new solutions hitting the market daily. Which technology do you actually need? There’s no easy answer, except that no matter what it is, it needs to serve your marketing strategy. You might not need to invest in six-figure marketing software in order to achieve the results you desire, whether it’s guest engagement or acquisition, it could be as simple as downloading a free app. Our experts weigh in on the role of technology in hotel digital marketing and the guest experience.

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Josh Herman Fontainebleau Miami Beach Daniel Kerzner Global Luxury Travel & Hospitality Brands Michaela Papenhoff h2c GmbH Michaela Papenhoff h2c GmbH John McAuliffe WebCanada Alan Young Puzzle Partner

Mark Wong Small Luxury Hotels of the World Michael Bennett Cendyn


How technology should serve your marketing

strategy

Why a positive mobile experience needs to

be number one on your priority list

Which technologies can help you enhance the

guest experience

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J O S H H E R M A N

Almost everyone wants to talk about data, but I’d say the vast majority of people are overwhelmed and don’t know what to do with it. I suggest setting yourself up for success by finding a technology tool that can help you collect, organize and analyze your data so you can take action on it.

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As marketers, we need to see the world through the guests’ eyes. If the guests’ eyes are on WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat or on a mobile device, we need to make sure that our marketing is built around that and

certainly built for that.

I’ll share an example. When I was working with the

W Doha, I always found they did a really good

job building their marketing around their guests. One thing they learned about their guests is that they’re always on Instagram and they take and share photos of their food in the hotel’s restaurants. So, they created an Instagram page for each of their restaurants and posted photos of the food and pricing. Their Instagram feed was essentially their menu, only better.

They also noticed their guests use

E N A B L E YO U R G U ES T S T H R O U G H T E C H N O L O GY


T E C H N O L O G Y

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WhatsApp to talk to colleagues, friends and family and wondered, ‘why can’t they do the same to speak with the hotel?’ So, they launched a service called Let’s Chat, a text-based guest communication tool where they were able to better service their guests needs, and upsell/cross-sell through effective dialogue. When a guest wanted to book a wakeup call, they would ask over WhatsApp. This real-time interaction gave the hotel the opportunity to ask, ‘Would you also like to arrange breakfast in your room?’ or ‘I see you’re leaving tomorrow. Would you like a car transfer?’ Most importantly, it was about speaking with guests on their own device, on their own terms.

Let’s Chat was later rolled out to hundreds of hotels and tens of thousands of guests. A great sign of a best practice!

“If the guests’ eyes are on WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat or on a mobile device, we need to make sure that our marketing is built around that and certainly built for that.”

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Individual properties rely on the technology that is available to them from industry vendors, which can have its challenges and limitations. Meanwhile, chains have the freedom and budgets to build their own technology and tools, but doing so takes a lot of time and effort – it’s just not fast enough.

What success really comes down to is how technology serves the marketing strategy. Bringing technology and marketing strategy together has always been a challenge in our industry, although in different ways for individual properties and hotel chains.

We’ve done several studies with independent properties at h2c and we consistently find that their websites and internet booking engines are not performing well in terms of conversion, on both desktop and mobile.

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I N V ES T I N T E C H N O L O GY T O S C A L E YO U R M A R K E T I N G AC T I V I T I ES


Marketing is still marketing and to be successful you need to get the basics and foundation right. Technology is an enabler and when used effectively, it can help you scale your marketing activities.

Technology allows us to interact with our customers, talk to them, and engage them more than ever. We can have one-to-one conversations through

social media channels, and give our customers a more personalized

experience in multiple ways and with many devices.

Take email for example. While it’s no longer “new technology,” I defy any marketing person to say that email marketing programs don’t work. I highly recommend investing in a good email marketing tool that has solid analytics so you can send relevant personalized content and messages and know the performance of your efforts (your open rates, your conversions and your returns, etc.).

Technology in marketing boils down to helping marketers get a better grasp on customer preferences, their behavior and purchase trends, and to design the

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most effective marketing strategy based on this intelligence

Marketing success will depend on how well we can leverage mobile as the customer’s most preferred method of consumption; how we can make sense of Big Data and pull out from it everything that relates to our business; how we use social to listen, learn, and have better conversations that lead to happier more satisfied customers; and of course, how we utilize the cloud which is becoming the center of marketing automation, and the connective tissue between an organization’s automation platform and their communication to the world.

Software, tools, and new technologies help marketers devise new ways to engage customers.

“Technology is an enabler and when used effectively, it can help you scale your marketing activities.”

I N V E S T I N T E C H N O L O G Y T O S C A L E Y O U R M A R K E T I N G A C T I V I T I E S

T E C H N O L O G Y

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B U I L D R E A L R E L AT I O N S H I P S W I T H G U ES T S

A L A N YO U N G

Digital marketing needs to become more personal. That’s something you want to keep top of mind as a hotel digital marketer.

We believe that technology will take care of engaging with guests for us. Yes, technology can and does facilitate guest engagement but in an industry

where customers take up residence in a room that’s owned by a company, a relationship actually needs to be developed.

In terms of mobile, everything you do needs to have a mobile capability. To take that a step further, mobile engagement needs to be first and

foremost, meaning the conversation should be two-way. Hoteliers tend to forget that digital marketing is not about sending someone an offer and hoping they take it.

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Mobile optimization is one of the basics of digital marketing. The online experience has evolved so much that it’s no longer a laptop environment. Meanwhile, agencies are still presenting laptop versions of website wireframes. They should really be presenting a website from a mobile perspective first, followed by the laptop. It’s kind of a shame we’re stuck in this desktop/laptop mind-frame when the consumers are already progressed to the mobile environment.

S H I F T T O A M O B I L E F I R S T M I N D S E T

M A R K W O N G

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C O M P L E M E N T T E C H N O L O GY W I T H H U M A N I N T E R AC T I O N


We like to think of a technology platform that complements digital marketing as a seamless customer relationship management (CRM) solution that resides in a hotel to manage what the human layer of CRM simply cannot, including:

Communicating with guests online, on mobile, or email when they’re considering booking Catering to guests while they’re in residence at a property

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C H A P T E R 7

# H D M G U I D E

Delivering targeted and personalized marketing campaigns Encouraging guests to book again Ensuring data privacy across all technology systems

All in all, CRM plays a big part in completing the guest journey and making the unnecessary, clunky aspects of travel, seamless and a delight to experience.

The sheer amount of data that can be collected on each guest, multiplied by the thousands of guests that may pass through the doors of a large hotel in a given year will always call for a CRM software system that can handle this huge number of

C O M P L E M E N T T E C H N O L O G Y W I T H H U M A N I N T E R A C T I O N

T E C H N O L O G Y

unique records. What is important however, is to not only use the data captured to entice guests with seamless technology, but to also provide personalized human interaction at the right time, with the right information for every guest to create those unique, unforgettable moments.

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# H D M G U I D E

T H I S G U I D E has touched on so many significant points that must be considered as a digital marketer in the hotel industry, and all should be taken on board. From staying on top of industry trends, understanding digital marketing advancements to fine tuning your strategy based on your marketing analytics and data, we’ve covered it all.

Two fundamental aspects of this guide however should be considered at the very basis of your digital marketing

F I N A L T H O U G H T S

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# H D M G U I D E

strategy before getting started; know your brand and your audience from the get-go; understand your guests’ journey - from path to purchase right through to their return to your property. These two aspects of your strategy will flow through everything you do and enable your guests to understand, through whatever marketing mediums

you use, who you are and why they should pick your property.

Technology has an incredible way of complementing these

strategies too. From understanding data, to

team collaboration to guest

empowerment,

we see day-in-day-out that hoteliers are able to learn more about their guests, communicate with them using the right message, at the right time, through the right channels and learn from their results and data. This in turn, allows for more surprise and delight moments for guests during their stay or during those important moments before they decide to book with you again. You know when you’re on the right track when those moments start turning your guests into brand advocates. Michael Bennett Senior Vice President, Global Marketing, Cendyn

F I N A L T H O U G H T S

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We invite you to join our mastermind community on LinkedIn, where you can learn from an elite group of hotel marketing experts and get answers to your most pressing challenges.

If you liked this book, which we hope you did, we’d love for you to share it with your friends and colleagues on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn using #HDMGuide.

N E X T S T E P S



https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://goo.gl/FmbwLP

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A B O U T C E N DY N

Our 20 years of success in the hospitality industry shows that we

don’t just have innovative solutions – we have products that are tied to

proven revenue producing business models. That means we understand

your struggles. We’ve been on your side of the table and we know

how to make your life easier and more successful. We know what is working, right now. Just ask any of

our over 30,000 hotel clients.

Do you have a question, comment or compliment? Contact us at

[email protected]

Learn more at cendyn.com

A B O U T W E B C A N A D A

For over 20 years, WebCanada has been helping hotel brands grow online commerce with affordable, easy to use, comprehensive digital marketing tools that really work. We are a group of experienced technology and digital professionals focused on empowering people everywhere to achieve.

Do you have a question, comment or compliment? Contact us at [email protected]

Learn more at webcanada.com

T H A N K YO U F O R R E A D I N G

http://www.webcanada.com?utm_source=definitive_guide_to_hotel_digital_marketing&utm_medium=ebook&utm_campaign=hdm_guide&utm_content=lastpage

www.cendyn.com?utm_source=definitive_guide_to_hotel_digital_marketing&utm_medium=ebook&utm_campaign=hdm_guide&utm_content=lastpage

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