What do consumers want out of hotel social marketing?

According to a survey by USA Today, the No. 1 choice for consumers contacting hotels via social networks is to find local info. Users are looking for recommendations on things to do, restaurants and bars in the destination, and a concierge that is able to reply to requests on social networks is seen as a way to enhance the consumer’s experience. The survey points the direction of what hotel social marketing should be about.

This survey got me thinking about certain digital marketing best practices that hotels should adhere to when engaging consumers on social networks. This article points out five simple tips for hoteliers that want to infuse their social presence with an “engagement” shot by turning their social presence into a social concierge.

Tip 1- Use your staff to describe what’s happening in your neighborhood

No one better than your staff knows what’s happening in your neighborhood. Whether it’s the trendy restaurant, or the cool new bar for singles, your Facebook page and twitter stream will come alive as you discuss what’s happening. Other locals may flock to your posts and enhance them with valuable information. This local, hard-to-get information is what hotel social marketing should be about, as this is what users are looking for.

Tip 2- Use photos and videos as they have higher likelihood to be shared

As a hotel manager you should not only develop a photo and video library of your property, but also of the neighborhood you are in.

Go on a field trip and take pictures and shoot video of interesting places and events in your town. Then use them to describe what is going on. A study by Facebook content strategy tool Zuum found out that rich media is shared almost 2x more than other media. Doug Schumacher’s, Zuums’s founder, says: “Sometimes even a simple image just needs the right introductory headline to get people liking, commenting, and especially sharing.”

Tip 3- Curate content and ask for feedback

The good news about social networks is that much content is just reused. Pinterest is a good example of that, where people just “re-pin” content that they see on the web. Use the same technique to improve your hotel social marketing presence. If you see an interesting article in your local newspaper, post it on Facebook and twitter. Sports fans are always a good crowd to engage, so leverage content from your local teams. This will get a conversation going. Finally, try to stick to local information that a concierge typically would recommend to a guest.

Tip 4- Provide real services like theater tickets and restaurant reservations

The same USA Today survey clearly demonstrated that social users are not necessarily task oriented, and that they don’t give any value to mundane things like weather or traffic updates. Social guests want to learn what’s going on, and if they see something that interests them they want to be able to act on it, immediately.

As part of your social concierge strategy you should define which services you are willing to provide over the social network, and which ones you want to do offline. Start by defining a few services that you want to do in the open: restaurant reservations, ordering tickets. This approach will not only provide great service, but more importantly it will educate other users that you are concerned about servicing your guests in whichever channel they wish to engage with you.

Tip 5- Engage opinion leaders that rave about your hotel

The last four tips were on turning your social presence into a social concierge. One additional way to get things going on your hotel social marketing strategy is to publicize and to ask for feedback on comments from opinion leaders. Look for people with significant amount of followers, and look for those that seem to be respected within the community.

You can take reviews from tripadvisor, repost them on your Facebook timeline and ask for feedback – “do you agree?” or “what should we have done differently?”. Embrace the community and the community will give you their feedback. Honesty and transparency go a long way in social networks.

Conclusion

In summary, hotel social marketing is about getting conversations going and delivering real value to your users. Use pictures and video to get conversations going, and provide concierge services to your users. This way you will not only grow your fan base – more importantly, you will create a community that will rally around your property.

Back in the fall of 2009, “getting fans” on Facebook was all the rage. Hotel marketing managers looked at Facebook as a tool to engage consumers and creating brand ambassadors, and their preferred metric was the number of fans or “likes”. Soon after, they realized that getting fans is actually pretty easy, as long as you have dollars to spend. Just advertise appropriately and your fan base will grow.

However, getting users that like your Facebook page is different from getting true fans. True fans are brand ambassadors that will spread good will around your brand. At the end of the day, it’s not about the number of fans, it’s about whether these fans really “like” your brand. What matters is the quality of those fans, how engaged they are, and whether they want to become ambassadors for you. Hotel Facebook apps are the solution to achieve this.

What happens on Facebook, stays on Facebook

One of the big advantages of digital marketing is that it is measurable. We regularly run statistics on the Facebook pages of our hotels. For the last three years we have seen a similar patten: what happens on Facebook, stays on Facebook. What this means is that there is very little spillover traffic from Facebook business pages back to the official hotel website.

The picture above shows website traffic of one of our customers for the last two years, and compares traffic coming from Facebook to mobile traffic.Mobile traffic has been growing significantly since February 2011, and represents already close to 20% (!) in March 2012. On the other hand, Facebook represents only 0.67% of total page views, i.e. close to zero, and more importantly shows no growth. Yet, fan numbers are going through the roof, with even boutique hotels being able to gather tens of thousands of fans.

The question becomes how can hoteliers leverage Facebook as a viable acquisition channel? Millions of hotel recommendations are made on Facebook every day. Facebook launched Insights (Facebook’s version of Analytics) as a way to try to look into fan behavior – how many people were actually reached in a week/month, how many people are talking about your brand, how do they react to your posts, new pictures, etc. Facebook insights will help hotels decide if they should work a social strategy inside Facebook with a hotel Facebook app that provides a business page and booking widget.

Tip #1: Use Facebook Insights to understand the current value of your Facebook page and improve on specific metrics.

Social exclusives work

It is important to provide social incentives to website visitors so they choose your property over the competition. Creating special offers on your facebook page and offering sweepstakes will create a loyal following. Also, it can help you sell distress inventory in a way that it doesn’t cannibalize your regular sales and you can optimize your search engine ranking by offering fresh content on the website.

Tip #2: Use promotions and sweepstakes to stimulate visitors to come back and engage.

Facebook requires content and booking capability to become an acquisition channel

It is clear from the volume of traffic that Facebook is generating, that Facebook is going to be a decisive channel in hotel recommendation and bookings in the next few years. But to have Facebook as a viable customer acquisition channel, hotels must provide the capability for users to to check out rooms, location and photos directly on the hotel’s Facebook page – hence, the need for a Hotel Facebook App.

Your hotel’s Facebook app should provide the ability for travelers to check out rooms, location and photos, check rates and availabilities for the travel dates, and book. Moreover, many travelers nowadays have flexible dates and are actively bargain hunting and willing to trade off some convenience for a better price or package. Make sure your hotel’s Facebook app includes a calendar overview displays a longer-term view of the rates and availabilities so travelers can choose the perfect vacation or business trip according to their needs and possibilities.

Tip #3: Get a hotel Facebook app that publishes hotel content like rooms and your booking engine.

Optimize for Facebook timeline for hotels

One of the big changes with Facebook timeline has been the ability for businesses to create pages within Facebook that provide web-like experiences. Now, instead of having to customize all content to Facebook, creating double work for digital marketers, the content that was created for web use can be transformed by a hotel Facebook app to work well within Facebook.

With the dawn of digital marketing solutions that manage both web and Facebook content, hotels can create and maintain their Facebook pages automagically – i.e. as they manage their website, relevant content gets pushed to their hotel’s Facebook app. Images are automatically resized so that they fit well into Facebook’s constraints, and new offers that are created (e.g. promotions) get posted on the Facebook timeline automatically. A unified digital marketing solution saves time and keeps your marketing message consistent across different channels by pushing new content to all channels at the same time.

Tip #4: Get a unified hotel digital marketing solution.

Conclusion

In summary, Facebook will become a major customer acquisition channel in the next few years. Hoteliers can use Facebook Insights to understand the current value of your Facebook page and improve on specific metrics. You should leverage e promotions and sweepstakes to stimulate visitors to come back and engage. And finally, hoteliers should get a Get unified hotel digital marketing solution that includes a hotel Facebook app.

Upselling add-ons during the reservation process is a digital marketing technique whereby the hotel induces the guest to purchase upgrades or other add-ons in an attempt to make a more profitable sale. Upselling in a hotel booking engine should be simply exposing the customer to other options that were perhaps not considered previously once the guest has committed to buying.

Using GuestCentric’s dynamic packaging features you can create and edit beautiful add-ons that guest can add to the reservation. These add-ons are created and and published on the website within minutes. By using bold images in the booking process, you can highlight services like airport transfer and guided tours or special offers like a welcome drink, a massage at the spa.

With GuestCentric, add-ons are presented after the guest has committed to the reservation, ensuring that up selling or cross-selling does not distract the guest from the main task at hand – selecting and booking a room at your hotel.

GuestCentric continues to expand your market reach by adding translations to the platform. With this update we added support for Brazilian Portuguese and made it the 11th language on the GuestCentric hotel digital marketing solution.

Bem-vindos nossos amigos hoteleiros brasileiros!
(Welcome to our Brazilian hotel friends!)

A useful revenue management practice is called in hotel lingo “pricing per occupancy”.

Pricing per occupancy is a revenue management technique used by hotels to maximize room revenue in leisure destinations that are visited by families or packaged deals. These hotels feature rooms, suites and/or apartments that can often accommodate a number of people with pull-out couches, roll-away beds and cots for babies.

Pricing per occupancy is mostly used by resort hotels, hotels and apartment hotels often in beach destinations. This revenue management tool is also used heavily by hotels that rely on package deals (air+hotel) typically operated by Thomas Cook, Thomson/LTU, TUI and other tour operators, as these typically offer prices based on per adult/per child basis.

For families pricing per occupancy is useful, as they can benefit from the comfort of staying together and the economy of not having to pay for additional rooms. For hotel managers, this revenue management technique maximizes revenue per room by allowing extra occupancy of the rooms against payment of an extra charge for additional adults and/or children.

Pricing per occupancy revenue management at GuestCentric

To create pricing per occupancy, hotels define a base rate that is yielded on a daily basis (typically the double occupancy rate) and extra charges for additional adults and children.

At GuestCentric we have made pricing per occupancy a no-brainer by allowing our hotel customers to define per room type the maximum capacity and the extra charges with one simple click. As your consumers browse through the offers on your booking engine, the pricing changes automatically to the selection. This way, your pricing always reflects on the offers.

If you want to learn more about what GuestCentric can do to improve your hotel’s digital marketing chat to one of our specialists online or sign up for our Coffee with GuestCentric webinar.
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New all-in-one “Office box” service helps boutique hotels and independent properties attack the digital marketplace

LISBON, February 29, 2012 — GuestCentric, the award-winning provider of hotel digital marketing solutions continues its worldwide expansion and announced today that it has been selected by Portugal Telecom to provide the foundation for its cloud services for boutique hotels and independent properties in Portugal. This partnership enables Portugal Telecom to meet the demanding expectations of its 2,000 boutique and independent hotel customers providing them with the capability to deliver extraordinary service to hotel online shoppers wherever they may be: online, mobile or social networks.

Portugal Telecom has a strong presence in the hospitality market for its voice, data and mobile services helping hoteliers overcome the complexity of IT, offering a comprehensive communications platform with voice, video, data and mobile.
Its next-generation cloud services, built on the reliability and resiliency of the GuestCentric, are being developed to meet customer demand for increasingly sophisticated digital marketing.

“Digital marketing in the cloud is a growing concern for our hospitality and tourism customers. Many of our hotel customers are already planning their migration to cloud solutions,” said Goncalo Fernandes, Director of SME Vertical Solutions, Portugal Telecom. “GuestCentric proved to be the most feature-rich and the highest performing solution optimized to meet our stringent requirements. Coupling our next-generation video delivery service MEO with SmartCloud solutions like GuestCentric’s will revolutionize the digital market for the hospitality segment in Portugal.”

Hotels using the new Portugal Telecom service will increase online reservations and lower distribution costs with four unique solutions:

• Engaging hotel website design and content management for online and mobile users;
• A best-in-class booking engine, that is also optimized for smartphones and tablets;
• Professional facebook pages and innovative social media marketing leveraging networks like twitter;
• Centralized reservations and channel management which provides strategic decision support data to improve marketing reach and impact.

“Portugal’s hotel market is highly fragmented and led by independent operators that have traditionally relied on a few distribution channels to promote their properties to consumers. The new SmartCloud offer by Portugal Telecom has the power to change this,” said Joao Trindade, VP of Marketing of GuestCentric. “Portugal Telecom, with its extensive roster of hotel customers, is the perfect partner to help Portugal’s independent hoteliers change their approach to digital marketing in a decisive way.”

Many of our hotel customers use promotions to drive revenue, earlier bookings, etc. A good benchmark is 30-35% of all revenue from your property should come from special offers.

To help our customers with the definition of promotions for their hotels, we have analyzed which promotions generate most results.

As a follow-up, we improved our extranet to make it a no-brainer for you to create seven types we have identified as the special offers that can generate most results for your hotel:

• Early booking: Increase early occupancy with advance booking discounts. Use non-refundable rates to get access to cash at booking time.
• Longer stays: Increase your revenue per guest by incentivizing them to stay longer. Increase length of stay and get extra revenue from services.
• Social: Reward your fans and followers and get access to their social profiles. Surprise them with extraordinary service.
• Flash deal: Setup flash deals at 40% off or more and sell large volumes. Control volume by creating a time-out.
• Packages: Maximize stay revenue by creating packages with activities, special meals, and extras.
• Voucher: Sell through marketing distribution sites like Travelzoo by promoting voucher bookings.
• Promotion codes: Share a promotion code to offer deals that are only visible to special people. Control access by limiting sell amount.

In addition, you still have 100% freedom to create your custom special offer with all the restrictions you can think of. But we hope the pre-packaged ones help you in your daily work of selling and marketing your hotel.

We have improved the ability to filter information in the hotel booking engine by creating a custom URL. The complete list of supported parameters below:
Mandatory parameters

• API key: &apikey=someApiKey – booking gadget API key, this parameter is mandatory. You can get it by navigating to Setup > External Booking Engine

Optional parameters – reservation data

• Check-in: &startDay=2012-02-28 – the selection time frame start day, should be in the yyyy-mm-dd format
• Number of nights: &nrNights=2 – the number of nights
• Amount (number of rooms): &amount=3
• Number of Adults per room: &nrAdults=3
• Number of Children per room: &nrChildren=1

Optional parameters – booking engine display

• Language: &l=[ca (Catalan), de (German), en (English), es (Spanish), fi (Finnish), fr (French), it (Italian), pl (Polish), pt (Portuguese), ru (Russian)]
• Preselected offer: &preselect=idofthepreselection
• Filter offers: &filterOffers=[rooms, promotions, all]

Optional parameters – Workflow

• Thank-you page URL: &thankyouUrl=http://someurl.com – the URL of the page to be shown after the confirmation screen
• Cancel page URL: &url=http://someurl.com – the URL to be shown when not completing a booking

Optional parameters – Reporting

• Channel key: &channelKey=someChannelKey – a channel key that is used for reporting when bookings are completed.

Example:

https://secure.guestcentric.net/api/bg/book.php?apikey=c3123bde72da365e6e69ea8b7da0b2ca&l=en&startDay=2012-07-20&nrAdults=1&nrNights=3

At GuestCentric, our customer base is growing increasingly sophisticated. As a consequence, so do the demands on our booking engine. This fact got me thinking about writing a post on the use of hotel booking engines and how its applicability is changing with time. I hope that these best practices help hoteliers, both large and small, luxury or economy.

More than just using the booking engine as the “transaction machine” on hotel websites, hotels are increasingly looking for capabilities to create digital marketing campaigns that are targeted, involve consumers and their success can be measured by the number of new bookings. This new type of digital marketing communication requires a significant degree of targeting and hotels must now care about how to stimulate transactions by the way the offers are presented on their booking engine.

This article describes how to address the needs for targeted digital marketing campaigns and the targeting features your hotel booking engine needs for successful campaigns that convert into more bookings.

Leverage different entry points from your website

There is only one chance to make a first impression. Hence it is important to understand your customers needs and whether they are price shoppers or whether they are coming into your site to conclude a transaction on definite dates.

Our suggestion is to ensure that to maximize return from your booking engine you can create customized entry points to the booking process, based on the origin of the request.

• Rates and Tariffs: If someone is looking for “rates” ensure, you should ensure that all offers are shown on the booking engine, including ones that are outside of the current dates. This maximizes shopping around, and a calendar is critical in this process.
• Rooms: On your rooms page, display nice pictures, include amenities and some indicative rates (“Rate from…”). Most importantly, leverage the rooms page as an entry point to the booking engine by providing a “book now” button right next to the description of the room. Ensure that this takes you to the booking engine with that room type pre-selected so that the focus of the consumer is on concluding the transaction.
• Special Offers: On your special offers page, display a good description of the promotion including special terms and/or guarantees and the indicative rates (“Promo from…”). Again, on the promo page ensure that there is a “book now” button. This button should take users to the booking engine with that promotion pre-selected, so that they just need to select which room they want and finish the booking.
• Additional entry points: Have the ability to create additional entry points. Ensure that your booking engine can be invoked with as many pre-defined parameters as possible. e.g., if for a resort on the beach, you may want to provide a page that describes the all-inclusive special offer and has a link with that offer preselected. If you have an “Easter special for 3 nights” you may want to create a landing page to promote it and link to a booking engine with the Easter dates pre-selected. Important parameters are:
  • Check-in, check-out date
  • Amount of rooms, Number of adults and children
  • Pre-selected offers, date filtering or flexible dates
  • Link to the cancel page and thank-you page
  • Some channel identifier for reporting purposes

Laser focus with Click-to-book

At GuestCentric, we call click-to-book the ability to select a specific room type or special offer, the check-in and check-out dates, the language of the target and create a unique link that can be sent via email, twitter, Facebook, or any other social network.

Click-to-book is an important mechanism to engage users and to send them offers with a laser-focus.

A single offer, in a specific language, for specific dates sent to a user or collection of users as a way to promote a last-minute deal, or to respond to specific enquiries. The power of click-to-book is its ultimate portability. It can be embedded in any sort of communication, most importantly email. Almost all digital marketing campaigns involve some degree of email. As a lead generation or as a follow-up mechanism. It is critical when communicating via email that e-commerce and reservations managers can send portable links that can be booked in one click.

Spreading the wealth: Custom booking engines

Last, but not least is the ability to create customized booking engines with specific offers. The idea behind creating custom booking engines is to create a simple and intuitive workflow for very specific uses. Take, for instance three examples:

• Events: when trying to book an event, users don’t want to be distracted with offers that are not relevant for them, e.g. some long-stay offer in different dates, or a golf package. Hence, creating a custom booking engine for an event that has just the special offers for the event simplifies the booking process. In addition, this booking engine can be embedded in the event promotion websites and a link can be sent out to the attendees.
• Affiliation sites: one of the big advantages of OTAs is that they work affiliation sites, large and small. If you have a hotel close to the Opera, or a golf course, etc. you can work package deals with those partners and create a custom booking engine that only displays the relevant offers. These custom booking engines can then be distributed to the partner’s websites and create an affiliation network for your hotel this way.
• Corporate intranets: one way to offer corporate rates is to “hide” them behind a “box” that gets unlocked if the user has the special code. While this mechanism is a simple way to provide corporate rates, it is much more interesting to provide special rates using a normal booking experience. Hence, if you want to create special offers for specific corporate rates, you can create a corporate booking engine that only gets accessed based on a normal web-based authentication paradigm (user id/password, Intranet addresses, etc.). A corporate booking engine provides the ultimate power to hotels to offer special rates to groups of users.

Conclusion

Hotels are increasingly looking for capabilities to create digital marketing campaigns that are targeted, involve consumers and their success can be measured by the number of new bookings. This new type of digital marketing communication requires flexibility from their booking engine:

• Customizable entry points
• Click-to-book links
• Customizable offers per booking engine

With these three features, your hotel’s booking engine will be able to address the needs for successful digital marketing campaigns that convert into more bookings.

If you want to learn more about what GuestCentric can do to improve your hotel’s digital marketing chat to one of our specialists online or sign up for our Coffee with GuestCentric webinar.
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Independent hotels are paranoid about visibility. The hospitality industry is extremely competitive: as within any market with oversupply, capturing market share means someone else is losing market share. Hence, most hotel managers spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about ways to make their hotels more visible than their competitors. And increasingly so they are thinking about ways to do it online through digital marketing strategies.

A friend quoted to me that in one of the big OTAs, the #1 spot of the search results gets 36% of the reservations, and results on page one get a whopping 90% of all bookings.

It sounds a bit extreme, but this single fact is the reason why in certain markets, though booking.com’s published commission rate is 15%, hotels are providing commission overrides of close to 30% to be on the first page. Because hotel visibility is key in a crowded market. And driving higher commission is a “simple” solution for many of these hotel managers. But is it the intelligent solution?

“Buying rank” is driving an increasing commission war between hotels that solely benefits the OTAs. Typically hotels only notice this at the end of the month, when they pay tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the OTAs. Using that budget for better digital marketing would be an alternative. This is why the big chains have recently launched RoomKey. We are also seeing an increasing number of independent hotels thinking of Online Travel Optimization, not just hotel SEO.

The biggest obstacle is that hotel digital marketing is considered by many as complex, rocket science or a black art. The “hordes” of what we at GuestCentric call “fake SEO experts” that sell naive hotel managers on the fact that through “advanced strategies” they will get the hotel on the first page on Google makes this matter worse. Be aware of what Google says on the topic:

• Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.
• No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
• Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.

Still, all hotel managers know that leveraging digital marketing is a good idea to increase their revenue and lower their distribution costs and it should be a powerful alternative to ever-increasing OTA commissions. Most hotel managers are also aware that never before were there as many tools that they can leverage to engage consumers. Finally, technology now enables them to do so at a reasonable price through their hotel websites, by creating special offers, or by leveraging social or mobile.

But these solutions sound like “a lot of extra work”. So, is there a silver bullet?

Below are five checklist items that you should consider when selecting a hotel digital marketing solution to solve your digital marketing problems:

1. Highlight your website as your main channel with automatic SEO

Google has many rules on how a website should be optimized. Ensure that the content management system you select as part of your hotel digital marketing solution enables you to change content and pictures quickly, but also optimizes basic Google content like title tags, URLs, Alt-text for pictures, heading tags, robots.txt automatically.

For more information on this topic you can refer to Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

2. Create great content, spell check it!

Google nowadays looks at content quality. So be original and create content relating to your destination that is original and fun. And don’t forget: one basic element of content quality is spelling, so spell check your content before pushing that “Publish” button.

3. Optimize for Mobile users

19% of hotel searches come from mobile, says Google. Hence, optimize your online presence for mobile users. Make sure you have an iPad-ready website (no Flash please!). Create a mobile version optimized for lower bandwidth networks and quick completion of basic tasks like calling the hotel or checking the address. Make the booking experience simple and straightforward for a mobile user.

4. Leverage social networks like Facebook, twitter, flickr for a multi-channel strategy

Get a tool that populates your content and booking engine in as many channels as possible. Think about what the big OTAs do: they sell on their websites, but they also power hotel sales on websites of airlines, rental cars, etc. So, use the same strategy: distribute your content and offers to as many content and distribution networks as possible. Most of these tasks can be automated and should take no extra effort. And leverage social networks: they are a great way to engage consumers.

5. Centralize customer databases

One key element of any digital marketing strategy is customer engagement. To achieve this, a hotel should have a central reservations platform that enables it to track the history of every customer. This customer relationship database should enable the hotel to engage customers on special occasions, create additional value for loyal customers and provide incentives to return.

To combat OTA dominance hotel managers need a powerful hotel digital marketing solution: one that is simple and intelligent, that maximizes return from their direct channels and creates long-standing relationships with customers.

If you want to learn more about what GuestCentric can do to improve your hotel’s digital marketing chat to one of our specialists online or sign up for our Coffee with GuestCentric webinar.
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