Three things to consider in hotel distribution and marketing in 2012

Today’s hotel marketing landscape is changing rapidly. The advent of new distribution channels has created more options to truly personalize a strategy to suit the needs of your property. With that in mind, it was no surprise when a recent survey of Sabre Hospitality customers revealed that understanding new distribution and marketing trends presented one of the top challenges to their business.

When planning their online strategies, hoteliers regularly look for guidance on choosing the top trends to follow. Mobile, social media conversion, and channel management are three key areas where some of the most significant trends for hotel marketers are emerging. This article intends to provide an overview of each and what to look for as you plan your 2012 strategy.

1. MOBILE: This trend is number one for a reason: as computing and communications become increasingly personal and user-customized, the term refers to more than just smartphones with internet browsers. Obviously hoteliers must consider mobile as an important marketing channel, but must also be aware of the trend to expand on-property with the advent of NFC and other device-activated services. Below is a list of five tips to help maximize your mobile-marketing strategy:

• Start with an optimized mobile website and booking engine which considers user experience across multiple mobile devices, including tablets. Take advantage of this trend with an excellent mobile site designed to get your mobile visitors to the answers they are looking for quickly and efficiently, with the ability to book on every page.
• Think of mobile as its own channel so you can offer special rates, promotions, product descriptions as well as tracking specifically for this market.
• Take advantage of SMS/text message marketing programs. Guest can opt-in and receive messages pre- post- and during their stays at your property.
• Work with sites with geo-location services such as Foursquare, Facebook, Gowalla, and Yelp to offer promotions. Participate in the free marketing programs that many of these sites offer, such as adding links to your website and other social media accounts, uploading pictures or offering check-in deals and specials.
• Optimize your location for mapping and mobile search. Consider running a mobile targeted AdWords campaign with click to call and tailor your message to mobile users.

2. SOCIAL MEDIA: By now you have hopefully initiated conversations and established relationships with your customer base through various social media channels. If you’re a hotel or a hotel group, you will have an active presence on at least Facebook and Twitter, if not other channels, and use these to engage and retain fans of your brand. The next question is, are you using social media to convert?

In the past year, social media channels such as Facebook have created more and more opportunities for hotel marketers to use social media as an extension of their direct-to-consumer strategy.  Some areas to consider to help your business grow through your social media efforts:

• Leverage Facebook as an extended booking engine and include call to actions just as you would on your own website to prompt fans and new customers to book directly.
• Take advantage of push-marketing opportunities on Facebook and include a specially designed optimized landing page that encourages interaction and engagement.
• Update your own content with targeted tags for the channels that are right for your brand. Consider including new tags such as Facebook send and Google +1 to leverage your customers’ networks on the larger social networks.
• Plan your social media advertising campaigns with your marketing efforts on these channels, giving new fans and viewers the opportunity to easily convert and engage with your brand.
• Are you investing in remarketing to capture interested consumers? Remarketing is an advertising campaign directing users back to your website or social media profile after they have already viewed your content and clicked away, and can help you capture a segment that may not have otherwise converted using your channels.

3. CHANNEL MANAGEMENT: Even though hotels do not want to be dependent on third parties/OTAs, there is still a value to these partnerships in the overall marketing and distribution landscape. The Billboard Effect trend has been one that we have been telling customers to pay attention to throughout the year, and it is still relevant for 2012. Managing and maximizing your presence across channels, including OTAs, can help you use third-party relationships to drive business back to your own property website.

The Billboard Effect tells us that 23% more bookings direct to brand website when present on OTAs (Cornell study).

The average online travel consumer spends 10 searching sessions over and average of five weeks before a reservation is finally made, accessing at least 20 websites in total. Your strategy should embrace their research – but ensure that you offer rate parity across channels, and that your own property is optimized to convert and be the place that more customers choose to make their bookings.

http://www.webintravel.com

Moving from online channels to ecosystems

The future of online distribution lies not through channels but through ecosystems, distribution experts report.

Online travel agencies, brand.com, social media, mobile apps and websites—they’re all interconnected parts of the booking process. Revenue managers who fail to understand this broader perspective risk losing business and customers, concluded a panel of distribution experts Tuesday, 29 November during an HSMAI University webinar titled “What is the Future of Distribution?”

“Consumers have no concept of ‘channels.’ They just want to book a room where they are naturally,” said Michelle Wohl, VP of marketing for Revinate, a San Francisco-based company that specializes in social media solutions for the hotel industry.

And where they are “naturally” is increasing in scope. Panelists shared the following data points during the 90-minute webinar:

• Facebook has 800 million active users, 50% of whom visit the social-media giant daily.
• Review site TripAdvisor draws 65 million unique visitors every month.
• Smartphone sales have overcome PC sales during 2011, and 51% of business travelers use mobile devices to get travel information, which is more than double the rate two years ago.

“Consumers are shopping everywhere,” said Amy Severson, director of strategic accounts and industry relations for online travel company Expedia.

Attempting to be “everywhere” might be a little extreme, she added. Hoteliers, instead, should analyze where they can make the biggest impact in the consumer decision-making cycle.

Zero moment of truth
In the early 2000s, Procter & Gamble spent millions of dollars in just such an analysis, said Scott van Hartesvelt, president of Gcommerce Solutions, a Park City, Utah-based digital marketing company for the hospitality industry. Headquartered in Cincinnati, the pharmaceutical and cleaning supplies giant discovered the best brands elicit two moments of truth from customers:

1) at the short shelf where a customer sees and decides to buy the product; and
2) at home, when the product either delights or disappoints.

But the Internet has changed this dynamic, van Hartesvelt said. Citing an updated analysis of the customer “moment of truth” conducted by Google, he said the new point of greatest impact in the buying cycle is called the “zero moment of truth” or the online information-gathering stage that precedes a purchase.

Customers today research purchase decisions more than ever before, van Hartesvelt said. They visit online review sites, consult with social networks, read articles and blogs, as well as visit company home pages. By the time they hit the “shelf” to actually buy a product, they are more educated and have a clearer understanding of what they want to buy.

For example, the average consumer in 2011 used 10.4 sources of information compared with 5.3 in 2010 before making a purchase, he said. Hoteliers need to make sure their brand is present in other Internet sources to reach customers and influence their decision making.

“Think about what are each and every one of those zero moments of truth that you can identity that would impact your hotel,” van Hartesvelt said.

A good place to start is a simple Google search for a property and its competitors, he said. Revenue managers should analyze how their properties are represented and whether they positively influence the booking process.

“It’s a function of understanding where might somebody go to research my hotel and my location,” van Hartesvelt said.

Those information sources are becoming more and more fluid and interconnected, he added. Facebook posts links to TripAdvisor, which links to brand.com, which increasingly is showing customer reviews. It’s no longer about channels, van Hartesvelt said, it’s about ecosystems.

Reviews and the buying cycle
Reviews are everywhere, the panelists said, and that means they’re becoming an increasingly influential part in the booking process.

In addition to TripAdvisor, many OTAs are implementing reviews as part of hotel search results. Brand.com sites are doing the same.

The goal, Revinate’s Wohl said, is to give customers the information they need and to encourage a purchase. If reviews are posted directly on Hotel A’s website, customers no longer need to jump to TripAdvisor or an OTA to search for them, thus increasing the likelihood that travelers will book directly on Hotel A’s website—or at least in theory. The phenomenon is relatively new, and it’s unclear how the incorporation of reviews will impact the booking cycle, she said.

What’s clear, however, is the importance hoteliers are placing on reviews.

“The No. 1 key to the future distribution is going to be customer experience. A lot of times that gets drilled down to reviews,” van Hartesvelt said.

More than 7% of hoteliers now respond to reviews on OTA and other travel sites, Wohl said.

Doing so is a good way to positively influence the conversation, the panelists agreed.

“Don’t be afraid of bad reviews unless you are running a bad business,” van Hartesvelt said. “… the cream of the crop will rise to the top.”

Key takeaways
Moderator Jeff Higley, VP of digital media for HotelNewsNow.com’s parent company STR and editorial director of HotelNewsNow.com, closed the webinar by asking each panelist to share a key takeaway:

Scott van Hartesvelt: “The biggest thing to understand is the interconnectedness of the different channels. Each channel does not live on its own. … they’re all interconnected. Being insular in your point of view to only looking at, ‘What can I do to make my hotel website better?’ … you’re going to miss out on where your customer are engaging.”

Michelle Wohl: “People do want to validate their booking decision by reading reviews. Make sure reviews are very visible on your direct site, the Facebook page or wherever people are going.”

Amy Severson: “You need to be approachable where your customers want to reach you … Think about being visible where your customers want to book.”

http://www.hotelnewsnow.com