Mastering Hotel Marketing: Strategies for Success in a Competitive Digital World

It’s going fantastic. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I’m really excited to have our conversation today.

Yeah, sure thing. First of all, from TravelBoom’s perspective, we’re a digital agency that really specializes in only work with helping independent hoteliers and property management groups succeed online. Anything from a website to SEO to email, social, you name it, that’s what we do. What makes us a little bit unique is because we are hoteliers at heart, we’re able to bridge that gap between the hotelier speak and the agency speak. We do a really good job there. Me personally, I’ve been in the travel business. I’ve actually been in the agency side since January third of the year 2000. I’m showing my age a little bit, but yeah, I got on my 25th year here. You don’t look like that for sure. I appreciate you saying that.

Yeah, I think that really is the biggest challenge is what you’re trying to do as a hotelier, a lot of times people don’t know who you are until they start that search process. They already have a brand affinity with, it might be Expedia or Booking. Com or some other OTA. The question then becomes, how does a hotel with a single property or, say, a group of properties, succeed online? It’s different. It’s difficult. Google is being way more aggressive. The search results page is changing constantly. Being able to just say be on the top of a search results page organically for your brand is no longer enough for a hotel. There’s meta-search, there’s paid-side, there’s local listings, there’s AI answers at the top of the results. There’s a lot of competition, and it makes it very challenging for hoteliers to find a way to to break through all that noise and be able to stand on their own. It’s a great choice for travel.

To me, it goes back to when you think of the innkeeper’s of old, where you can think of a traveler who picks your property, and you’re not only the place where they’re going to lay their head at night, you become the conduit to the place that they’re staying. I think if you’re a hotel and you’re trying to differentiate yourself in any given market, the trick is to say, Okay, what is my unique prospect to a guest? How can I take that and integrate it into everything that I do? A really good example is in Charleston, South Carolina, here in the States, there’s a property called the Vindoo, and it is known as the Charleston’s Art Hotel. The way they differentiate themselves is they actually have in-house artists that do paintings and different pieces of art in the lobby. Then every room you go to is completely unique with local art, where the visitors and locals alike are able to come into the common areas, and they’re basically in an art gallery. That works really well for them. I’m not saying everybody should become an art hotel, but like the Vendu did, find out what it is that’s your passion as a hotelier or an innkeeper, and then lean into that 110%.

If you do that, you will naturally rise to the top of the people who identify with your property. Because let’s say you have 100 rooms at your property, right? That means you have to fill 100 rooms. You don’t have to appeal to everybody who’s visiting a destination. You just want to be an ultimate state or someone who wants what you have.

Exactly. You see a lot of people who try to say they’re the most luxurious property in any given market. Well, if you’re really not, the web is so transparent now between reviews from social proof and everything else, people are going to know. I think if you can go with the authenticity of what what you’re passionate about, and then make sure your website says that, make sure your paid campaigns say that, make sure your social interactions all point back to that so that you become the conduit for your ultimate guest throughout their entire planning and stay journey, right?

Since I started, the internet started. I would say that’s it.

But if we want to get evemore granular, when I first started, it was a lot of you’re setting your rate for the year and you publish that in an actual printed thing. That has now turned into the science of revenue management where your rate is yielded based on demand and occupancy and what your targeted RevPAR is and everything like that. Mobile was obviously a major tipping point, but I would say in the past 4-5 years, AI, which everybody says this, AI is the big disruptor again. I don’t think there’s a place where that’s more prevalent than in the hospitality space because you’re starting to be able to say, I want to achieve X occupancy at X rate and letting the tools that work behind the scenes in your revenue management platforms do the hard work of figuring out what that ideal price point is for every single day based on the current occupancy. You have that, obviously, You have your paid strategies that have a ton of AI behind it. You have in-room technology, you have front desk technology. It all goes to the point where you have humans who are guiding the ship, but the AI is doing so much more that if you’re an independent hotel not diving into that head first, you’re going to find yourself really behind power curve immediately, if that makes sense.

I think That’s where you start going to that CDP versus the old-fashioned CRM, where you’re able to bring in cues of what that person is doing online, what their shopping behaviors are, and who they are specifically to get very targeted and engaged with each individual guest. One of the things is a lot of times, a great conversion site on a hotel is 2-3%. What happens to those other 97% of the people who visit your site and leave? Well, we can bring them back if you’re being smart. Ai is a big component of that is saying, Okay, they visited the site, but they left, but I have their email address. Well, let’s start those drip campaigns. Or they’ve made a booking. I noticed that they booked a unit It for an adult and two kids, but they only have a one-room property. What can we do to upsell them to a two-bedroom, which will make their stay better, give them a better experience, and obviously help from a revenue perspective from that hotel? I think paying attention and letting AI create that ultra personalized journey for each guest is a huge opportunity.

The fun thing about hotels, unlike Ecom or Lifestyle or a lot of other companies, is with a hotel, you get to have face-to-face interaction with that guest. To me, the biggest opportunity for creating those great reviews is when somebody, before they visit, you let them know what their expectations are. While they’re on the property, you exceed those expectations and you make sure you have those opportunities to identify issues that they might have so that you can correct them at the property. Some of the best reviews that our hotels get are the ones from somebody who had something some type of problem at the property. A good example is, let’s say somebody has a leaky toilet in their room. They’re going to call the front desk or you’re going to be proactive and say, Hey, how was your stay? They say, I had this problem. Now you go above and beyond and you say, I can fix that for you. Not only do I want to fix it, let’s go ahead and move you to an upgraded room. Let me take care of this. Let me do this for you. So that at the end of their stay, they’re like, Oh, my gosh, I had a little problem, and they went above and beyond.

Then what happens is, those guests are only leaving good reviews because you addressed any negative feedback while they were there. Then I think at the end of it is, as they’re checking out, you’re asking for the review.

You’re asking for it.

Yeah, exactly. If you can get to the point where, like I said, going back to the innkeeper’s hundreds of years from now, they were doing everything they could to make you happy, that’s hard to do at scale with a several hundred unit location. But if you can get them to know your first name and care about you and you’ve helped them, well, if you’re their friend, nobody’s going to leave a bad review for their friend. I think that’s the goal that you want to get.

I think you address them by first mapping out what that overall conversion funnel looks like and understanding, say, Am I bringing the right people into my site for my experience to start with? Then work your way down, making sure everything is optimized. Realistically, the biggest bottleneck that they have is going to be when they typically leave the hotel’s brand website and go to the booking engine. That’s where a lot of booking engines are still working on getting caught up to be the amazon. Com-esque conversion where they have those urgency messages, they have the tools that drive people through the booking process. Then a lot of people, they see that rate, and then they’re going to leave. Not necessarily because the hotel did something wrong, but just because, Okay, now I know I’m going to be spending $1,000 plus on a great vacation, they’re going to leave and do some shopping. Do you have those abandonment tools in place? Because this is the other area where I think there’s a big opportunity in a bottleneck is if someone visits your site, you paid a lot of money to get them there, and then they leave and you don’t go back and say, Hey, come back in.

Let’s finish this booking. That’s your big bottleneck. You got to fix that part.

I think that’s where we go back to my story of the Vindu in Charleston, South Carolina. In their case, if your story is we love art, we love the expression, that needs to extend to your website, that needs to extend to your social channel channels and all your communications. Where people have a problem, and I think this probably goes to the bottleneck also as well, is if you say, My hotel is all about art and your email is a standard Mailchimp message that does not match that message. Your social channel doesn’t match it. People realize that, wait a minute, this person might be phoning it in. I don’t know if I’m actually going to get the experience that they’re promising on their site. Making sure that’s all aligned is really how you have to tell that story. Each platform is different. Let’s say you have a social media influencer come in. In their case, you want to have a social media influencer who is a true art aficionado. You don’t want to have somebody who’s coming in that’s just a hotel blogger. You find those places of authenticity, and then just push that button as much as you can.

Oh, gosh. Favorite client story. That’s a good one. Years ago, we were much more into the the golf business as well. We had one client who ran a major golf organization with dozens of golf courses. His name was Jim Woodring. He was in the Myrtle Beach area. He’s on the Myrtle Beach Golf Hall of Fame. He’s a legend in the community. Luckily, I was able to work with him for dozens of years. It was one of those things where the client is so educated on the subject that I feel like I was getting a university degree after every meeting. It helped you say, Hey, are you uncovering the hidden detail behind the stat, let’s say? If the report says you’re up 10%, a lot of people say, Oh, that’s great. He would slice and dice that to say, Okay, why is that good? Shouldn’t have been 20%. Let’s dig into that. Then what would happen is you end up with this amazing growth and amazing performance for your campaign because he did such a wonderful job pushing you to get to the next level. I think I’ve had a lot of funny client stories for sure, but that’s probably one of the ones that really helped me be the best hotel marketer and travel marketer there is.

We do have one where years ago, we were working on an email database for our send, and the client brought us a jazz drive with their current email addresses on it. We’re like, A jazz drive? I don’t know if you remember what those were, but it was like a giant floppy flat big floppy disk that hasn’t been used in dozens of years. I’m like, I guarantee you this is your email database. We do not need to be sending to these emails because they have not opted in. Because you probably got it sometime in the late ’90s. So yeah, there’s a lot of little funny stories like that for sure.

Yeah, let’s see what happens.

Last Google search. Oh, you know what? I’d have to look at that. Actually, I know what it is. I had to find UDEO, which is the AI music generation platform, because we’re working on redoing our podcast, and we decided we want to have AI intro music, so I had to Google that. All right.

Last vacation? We actually just got back from Lake Hartwell in upstate South Carolina. I think we got back about two weeks ago.

Friday evenings after office, well, my house backs up to a golf course. I’ll either be out there swinging the clubs or more often than that, I might just be hanging out in the pool with a cold beverage in my hand.

That was very fun. I really appreciate the opportunity and hope everybody has an awesome day.