It amazes me how some businesses expect their customers to spend time creating promotional material for them – without even recognizing their efforts.

Looking outside the hotel industry for a moment, Ford ran a promotion where 100 car bloggers drove a Fiesta completely free for 6 months in exchange for writing about the experience.

A tradeoff like this is fairly common, but what Ford did well here was support the bloggers with attention. Using their corporate marketing power, they raised the visibility of the people writing about them. This, of course, led to more people reading about the cars – so everyone won.

(You’ve also gotta love Ford for making – to my knowledge – the first car that tweets and checks in with Foursquare)

The big lesson: Your social media activity needs to be less about sales and more about amplifying the messages of your fans.

How do you support the people writing about you?

[Photo credit: John McNab]

Here are some of the best hotel websites I’ve seen recently:

Trapp Family Lodge

Why I like it: This site does a great job of sharing the experience through great images and solid copywriting.

Mosaic House

Why I like it: I profiled their site before – noting their excellent use of Facebook Connect to build a community. This latest version does this even better.

Hotel Terra

Why I like it: Smart and simple.

Jumeirah Group

Why I like it: It uses images to avoid complicated navigation and present a more engaging interface.

Atlantis The Palm

Why I like it: The flash intro is put to good use – splitting up traffic by visitor type. Once visitors reach the main site, they see beautiful images and a clear next step: making the reservation.

MGM Grand

Why I like it: I’m not usually a fan of flash-heavy websites, but this fits their style well. I like how they position social media as a way to receive updates on Vegas – not just their hotel. And you’ve gotta love some good house music…

Pueblo Bonito Resorts

Why I like it: This website just seems to have everything in the right place, and uses rich media well

Albert Hotel

Why I like it: The ‘meet your team’ concept is genius

Hotel Guarda

Why I like it: Links are written as benefits of staying with them.

theWit

Why I like it: I love the concept of Witisodes. And they do a good job of letting others sing their praises. (It’s meaningless if you call yourself the best hotel)

The Urban Suites

Why I like it: Cool map, separate page with guest reviews – speaks well to their core audience

Thompson Hotels

Why I like it: Instead of just shouting what they want to say, they ask what I want to hear

Hotel SO

Why I like it: It’s clean, simple, and connects with the type of design-conscious budget traveler they are trying to reach.

Haagsche Suites and Mitaroy Goa Hotel

Why I like these: I’m a little biased here, but Guido and Mihir are great examples of hoteliers that built a community of online fans through blogging. This has worked so well for them that they publish their whole hotel website now in WordPress.

Past guests

• Past guests are easier to bring back to your website
• Past guests are usually much, much more profitable

As marketers we tend to spend most of our time creating communications aimed at reaching new audiences – people who have never heard of us before. Huge amounts of time, money, and resources are used to capture new web traffic.

That can be a mistake.

Past guests are easier to bring back

If someone stayed at your hotel and had a good experience, there’s a good chance you can bring them back to your website.

The great thing about communicating with these people is that you usually have additional data you can use to personalize and customize the messages. This extra information can be used to make your offer more relevant, and more likely to convert into a sale.

Look at the first time someone comes into contact with your website or your hotel as a golden opportunity. If you provide them with what they’re looking for, they’re going to remember you. They’ll want to come back. Having people in this frame of mind makes it easier to hold their attention long enough to share what you have to say.

This is much more profitable

Various industry research studies indicate it costs somewhere between 5-8 times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to sell something to an existing one.

If this is the case, shouldn’t our priorities reflect this? I advocate – and personally practice – the strategy of spending the majority of time connecting with my current audience.

Yes, reaching out to new readers and customers is important – but make sure your priorities are in the right place.

How to get people coming back to your website

Start as soon as they leave your hotel. Give information. Provide value. I know of a few hotels that prepare a “departure package” with flight details, info to make the departure go smoothly…and of course the opportunity to stay in touch.

Create a continuity system with value. Create a reason for people to come back. Make your site sticky. Something that makes people keep coming back to see what’s new. This requires a lot of hard work and creativity – but make that your goal.

Get them connected in social media. If these people are part of your social network, you have the opportunity to connect on an ongoing basis. Maybe that’s following you on Twitter. Maybe it’s subscribing to your blog. Try to get them plugged in somehow.

Reward their loyalty. Most hospitality organizations have some type of loyalty rewards program. Extend that tactic to the web. Reward your frequent website visitors with special privileges.

This goes back to thinking like a concierge

Offline, your concierge probably is one of the most important people at your hotel for cross-selling and up-selling guests to additional revenue opportunities.

Online, we need to adopt this concierge mindset to expand the profitability of each guest. Adopting a mindset of service not only encourages more people to interact with you online, but it’s also more profitable.

Failing to educate people on the various products and services you provide leads to missed revenue. A study by The Forum Corporation of North America confirmed that 88% of customers value being advised on products and services that better meet their needs. Are you doing this?

Plan your online marketing program around this

Attracting new website traffic is vital for business growth, but the real money is in reselling to your existing customer base.

We all love to celebrate a job being finished, but in online marketing, and in ALL marketing for that matter, the launch is NOT the time to celebrate.  Sure, go ahead, high-five each other for nailing the deadline, putting out good-looking work, or figuring out that complex issue, but do not get drunk in this celebration because you’ve only completed about 7% of the task.

If you really want to celebrate, save that for when the sales roll in.  I could care less about how a web site looks, reads, or acts until I start to see what it does in terms of sales.

Bob works primarily outside the hospitality industry, but the concepts apply just as well to us working with hotels.

I’ve watched organizations spend hundreds of thousands on a website…and then think their job is done.

It’s not.

The launch of a new website or campaign is just the beginning.

The real value will come from the testing you need to do in the weeks and months that follow.

• Honesty sets expectations appropriately
• Honesty prevents guest disappointment
• Honesty avoids negative word of mouth

That’s why I love Oyster’s Photo Fakeouts feature:

Use media that portrays what it’s really like to stay with you. If something needs fixing, fix it.

But never use half-truths.

As John Wanamaker famously said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

I blogged on this a while ago – it’s becoming increasingly difficult for marketers to track their campaigns. I’ve noticed that as I deal with conventional tourism marketing – they’re not so familiar with online media. Their methods of tracking in all cases — not just online marketing metrics –but off-line: what’s the value of print, what’s the value of TV, what’s the value of radio? All of these conventional media buying metrics in which the old-school media buyers have so much experience… they find very difficult to track new media.

Travel Booking Isn’t Linear

There’s no straight line from ad campaign to purchase in travel marketing anymore. There’s just so many factors that go into purchasing travel.

If you take Expedia as an example – their numbers are down in a number of areas. People are using them as the Amazon.com of travel, they research there first, but increasingly Expedia and other Online Travel Agents are finding it more difficult to give people reasons to book there. As I was recently reviewing a survey done for luxury hotels and brands, it was quite stunning to see the stats on how people are booking directly through the hotels.

So there are no easy answers.I think it comes down to that really scientific thing: gut feel!

I feel a little bit like a Steve Jobs of travel marketing sometimes — “To hell with the research! This is what we need to do.” And I think hotel marketing is really in a state of flux right now. We have all the people that we’ve been dealing with for years — ad buyers, media agencies — but they really don’t understand online behavior enough yet.

It’s a Branding Issue

And then when you look at social media brand building, for example, like Gary Vaynerchuk has been doing. It’s the whole personal brand thing, and is so applicable to hotels – especially independent hotels.

We’ve got a great example of this with what Joie de Vivre hotels has been doing: building almost a personal brand of each individual property.

We get far too hung up on metrics. I think you get buried in numbers and put off by numbers. So I’m sounding a bit like an ad rep — saying not to worry about the numbers, and just buy my ads. But I think with regard to online metrics, I’m really just interested in how many unique site visitors I have, how many new visitors I’m getting, where they’re coming from, and what type of search they used to find us. Not just direct referrals – but the phrases that people are using to find us online.

And that’s the disconnect. If you find that 40% of people are finding you by typing your hotel name into a search engine — you’ve completely lost connection to your metrics. Where are they coming from? It could be a print ad, it could be completely residual, it could be they saw a special promotion and the price is right.

This is the way I see people coming to my client’s sites. People don’t bookmark websites anymore – they simply type it into Google. For example, if I don’t know the name of your blog, I would just type in “hotel marketing blog” — and arrive at your site. People just do that for everything.

Focus on Website Optimization

The important thing is website optimization. Let’s concentrate on website efficiency. Get people onto the site in the first place, and that’s where you can begin creating some good metrics.Monitor their path through your website, and adjust for sales efficiency.

Obviously for hotels, the question is: are we making it possible for them to book a reservation in the way they want at any stage? You want to make sure there’s a widget on every single page that allows anyone to commence the booking process at any time.

So do everything you can that you think would be effective in bringing people to your website and then focus on converting those visitors to bookings.

This Requires a New Approach to Marketing Planning

Don’t just say “I have $1 million to spend to market my hotel this year,” and then going down the list of marketing options – so much on this, so much on that, so much on the other. Instead of doing it as a top to bottom list — like a CPA would do a budget –take a sheet of paper and draw a big circle at the center. Write “website” in the middle of that circle, and then everything else that needs to be focused on how to get people to your site.

Every single resource, you spend on marketing needs to answer the question: “How will people get to our website?” Once you’ve done that, look from the perspective of inside your website, and imagine the different sources that people will be using to arrive there. How did they come to you?

Conversion isn’t linear. People don’t just come to your website and book when they get there.

Make People Feel Good About Their Decision

They’re going to look for pre-reservation validation. They are going to check what people are saying about the hotel on TripAdvisor, they’re going to check rates elsewhere, they’re going to check alternatives.

And then even after they’ve made the purchase, you need to make damn sure that they feel they made a good decision. People will often do just as much research after they’ve bought something. This is often overlooked: what do we do to make sure we hold onto the reservations we’ve got?

Do you have enough information on your website and web presence – Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor – so that someone who has made a reservation feels absolutely comfortable they have made the right decision? This is important for making sure they have a good time, because when they arrive at your hotel their mind will be relaxed that what you promise, you can deliver.

And then of course you get into all the stuff that isn’t online. A lot of the stuff I encourage my clients to do is incredibly old-fashioned. And that is: get them to you once, show them a great time, and then they will tell the world. It’s just that the Internet is word-of-mouth on steroids.

Much of the information you publish online can be used and reused in many different formats. To expand your web presence, consider repurposing your website content as:

• Blog posts
• Email
• Newsletters
• Articles
• PDFs for download
• Press releases
• Case studies
• Video
• Twitter updates

Repackage your content and distribute it through as many channels as possible to build a powerful web presence that increases your hotel’s visibility.

Many organizations make the mistake of assuming their website visitors come often and stay long. That’s not the case. Probably 75% or more of your site traffic has never visited before and they’ll stay for less than a minute.

Your challenge is to capture the attention of these visitors, and do everything you can to turn that one visit into many more in the future.

The way you do this is through involvement devices. Things like an e-mail newsletter, a blog, or a Twitter account.

Once you’ve begun an initial relationship like this, you can continue to communicate and develop the relationship.

How are you engaging your first-time website visitors?

Thomas O’Neil, Google Travel

Mobile landing pages: designing the user experience

• landing pages are evolving
• 4 great examples
  • Hotels.com/iPhone
    • being first moving has big advantage
    • have 1 million+ app downloads
  • m.toyota.com
  • m.cnn.com
  • iPhone.fandago.com
• key take-away: there needs to be optimized landing pages for the consumer
• not everyone has an smart phone…design for less
• search google webmasters: “mobile seo”
  • search algorithm is different for mobile sites

Mobile search: what consumers are doing

• not usually willing to do more than one search
• probably won’t go beyond top 2-3 search result listings
• they search for roughly the same amount of words…but search less often
• SEO is extremely important. If you’re not in the top 1-3 results, you may as well not even be there.

Advertising on the go: opportunities to reach individuals

• 4 types of Google advertising opportunities
  • WAP search
  • HTML search
  • content network (on other sites)
  • YouTube videos
• understand which apps your audience is using to choose advertising opportunities
• Google provides a high level of reporting options

Krista Pappas, Microsoft Bing Travel

• Mobile is at the center of the digital lifestyle
• The big story is that mobile is huge & growing. It’s critical you begin developing this one-on-one relationship with your customers now.
• Once people start using the mobile web, they don’t go back
• 107% more news & info was consumed through the mobile web in 2008 than 2007
• View mobile as more than just another media buy
• Mobile web is NOT the World wide Web
  • screen size limits text
  • information needs are based on location and situation
  • requires information be filtered so only relevant info is delivered
• Bing is working to give great mobile results
• Search results are optimized for mobile devices
• People may be booking more hotels last minute…as opposed to airline tickets. Tickets require more certainty and search options, hotel booking is seen as a much simpler process.

• 80% of online marketers do not serve personalized content, and do not use performance metrics to promote content
• Less than 30% frequently test their content
• 70% of content decisions are unsupported by data

That’s scary. Especially if you depend on your website to generate sales.

Since I often talk about ‘scientific marketing’ it’s good to have some solid numbers on the state of the industry. More and more, I’m emphasizing the importance of conversion tracking, testing, and optimizing in the campaigns I manage. This process is fundamentally at the heart of internet marketing, and it would be a waste if we didn’t fully exploit it.

Tracking

Tracking is gathering the data as it is now. The process is quick and easy through tools such as Google Analytics. By adding once piece of code to your website, you can have access to hundreds of detailed reports.

Testing

Testing is letting the market vote on your marketing ideas. After tracking systems are in place, you can perform split testing to determine the best mix of your website elements. Testing replaces guesswork with pragmatism in the marketing process.

Optimization

Optimization is acting on the information you discover. Once you have data, you must use it. Few website owners continue through all the way to this step. It’s essential your site development is guided by the insights you’ve collected.

This 3-step system is the only proven way to achieve outstanding internet marketing results.

Are you investing enough into this process?

[photo credit: faith goble]