Josiah’s note: The following comes from a conversation I recently had with Tom McCallum. In this article, Tom discusses the travel booking process, and how it takes place today.

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.

Read more…

Chris Pirillo likes to use the metaphor of a DJ for producing Web content – it’s all about remixing.

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.

Most of your website visitors are there for the first time: What will you do about that?

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?

Google and Microsoft explain how consumers are interacting with mobile…and how suppliers can reach them.

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

Read more…

Omniture’s 2009 Online Conversion Benchmark Survey – conducted in July and released last Tuesday – reveals some startling facts:

• 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]

Reader Sylvie asks:

“…I do wonder though how many people think we post false reviews as well. I’d like to think that none but I’m sure they’re out there. How does a company go about ’showing’ their integrity? Proving they’re honest?”

Again, I’d like to take some pointers from the world of ecommerce. There, the credibility of the reviews has a large impact on sales performance – so the industry has developed creative ways to prove they’re real.

Here are 3 powerful ways to prove review integrity:

Postcards, letters, and hand-written feedback

Give away free postcards to all of your guests. If you’ve provided a great experience they will often write back to you. I saw this all the time when I worked as front desk staff at a hotel.

If people send you a postcard or letter, scan it and upload it to your website. It’s harder to fake that.

I like what Hotel SO is doing in New Zealand with their online guestbook:

Hotel SO online guestbook

They even posted this to a separate domain for easy reference…brilliant!

Signatures

If you can’t get someone to write you a whole handwritten letter, at least get their signature on a paper (with permission, of course). You can then scan and add it to your website along with their comments in digital form.

Online video or audio

This is the hardest, but most compelling. If you ever have the opportunity (and permission) to record video or audio content of your guests’ feedback, do so. Showcase it on your blog. Featured on your website.

Your goal is to get some guest feedback in rich media formats. Reviews are typically more believable when they aren’t just typed text.

More importantly, make sure there is no reason for someone to doubt the authenticity of your reviews. Most people will trust the testimonials that you post to your website…unless there is good reason to believe otherwise.

Claim your hotel (or business)

Start off by claiming or listing your hotel in Google Maps.  This step is crucial for optimizing your local search visibility.

In my experience, even 15 minutes making sure all the details & keywords are correct pays dividends for months after.

Use the map on your website

Many hotels are using Google Maps on their directions or ‘find us’ page. It provides an extra layer of functionality to a traditional map image: allowing your visitors to see satellite and street view, as well as custom directions from anywhere they are.

Google provides a little widget that makes this process super-simple. First, you just search for your location – and click the Link link:

Following the customize embedded map link will lead to a page where you can edit the view, and obtain the website code:

Make a custom map

A logical step in concierge marketing, a custom map can show guests the special attractions in your area. Here’s a good example that Xotels created for the Puerto Antilla Grand Hotel in Spain – it shows golf courses in the region:

You may want to take this a step further and add rich media to the map. A 3rd-party tool such as Trippermap allows you to add your own photos to a custom map – which could work well for custom city tours:

Trippermap

Advertise on Google Maps

If you’re advertising in Google AdWords, your text ads will have the opportunity to display to people searching the maps.

For additional coverage, some businesses are painting logos on their roofs – like this Target store in Chicago:

Chris has a (spoof) tutorial on how to optimize your roof ads for Google Maps.

This post is by guest expert Neil Salerno.

At last, most hoteliers would agree that the only way to measure the effectiveness a hotel website is to track the number of reservations being generated from it. For those of you who are still satisfied with simply knowing how many visitors your site gets, you may be missing the big picture. Getting more visitors doesn’t necessarily mean you are getting more reservations.

There are actually two separate issues at hand:

1. Driving visitors to your site
2. Converting lookers into bookers once they visit

Many people are quick to consider search engine optimization, but more people need to concentrate on WSO, website optimization. WSO is your site’s ability to sell your hotel, once users visit the site.

There are many WSO points which contribute to making a productive hotel web site. Contrary to the belief of some site designers, a hotel website is not just an attractive online brochure with moving parts, bells, and whistles; it should be a tool to generate sales; and that takes marketing expertise. Unless one is designing a site for a museum, there are definite marketing principles involved in the design itself.

Perhaps the most difficult undertaking is to make people understand that their attractive web site may be a marketing failure because it lacks the sales tools to produce reservations; such as well-written, keyword rich, sales text, technically acceptable photography, an easily understood navigation scheme, researched and carefully chosen search terms/phrases, workable description and title Meta Tags, and a good link strategy.

Here are nine steps that others are using to help ensure that their site will capture a greater share of online reservations.

Avoid Flash Intros and Other Flash Elements

An introduction landing page may look pretty, but they don’t do a thing to help your site’s popularity nor its productivity. I’m sure one of the most frequently clicked links on these web sites is “skip intro.” People aren’t looking to be entertained, they are looking for information. Tell your web designer, no thanks on flash intros.

Search engines only read text. A little flash can be attractive, but too many web designers get carried away with it. Your web designer needs to spend more time developing text, which is far more important to the success of the site.

There appears to be a growing preference towards developing the entire site in flash. It sure is pretty but it has some huge problems. It’s costly to produce and costly to make changes. Most flash requires navigation links to be double-clicked in order to function. This may sound like no big deal, but many users will assume the link is broken, since we are all so accustomed to single-clicking links.  This type of site may be perfect for an art gallery or museum, but dysfunctional for a hotel sales site. Second, flash confuses search spiders and almost always encourages a low site ranking. Third, take a good look at successful booking portals like Expedia, Travelocity, etc…No flash!

Be Careful with Photos and Other Graphics

Photos create interest, but text sells. You can make your photos more interesting and searchable by simply adding text descriptions to every photo. This works especially well for “photo galleries” on your site. Since search engines only read text, your photos will become part of the search process and actually increase the popularity of your site.

Navigation Scheme on your Site

The first rule of hotel site design; don’t make it necessary for visitors to “learn” how to navigate your site. Website designers, who lack hotel marketing expertise, tend to become overly creative when designing and naming navigation elements. Your site’s navigation scheme is among the primary evaluation essentials for search engine spiders when ranking your site.

Drop-down menus are acceptable, but stick to common labels. You can’t go wrong with common labels such as “facilities”, “amenities”, “activities”, etc. Talk about confusing, we even saw one web site that labeled their home page “lobby.” Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Navigation elements do not need to jump, twirl, or flash in order to create interest in your site.

Meta Tags and all that Technical Stuff

There is some debate over the importance of Meta Tags, some search engines swear by them, some don’t. It only makes good ‘ole common-sense, however, to make sure that you have the proper tags attached to your site-they are free. Want to see your tags? It’s easy, go to Explorer and find your site, then click view, source.

There are various tags, such as Title Tags, Description Tags, Key Word Tags, etc. If there are tags entered, how well were they researched? How accurate are they? For most search engines, tags help them find your site. By the way, some Meta Tags should be different on each page of your site. There are several web sites which will allow you to see how many searches were performed, during the previous month, for each search term used. They will even suggest search words and phrases you might never have thought of. Don’t guess; you could be wrong.

What Does Your Site Say? (and how does it say it?)

The most common error on hotel web sites is poorly developed text. I can always recognize a site designed by a techie; the text usually looks like an after-thought. Text is the most important element of the site for two reasons; text is the only element that search engines can see, and second, text is what sells your hotel. Photos create interest, but text sells.

Realizing that most visitors will rarely read your entire site, it’s essential that the text is written in order of importance from top to bottom. The first two to three paragraphs should include as many key words/phrases as possible to facilitate searches. Be careful not to overdo it, you could be accused of spamming.

Home page text is obviously most critical. This is your opportunity to clarify your location, not simply your address and the most important selling features of the hotel. The location description should contain distances to room generators, such as attractions and businesses, etc.

Don’t forget to ask for business; you are writing sales text, not a brochure. The old concept of features and benefits still apply. Write as if you are talking to your visitors; forget ninety-dollar technical terms: talk plainly. Developing text should consume the most time and thought in designing your site.

A Booking Engine Could be Your Best Investment

For the life of me, I can’t think of a single reason why every independent hotel site shouldn’t have a booking engine attached. Independent hotels need a booking engine to gain equal footing with franchised hotels. Simple fact is that more and more users are booking reservations in real-time online. Email availability inquiries just don’t do it, anymore.

Not all booking engines are equal. Look for an engine that can be easily maintained; you will have to maintain rates and room inventory. Look for a well-designed engine, which is user-friendly and professionally designed. Look for an engine that charges a flat fee each month with no commissions or booking fees. Look for an engine that has a good technical staff to assist you.

Above all, don’t expect Internet users to be satisfied with email reservations on your site. We can only guess how many reservations you could be missing. For those of you, who think that a booking engine is financially out of reach, think again, the return on this minor investment is huge.

Collect and Use Your Web Site Data

There are many web site data collection software programs and basically they all collect just about the same information. You need to know your primary feeder-markets, primary referral sites, most productive search engines for your site, etc.

Make sure that your web master knows how to use this information to make changes to your site. There is no “perfect” web site; only those we continue to strive to make perfect. Software such as Google’s Analytics can show the popularity of each page on your site, so adjustments can be made. This service collects data from visitors to your web site. Yes, it’s affordable too; for now it’s free.

In the old days of print advertising, my favorite saying was “50% of all advertising is a waste of money; the problem is we don’t know which 50% it is.” This is not true with a web site; we can easily see what is productive and that which is not productive.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

In those good ‘ole days, we had to spend money to advertise our hotels, without knowing what the response would be, if any at all. Pay-per-click advertising is exactly as it appears; you only pay for those users who actually go to your web site.

Check it out; it could be a great investment if you find someone who knows how to use it properly and will maintain it for you. It could help you dominate your competition.

Develop a Link Strategy on your Site

Several search engines also use your site’s popularity to rank your site. They measure in-coming and out-going links. Links to attractions and relevant locations can be very useful. Use some caution, however, it helps to link to those sites that are most popular and never place out-going links on your home page.

Dollar for dollar, Internet website marketing represents the best-value sales tool available to hotels today. It still provides a great return-on-investment and is the great equalizer for Independent hotels. Don’t be satisfied with a site which looks attractive, but produces too few reservations

Neil Salerno, the Hotel Marketing Coach, advises hotels on how they can best use their websites to attract more guests. You may email him at NeilS@hotelmarketingcoach.com.

This post is by guest expert Neil Salerno.

There’s only one way to know whether or not your website is doing its job and, that is, to check the number of reservations it’s generating. If you have an independent hotel, this is an easy task; your booking engine’s analytics should tell you. If it’s franchised, it’s a little harder because most brands don’t want you to know how much your proprietary site is contributing to bookings. Many don’t want you to have a proprietary site at all.

Unfortunately, many franchises still discourage the use of proprietary websites and/or measuring your own site’s production. It’s a matter of self-preservation; they’re afraid you won’t need them, I guess. A big hooray for enlightened brands like Hilton and Preferred Hotels, which support the use of proprietary sites for their hotels. It makes common sense; proprietary sites can do what franchise sites cannot. Only a little more than 20% of searches are performed by brand name, anyway.

Is Your Website Producing Business? (Do you know?)

More and more hoteliers are turning to the Internet to sell their hotel rooms, food, beverages, and other facilities. But, the question is just how effective is that website to attract visitors and book business? It is amazing how many hoteliers have no idea whether or not their site is actually producing business and appear satisfied with only knowing how many visitors the site gets.

Would you hire a sales person and not measure how much business he or she books? Would you be satisfied just knowing how many people they talk to? I doubt it.

More than just the way they look, too many hotel sites are not designed to be found through generic search nor are they designed to drive reservations. In the last few years, many website designers have gravitated towards building websites for hotels. Unfortunately, many of them have no hands-on experience with hotels to understand how and why people choose a hotel online. It’s also sad that many of them don’t know how search engines work either.

Destination-focused Websites

Some hotel sites are nothing more than online brochures. A hotel online brochure is a site, which only covers information about the hotel itself; that makes it dead-in-the-water from a search standpoint. Someone who designs such a site, doesn’t understand how travelers use the Internet to find and book rooms.

Few people choose a hotel before choosing a destination. The fact is that most travelers first select a destination, attraction, or activity, then select a hotel within the scope of that destination. Hotel online brochures mention little, if any, information about the destination features nearby. Yet, this is the most important search findability information on your site. Selecting a hotel is most often the “second” decision made by travelers.

A Matter of Value

The location, not the address, of a hotel plays a very important role in the process of determining value. Most travelers do not choose a hotel by facilities and rates alone, it’s value that counts. How convenient the hotel’s location is, as compared to where they need or want to be, is their primary value decision.

It’s Also a Matter of Search Findability

Just designing a website that looks great is a small part of a site designer’s responsibility; almost any site designer can make an attractive site. You’ve read a lot about a site’s search ability or findability; to me, the most important part of any site. Many site designers appear to have been enlightened about the use of title and description meta tags; important search elements, but we still see a lack of understanding about keyword search tags.

Many search engines, like Google, search for keywords within the body text of each web page. This is why keywords are useless unless they have been incorporated within the site’s content. Remember, content is king. Researching and using popular keywords is essential to generic search. Generic search incorporates location attributes; trip types, such as meetings, weddings, etc; and popular attractions or activities.

Getting on page one of generic searches is an achievable goal for all hotels; the ultimate goal is to be within the first three generic search results. Pay-per-click advertising is a great tool for sponsored search results, but is too costly if generic search is ignored.

Competition has never been keener than it is today and the vast majority of travelers are using the Internet to decide where to go and where to stay. There is markedly less incidental travel since the recession started; making productive hotel websites more important than ever before.

Promoting your hotel through the Internet does not end with the publication of your website on the web, it only begins at that time. There are many hoteliers that are successfully marketing their hotels online through packaging, special promotions, holiday activities, and guest comments. Are you?

Neil Salerno, the Hotel Marketing Coach, advises hotels on how they can best use their websites to attract more guests. You may email him at NeilS@hotelmarketingcoach.com.

The other day I saw a tweet by Hollie Walker that caught my eye. She was promoting a new virtual tour of her hotel, but instead of the ubiquitous URL-shortcuts on Twitter, Hollie was able to include a full, descriptive URL. With Director of Sales & Marketing Brad Logsdon, the Hilton Anaheim has registered a separate domain for each of their web sales tools:

• HiltonAnaheimTour.com
• HiltonAnaheimVideo.com
• HiltonAnaheimBlog.com

It’s a brilliant idea: instead of explaining website navigation to potential guests, you can give them a simple, easy-to-remember address. With domain registration available for under $10, I’m surprised more hotels haven’t tried this.

I asked them a few questions about the strategy in an email:

How did you come up with the idea to host each tool on a separate domain?

We just completed a $70 million dollar renovation to our hotel and wanted to show it off.

What are some benefits?

The online virtual tour is a great tool for our sales department. Not a lot of people want to carry around stacks of paper and sales kits anymore. The virtual tour is great for answering client questions especially while on the phone with them. We can walk them through our hotel virtually and we’ve had great response from our clients.

Who developed the mini-sites for you?

We have an independent company that created the tour and video for us and they really showcase our hotel well.

How do you promote them?

We promote online through an array of social medias, our personal blog, and our email signature line. It is amazing how rapidly social media is growing!

This just may be the best $20-30 investment you can make for your web presence. What do you think?