When was the last time you bought food or coffee from a national chain instead of the independent local place you never visited before?

Chances are, you didn’t want to risk something unfamiliar. Going with the chain provided a consistent level of service and product you could expect.

The business did that by building and following systems. Every single time. Around the world. Procedures that specified down to the last detail how your experience was created.

Predictability is crucial for building loyalty. Nothing turns people off faster than experiencing great service the first time, only to be disappointed the second time.

Let me ask you: How do you provide predictable excellence?

(I’m looking to explore this subject a little deeper in the future. Do you know any great hotel operations experts I could talk with?)

A reader recently wrote me with this common dilemma:

We are a 15-room boutique hotel, that is a bit off of the main travel area – especially during the winter months. A 103-room resort recently opened close by, which has been extremely hard on us, not to say the least about the economy problems.  Now, we are on a no-budget marketing expense lockdown, heading into the off season, and trying to attract business. Any advice?

How can you run a marketing campaign with no budget?

I covered a little bit of this in my free hotel marketing article, and you need to be very creative and resourceful.

Zero Budget Marketing Strategy

* If you’re going to promote successfully with no budget, you’re going to need to use word of mouth: people talking about you.

* Get a strategy together for guest review sites like TripAdvisor. Reviews by your past guests gives you extra online exposure, and can encourage people to stay at your hotel. Read the marketing guidelines from TripAdvisor (and Qype) before getting started.

* Build a referral system that lets your guests spread the word for you

* Partner with other businesses to refer guests. Look for ‘piggyback’ marketing opportunities.

* Get involved with your community through volunteering. (Here’s how David McConnell does it)

* Avoid mass promotion. Instead, focus on a very small market and practice mass personalization. “The smaller the target, the bigger the bulls eye.”

Zero Budget Marketing Tactics

* Start blogging (Seriously, this works) Have your own employees write the blog – readers find that much more credible.

* Repurpose your existing content in ways that help you attract new guests

* Social media may be the answer. (And it may not be.) Understand that it often takes a lot of time to promote effectively on these ‘free’ websites. Track results and see if it’s worth your while.

* Plan an email marketing system for travel agents and corporate travel planners – people who could send you lots of business

* Look into pay-for-performance tools such as MeetingsBooker

I’ll bet you have more ideas – how do you create something with nothing?

Over the past few months, I’ve been collaborating with professional blog developer Adam Malseed to create blog marketing training resources for hotels and hospitality companies. Today, we’re happy to announce the release of our free e-book:

Download Blogging for Guests

In this 20 page guide, you’ll learn why blogs are essential for marketing today, and how they can increase your profits.

This week, I’m going to be blogging from blogforguests.com: sharing exclusive interviews and tips on how you can use blog marketing effectively. And then on Friday, we’re releasing another free resource that is getting some finishing touches right now.

So, I invite you to visit blogforguests.com during this week as I blog over there. Regular posting will resume again here shortly.

Business marketing blogger John Jantsch wrote why he thinks marketing should be visualized by an hourglass shape… not a funnel. Traditional sales and marketing has been explained by a funnel process: you put a lot of leads in the top, then filter them down until you make a few sales at the bottom.

But today, you should think of your sales and marketing efforts differently. It’s more like an hourglass. Yes, only a few people may ultimately buy from you, but the big difference is that your marketing efforts should never end once you have made the sale. Instead, that’s when your service strategies should kick in to deliver an excellent experience leading to word-of-mouth buzz.

Here’s my little illustration…

Read more…

Last May, The Langham Hotel in Hong Kong unwittingly created a firestorm of controversy on the internet. A series of three videos were produced to present the hotel as a safe haven for culture-shocked travelers. After the videos were released, they received a lot of negative criticism as “racist” and “offensive.” The videos were pulled from YouTube, and the hotel had to issue a formal apology.  But as this hotel learned the hard way, you can never completely erase negative buzz online.

Of course, the solution isn’t to avoid all forms of online interaction. Social media can serve as a powerful channel for your staff to serve guests.

The Internet marketing managers at the Roger Smith Hotel in New York City have developed a web presence that shows what’s possible when social media is done right. Through a dedicated website, blog, Facebook fan page, YouTube channel, Flickr photo stream, and a Twitter account with over 3,000 followers, the hotel is able to build loyalty and attract attention using social media.

And then there’s the vast majority of hotels that have either a nonexistent or a mediocre social media presence. The problem there is that their social media campaign is so boring it doesn’t attract any attention: negative or positive. They’re simply not on the radar.

This is why a social media policy is so important

A good social media policy serves as a roadmap for encouraging your staff to take part in promoting your hotel online…but also serves as a safeguard against tarnishing your brand’s reputation. It recognizes that social media is by definition a personality-powered platform. It encourages your staff to actively participate in spreading the word about your organization online.

It’s not so much a set of rules as it is a written philosophy to clarify your engagement strategy.

The two parts of a good social media policy

Read more…

With all the hype over social media during the past several years, e-mail has taken a backseat role in many ways.

That’s a shame. E-mail remains a very powerful marketing tool when used correctly. It can serve as the cornerstone of permission-based relationship marketing — the concept Seth Godin explained in his 1999 book Permission Marketing.

E-mail usually has a higher psychological value than other social media communication. If you are consistently delivering value in your messages people will listen to what you have to say. They may even take action.

This may sound like just theory, but in this article I will show you concrete examples of how hotels are using e-mail marketing to make money. We will look at ways your hotel can use email, how to build your list and create a campaign, benchmarks for testing, and finally some case studies of other hotels.

Part 1: Ways your hotel could use email

Use it as a direct response tool. When done correctly, e-mail allows you to communicate with laser-like focus to specific groups of people. This is one of the best ways your hotel can drive direct bookings.

Use it as an automated sales force. More than any other marketing tactic, email lends itself well to automation. You can create a powerful sales system, and then sit back and let it do the work for you. (At the end of this article, there is a case study of how the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado used this tactic to generate $245,000 in revenue from a $15,000 investment.)

Use it as a feedback and research tool. Many hotels send an automatic survey link to gather guest feedback. That’s a good start. But I think there are also other ways you can use e-mail to get feedback… not only on the guests stay, but also for new ideas and other market research. This depends on the type of list that you have developed, but the potential is there. Be creative about it.

Use it as a relationship building tool. You can send loyal guests special offers. You can notify them of new amenities or features. You can provide insider information. You can use email to give your organization some personality. The opportunities are endless for building top of mind awareness.

Use it to provide superior guest service. There is so much potential for hotels to use e-mail to improve their guests’ experience. A series of e-mails could be triggered whenever someone makes a reservation: leading up to the stay, and then following up after they leave. Putting everything on autopilot insures every guest has an excellent experience interacting with your hotel. It reduces staff busywork and the potential for errors.

Use email to communicate with other important stakeholders. Email communications don’t always have to be sent to guests. There are other groups you should focus an equal amount of time on.

Fairmont Hotels understands this. Nearly half of their email newsletters are written for and sent to other businesses. One newsletter goes to administrative assistants that handle corporate bookings. Another goes to travel agents. Reaching and working with these people plays a large role in generating revenue.

Thought: What business partners should you be communicating with?

Part 2: Plan your list building strategy

Even aside from the ethical considerations, getting the best results from your email promotional efforts requires you create a list organically and with the explicit permission of your prospects.

• You can include a signup form on your website. Just keep it short: email & first name is best.
• Your front desk staff can ask for addresses during check-in or check out
• You can leave a letter of invitation in their room

However you plan to collect email addresses, make sure there is a strong benefit for the person signing up.

The prospect of receiving generic updates from your hotel may or may not be enough. Exclusive discounts or preferred service is more compelling.

Read more…

Is fear holding your hotel back? Are you avoiding action because you’re afraid of failure?

David Meerman Scott recently wrote an excellent post on fear. I also have seen many hotel executives scared of trying new marketing that could benefit their hotel and their guests — simply because there are afraid.

Afraid that they’ve never done this before.

Afraid that it might make them look bad.

Afraid that they cannot track everything.

Progress and innovation are impossible unless we take calculated risks. Educate and prepare yourself, then go out and make things happen.

Stop letting fear prevent you and your organization from achieving success.

What’s holding you back? What are you afraid of?

[Photo credit: flikr]

The difference between Google and Twitter

After last week’s experiment, several months of testing various Twitter integration tactics, and reaching 100,000+ people in 36 hours, I’ve learned some interesting things.

Read more…

This post is by Hotel Marketing Strategies contributor Allan Simpson.

Potential leisure customers don’t need to buy a stay in a hotel to make them feel good.  There are lots of other things people can do.

Hotels find themselves in a straight fight with everyone else who has in interest in the “disposable income” people have.  As we all know – there isn’t so much income that’s disposable these days, but there’s still some out there.

It may be a straight fight, but it’s not a battle of equals.  This is true David and Goliath combat.  Your problem, as you sit there in your hotel wondering where the next booking is going to come from, is not just that Goliath is a lot bigger than you.  You are also faced with the fact that Goliath is a lot better informed about your target market.  He knows how to influence buying decisions in such a way that even the buyer is completely unaware of what’s going on.

You see, the buying decision is not just which hotel or which location?  There are competing products out there – everything from new cars to boxes of chocolates and they are considerably better at marketing then 99.9% of hotels.

They can say to your potential customers “buy me instead”…and they will obey.

If you want proof, go and invest in the new UK edition of Wired magazine.

There’s an article on page 98 which talks about the following marketing tactics:

• Brain-scan research
• Phone location mapping
• Eye tracking
• Store location mapping
• Face reading ads
• Personality profiling
• Sensory marketing
• Loyalty card linked TV ads

…and many more.

The businesses competing with you for “disposable income” are using techniques like these.  They are very sophisticated.  They invest in their marketing and they use clever people to make sales happen.  Contrast this with the attitude in the hotel industry.  What’s one of the first things hotels cut when things get tight?  Marketing.  In smaller hotels, the person responsible for marketing is just as likely to be found polishing cutlery as planning the next campaign.

There are things you, as a hotelier, can do to improve your online sales.  Outside of this article in Wired magazine, there are things like Persuasion Architecture for websites (I bet your webmaster hasn’t mentioned that one to you recently – or am I wrong?).  It takes effort and costs money to develop, but in exchange you get a good chance of significantly improved “look to book” ratios.

I recently came across a hotel with an astonishing look to book ratio of 76%.  In a world where hotels regard the “average” as around 2%, this is a wonderful example of taking marketing by the scruff of the neck and making it work.  This particular hotel manages its marketing, it has invested heavily over several years and it maintains good people to do the marketing and selling work.  On busy days sales people don’t polish teaspoons.  Instead sales people are given the scope to make sure every day is a busy day.  Just like your competitors from other industries do.

Some hotels will update the copy on their website every year whether they need to or not. Other hotels still think that a one-off advert with the business name as the headline and a picture of a restaurant chair will have people flocking to the door…  Of course, it doesn’t.

If you’re laughing at that thought because you know better and you’d never be caught publishing an advert with your hotel name as a headline (or even worse – a price), take a look at the travel section in any Sunday newspaper to see how many of your industry colleagues are making a dreadful mess of this.  Then laugh a bit more.

If you’re not prepared to make the effort with your marketing, if you’re not prepared to change the way you do things, you won’t get the results you need.

The real competitors you’re up against as an industry are those who sell what are called “substitute” products and services:  As I suggested above, anything from cars to chocolate bars.

These competitors are very, very good – and they’re making marketing work for them by treating it as seriously as they can afford to.  An important point here, is that they can’t afford not to – there is so much investment goes into developing cars and chocolate bars that to skimp on marketing doesn’t even cross their mind.  Reaching out to attract customers with an effective sales message is an essential part of the business process.  Marketing is another stage in their investment, necessary to stand a chance of a good return.

Come to think of it, somebody invested in your hotel.  It might have been you?

How good do you want to be?  How hard are you making your marketing investment work for you?

Your competitors are constantly enticing and encouraging people to buy.  What are you doing?

In a world where people selling competing products are looking right inside customers heads in order to get them to buy, it looks like the hotel industry has a little catching up to do.

Allan Simpson is a hotel copywriter with UK-based HotelSphere.

The past year has been quite the ride for me as managing director of Gradigio. My team and I have had the chance to work with some amazing people around the world; many of whom found us through this blog. As a way of giving back to you, my loyal readers, I’m proud to announce our…

Hotel Marketing Makeover Contest

We’re going to be giving one lucky winner a complete internet marketing makeover…for free. The total market value of these services will exceed $25,000US.

What’s included

Everything. At least, everything I know your hotel needs to be successful online.

Through one-on-one planning sessions, group strategy brainstorming, and some hard work on our part, we’ll help the winner:

• Understand the current market situation for their hotel
• Perform an in-depth analysis of their website and overall web presence
• Oversee website changes (as agreed)
• Initiate a complete organic search optimization campaign (strategy planning & implementation)
• Initiate a complete paid search (PPC) campaign: planning, setup & 3 months’ management
• Collaborate on publishing a rock-solid content network that attracts visitors
• Plan and launch a blog marketing campaign
• Build a powerful presence in social networking sites
• Plan and oversee a systematic social media outreach effort
• Plan and oversee a video marketing strategy
• Evaluate mobile distribution options
• Build a localized web presence in important foreign markets (as needed)
• …and anything else we think of along the way that will help you reach more people

This will take place over a period of several months, and the winner will emerge with a powerful web presence that helps them increase direct bookings and overall sales.

The 4 ways to enter this contest

1. Upload a video to YouTube or Google Video explaining why you want to improve your hotel marketing. Title it “Gradigio Hotel Marketing Makeover.”
2. Upload a set of your hotel photos to Flickr, and name the set “Gradigio Hotel Marketing Makeover”
3. Write a post on your hotel blog announcing this contest (or) linking to this blog’s homepage & letting people know about it
4. Email 5 friends in the hotel industry a simple invitation to this blog (ex: “Hey, I thought you might find this blog helpful: hotelmarketingstrategies.com…”)

Whichever method you choose, just let me know of your entry by sending a quick email to enter@hotelmarketingmakeover.com that includes:

• Your name (& email)
• Your hotel’s name
• A link to your entry (video, photos, etc)

How the winner will be chosen

The winner will be selected randomly from all valid entries sent to the address above, and will be announced exclusively in the August 2009 issue of our Hotel Marketing Ideas newsletter.

If you enter this contest, I highly recommend you signup for the newsletter

Important dates

We will accept entries starting now (July 1) until the end of this month (July 31).

Enter now

The contest entry details are pretty simple, and described above.

To re-read this on the official contest website, please visit:

Hotel Marketing Makeover.com