The Dubai Mall is the largest shopping mall in the world. Among its 1,200 stores, you can find pretty much anything from anywhere.  It’s possible to spend all day shopping and only be scratching the surface. (I speak from experience – I’m writing this from a cafe here to rest my feet.)

The choice at this mall is overwhelming. But there’s one store – The White Company – that narrows the selection by selling in one color only.

It doesn’t matter if they find a really cool product in green. It doesn’t matter if the customer wants a widget in blue. Even if yellow is the next big thing, they won’t stock it.

They only sell products colored white.

Limits are essential for building a brand. Constraints make the buying decision easier, and define what you stand for.

Do you clearly state what you offer and who your customer is?

Do you make it clear what you do NOT offer and who your customer is NOT?

Blurring this line in an attempt to add revenue will confuse how people see you among the competition.

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…

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]

Many hotels are working on their marketing budgets right now. I have received multiple requests for advice on budgeting this week, and wanted to put together this practical, straightforward guide. We will examine the biggest factors to consider when planning your Internet marketing budget, 11 major categories hotels should budget for, and finally 3 basic hotel budgeting approaches.

This advice comes from my own real-world experience as the marketing manager or consultant for dozens of leading organizations around the world — and also as the owner of three companies. When your own company’s money is on the line, you tend to take a very pragmatic approach to marketing, and that’s what I intend to do in this article.

Factors to consider while planning your hotel marketing budget

Many industry professionals recommend you start with the industry average marketing budget. I disagree. Every business success I’ve been involved with has been contrarian. If you spend your resources like everyone else, you’ll get average results. Breakthrough campaigns often require unusual approaches. You decide what works for you.

Be aware of industry standards, but don’t feel bound by them. It can be helpful to know the average prices hotels are paying for individual marketing tactics — if only for a point of reference.

Start with an internet marketing plan for the year. Sounds simple, but true. If you don’t know how you want to spend your money, calculating the amount will be extremely difficult! Some tactics to include are explained below.

A good budget will take into mind past results your company experienced — but will also realize that things change. What worked five years ago may not work over the next five years.

Remember your primary business objective. Do you want more overall sales, to build your brand, or consolidate your profits? Each requires a different approach, which we’ll cover later.

Know your marketing priorities. Separate the “musts” from the “wants.” So many things can happen along the way that cause you to deviate from a plan made months ago. Having priorities ensures the essential gets done.

Identify which marketing strategies you don’t need to implement. There are a seemingly unlimited number of marketing tactics you could try, so identifying the non-essential helps you focus and cut costs. Every hotel doesn’t need to do every tactic out there.

Be aware of trends, and budget appropriately. Some organizations on annual budget cycles approve money for trends way too late — and missed the boat. Make sure the resources that you’re dedicating to a tactic or strategy will be valid 1, 2, 5 years from now. You don’t want to outdate yourself.

I personally recommend most hotels abandon all traditional marketing and advertising in favor of any Internet focused strategy: 75% of budget for web-based communications, 25% for PR. You can discount this advice as someone who has worked in web marketing his entire career, but the numbers don’t lie. In the campaigns that I’ve been involved in, we have achieved phenomenal return on investment… and received media coverage an organization our size shouldn’t normally be entitled to.

Separate your marketing costs into two categories. Initial development costs include research and strategy development, website design, content creation, marketing systems set up. Ongoing expenses and maintenance include e-mail marketing, pay per click advertising, search visibility improvement, website maintenance and development, consulting fees, and analytics and tracking analysis.

Ensure that you are sufficiently capitalized. Many marketing tactics will take several months to show results, and often the best results are obtained by sticking with your marketing plan month after month — for the next 12 months. You may have to adjust your marketing plan to enable this, but make sure your budget is sufficient to accommodate consistent execution.

Be aware that your most important marketing investments may not even be under the traditional ‘marketing’ budget category. For example, introducing a fabulous collection of guest amenities can cause your guests to promote your hotel for you. At the end of the day, your guest experience is the marketing. Money you spend to create an amazing guest experience at your hotel has some of best ROI.

Finally, think of your marketing program as an investment. If you are promoting properly, every dollar that you spend on marketing will come back to you many times over. Good hotel marketing budgets are never an expense, and it’s important we remember this.

11 most important hotel marketing budget categories

Read more…

Over the past few months, I’ve seen hotels creatively use Facebook to successfully attract new guests and connect with past ones. This has led me to recommend a new situational approach to using Facebook: what works for some hospitality companies may not work for others. It seems you must have clear goals for being on the site before you can succeed.

The Pros & Cons of using Facebook

Pros

• It can serve as a rich media sharing platform for collecting and distributing photos and video of special events at your hotel
• You can extend your page functionality through various applications
• It can serve as a good social media hub, sharing content from various sites around the web
• The new enhanced wall feature encourages interactivity and creates a sort of “lifestream” around your hotel
• Event promotion seems to be something that works very well – considering how people tend to use Facebook
• You can rally people around a cause
• Access to statistics has improved over the past few months, making it easier to track metrics

Cons

• Your potential guests may not be using it
• Your guests may not want to use it to interact with a hotel
• People may even get annoyed by receiving marketing messages from a hotel on Facebook

“I thought Beverly Hilton was an old girlfriend, but then realized I’d been friended by a hotel. #HiltonFail” @simmonet

But perhaps the most powerful argument I hear against using Facebook is that is doesn’t reach people in the decision making stage of the travel planning process. This is something you must consider carefully if you are starting a brand-new Internet marketing campaign with limited resources. You may get a higher return on investment by focusing on online reputation building and search marketing.

Should your hotel have a Facebook presence?

Here are some questions to ask yourself 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]

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.

I’m trying a little experiment on Twitter.

For the next week or so, I’ll be publishing excerpts from my blog posts as tweets using Tweetlater. The idea? To provide value and complement the myriad of links people (including myself) are dumping into Twitter.

What do you think: do you like this idea? Would you find it useful, or is it just duplicating the content here on the blog?

Photo credit: visualpanic

While planning for a recent trip, I found myself conducting dozens of web searches to find information on my destination. These included:

• Flight information (Kayak.com)
• Airport transportation options (WikiTravel)
• The city’s best design hotels
• Guest reviews & photos of those hotels
• Best ways to get around the city (taxi, public transport, etc)
• Can’t-miss boutiques &  galleries
• Places to eat (Yelp)
• Special events going on
• Typical climate for that time of year (clothes to bring, etc)
• Best places with WiFi I can work from (bonus points if I can drink something caffeinated)
• Running paths for my marathon training (Google Maps & MapMyRun.com)
• Best places to photograph (Flickr is my favorite tool here)
• Interesting day-trips from the city

Keyword research tools confirmed my travel planning behavior is very typical. Every day, hundreds of questions are being typed into search engines to find this type of information about the city you’re in.

Your potential guests are turning to the web for information

Many online travel planning resources aren’t direct competitors, but relying on them to educate your guests is risky.  I see a huge opportunity for hotels to build their own destination information portals with a concierge mindset.

Are your potential guests going to find what they need from you or another website?

The web makes providing information easier

Before the web, it was difficult – if not impossible – for an individual hotel to publish a substantial amount of local information. Production costs would have been prohibitive, and distribution very difficult.

Now with just a simple website, you can share useful information very efficiently.

An example of proactive service

The Witt Istanbul Suites publishes detailed information on transportation options for getting around Istanbul:

Witt Istanbul Taxi Information

Since many of this hotel’s guests come from the UK and other English-speaking countries, the owner wanted to ensure the guests feel as comfortable as possible. To help overcome any language barrier, they offer printable directions in Turkish for the taxi driver:

Printable directions in Turkish

Providing this type of information is brilliant for two reasons:

• It helps guests to feel comfortable before they arrive
• It reduces the workload for your hotel service staff

Customer service 2.0

Instead of calling you directly with questions, tech-savvy travelers may prefer to communicate using the web. Twitter provides one opportunity to answer questions in real time. On the corporate level, we see Hyatt offering concierge services through a dedicated Twitter account.

HyattConcierge on Twitter

With just 131 updates, I assume many of their support requests take place via direct message (for privacy reasons). It’s not a bad start.

Actively engaging potential guests

My only complaint with @HyattConcierge? In my opinion, it’s not a huge improvement over phone or email support.

The real power of Twitter is in offering real-time service to people who aren’t aware of you (yet). Twitter search allows you to reach out to people needing help, and provide useful advice and information.

Independent hotels can do this successfully. A poster child of hotel social media success – New York’s Roger Smith Hotel – actively participates with guests to build their online fanbase.

@RSHotel Twitter Stream

Since this is a relatively new medium for customer service, little things like this gain a lot of attention and build a great reputation.

The best approach: Useful information + Real time support

Ultimately, hotels that want to use this ‘concierge approach’ to their marketing should use both approaches:

1. Build an accessible database of useful, insider information on their destination
2. Monitor real-time communications channels for opportunities to serve

It’s time to throw away the silver bullet

As marketers, we can fall for the trap of thinking all that’s needed is just one more tactic. One little trick that will cause sales to climb dramatically and eliminate our competition.

There is no secret

Great reputations are built around helping other people. It drives positive word of mouth – online and off – which ultimately brings you more guests.

It’s not unique or even particularly clever. But it works, and that’s what matters.

All the clever marketing in the world is useless if potential guests abandon you out of frustration. Hotels that figure out how to combine excellent customer service with new technology are the ones that will succeed online.

3 questions to ask yourself

• “What questions do I have when planning my own trips?”
• “What content could we publish that answers these questions for our destination?”
• “How can we get this information in front of the people that are looking for it?”