• Krista Pappas, Microsoft Bing Travel
• Gary Jackson, Google Travel
• Anne Payne, BeDynamic
• Yen Lee, Uptake

Yen Lee of Uptake – “The Long, Fat Tail of Search”

Numbers that really matter

• 73% of consumers search before they make a booking
• They search an average of 10 times
• 86% of leads are generated by organic search (there IS a free lunch)
• Typical travel search is 3.1 keywords
  • It’s becoming more specific: was ‘chicago’…then ‘chicago hotels’…now it may be ‘chicago family hotels’
  • (this means they give us more context now)
  • Always tailor unique content to consumer preferences

Krista Pappas of Microsoft – “Maximizing SEM In a Tough Travel Economy”

• Searchers want more than a URL – they want detailed information
• 5% of search sessions are over 30 minutes…and they account for 50% of time spent on search engines
• Bing is trying to become a ‘travel decision engine’ …experimenting with visual search
• Marketing lessons
  • Test, test, test ad copy variations
  • 18-24 age demographic favors travel metasearch sites
  • Focus on targeting short trips & “staycations”
    • use keywords like “national” “state park” “monuments”
• Keyword behavior is changing.
  • biggest increase in 7-term hotel-related searches
  • expand your keyword portfolios
• Invest in landing pages to support SEO & SEM efforts

Gary Jackson of Google – “Finding the Sophisticated Travel Buyer with Search”

• Economy may be improving, but consumers are now more value-savvy
• Consumers are clicking on more paid ads
• Analysts say search is the fastest-growing segment in online marketing
• Travel queries have increased 40% since 2008
• Search clicks to travel sites are up 35%
• Search funnel: Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Purchase
  • Purchase searches may include brand & a date (ex: royal caribbean europe cruise in 2010)
• Continually learn: use data to optimize
• They’re is a strong correlation between travelers and smart phone usage
• 48% of consumers willing to buy a hotel room via mobile (eMarketer)
• When doing SEO, tag every piece of content and make sure it’s current

Anne Payne of BeDynamic – “Actionable Entertainment Content”

• Aside from groceries, the first place consumers go to before buying a product is the internet
• Is your story useful to your customers?
  • What type of behavior are you trying to achieve?
  • What metrics are important to you? (things need to be measurable)
• Case studies
  • Victoria Inn, Core’s Landing, Rice Lake, Ontario
    • Challenge: no online reservation system, most bookings came from word of mouth
    • Solution: creating content centered around what their customers liked most
    • Results
      • Paid for campaign in 1-2 months
      • Quickly reached top of search results
  • Audley Travel (tour operator)
    • Challenge: most important key words ranked outside Google Top 100
    • Solution: content strategy targeted 1000′s of long tail keyword strings
    • Results: overall traffic increased 142% from search volume & rankings; 372 top-rankings for keywords
  • Radisson Edwardian Hotels (UK)
    • Challenge: PPC had only mediocre results; website lacked direction & was not able to communicate hotel benefits
    • Solution: create content that promoted the uniqueness of the property, local events & seasonal activities
    • Results: 2553% ROI in first month; 3x ROI in first seven months
• Be the source
• Be invaluable

Q&A with Panel

“We treat SEO and SEM very separately. It’s like there’s a wall between them.” – Google

“You cannot have a ‘set it and forget it’ approach to SEO. Constantly create fresh content.” – Microsoft

86% of travel leads come from SEO. 14% through PPC. Are you spending 5x the resources on SEO? – Yen Lee, Uptake

“See SEO as a profit center, not a cost center” – Yen Lee, Uptake

“The two huge things for 2010 will be mobile and local.” – Gary Jackson, Google

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.

Some hotel marketing functions are best kept in-house. For others, it’s more profitable to outsource them to an outside partner. Here are ten of the most profitable hotel internet marketing tasks to outsource and why.

1. Web Design

Why: Designing an effective hotel website requires time to create pages that are attractive, informative and visitor friendly. This requires a knowledge of the hotel industry in addition to technical knowledge and an understanding of usability guidelines.

2. Website Maintenance

Why: Building and managing a website are two different tasks. Website design gets a lot of attention, but upkeep is equally important. It’s important to constantly update your sites with the latest information.  Unless you have the technical expertise and time to do this in-house, it’s common to outsource this function.

3. Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Why: Sure, anyone can throw together a PPC campaign in a few hours, but it requires a lot of research and testing over the long term to do this well. A good agency will take time to understand your business needs, and build a campaign around them.

4. SEO Optimization

Why: Effective SEO can include website re-design, optimization and a strategic linking strategy – so it can be nice to have someone else manage this whole process for you.

5. Content Creation or Copywriting

Why: Many managers understand the benefits of content marketing, but struggle with writing it. Fortunately, there are many talented writers that would be happy do this for you. These people can be hired to help you write articles, website content, blog posts, email newsletters, and more.

6. Twitter

Why: Twitter can take a lot of time to use effectively. Some of my colleagues have achieved excellent results – both in positive buzz and in generating revenue – but they invest a lot of time. If you don’t have the time to participate, you may want to hire someone else to do it for you.

7. Online Reputation Management

Why: Again, this is a task that just takes a lot of time to do thoroughly. Hiring someone to monitor the web and reply as needed can be a worthwhile investment.

8. Video Production

Why: Hiring people with expertise in producing quality videos will help your company gain higher visibility in YouTube, Google Video Search, Blip.tv, and so on. A good video marketing team will understand your branding objectives, and produce video to accomplish them.

9. Mobile Phone Promotions

Why: This is one of the hottest new distribution channels, and hiring specialists in this area can help you gain a first-mover advantage. Hire someone else to begin your mobile promotions strategy, then learn and experiment as you go.

10. Website Optimization

Why: Website optimization is different from search optimization – it’s the process of adjusting your website so operates at peak sales performance. Hiring someone for this can have a big impact on your overall internet marketing success. A good website optimization specialist will have a good understanding of your hotel, how people buy online, and website conversion improvement.

The bottom line? Outsourcing individual components of your internet marketing campaign can reduce the burden of employing staff to perform those tasks in-house.  It can allow you to focus core business activities, spend more time on strategic planning, and less time on implementation.

Free by Chris Anderson

…which was literally free with my Audible account (and also available free on Google Books).

The whole concept of ‘free’ has something I’ve seen evolve online for years, and experimented with extensively during my time in the software industry. Chris’ research shed a lot of light on the subject, and got me thinking how this trend applies to hotel marketing. A few thoughts…

Any price puts up a barrier to adoption

Free and charging just 1 cent are completely different situations.

That goes two ways

If you’re trying to eliminate waste at an event, you could try charging something insignificant like $0.10 for snacks. That price has the economic impact of “0″ – but psychologically causes people will think twice. The very presence of any price stops people scooping up things they don’t need just because it’s free.

On the other hand, if you’re trying to spread a message, charging even an insignificant price will dramatically reduce the number of people you reach.

Give away something free to increase value elsewhere

The invitation-only TED conference recently started publishing video excerpts of talks from their events: for free. In just a few years, ticket prices have doubled, and attendance is up.

By distributing valuable information at no cost, they increased overall demand.

A practical implication of this could be to give every travel blogger a discounted stay at your hotel – regardless of their audience size. By obtaining a review from the “long tail of bloggers” you can reach niche audiences and build your web presence.

But…a hotel isn’t in the information business

Chris Anderson’s book is undoubtedly more applicable to businesses in the information and technology industries. The economics of giving away tangible products are much different than a digital product you can give away infinitely for free.

In hotel marketing, Free is best used to build fans

Publishing a lot of content and giving it away for free builds a base of fans that are likely to book a room or recommend you to their friends.

It’s what I call the concierge approach to hotel marketing.

Attention is the most precious commodity when everything is free

In a New York Times book review, Virginia Postrel explains:

“Unlike tangible commodities like T-shirts or plastics, most digital content doesn’t generate much new demand as its price falls toward zero. Even with no admission fee, videos, blog posts and online games soak up users’ time, and time has a hard limit. So as the supply of cheap content expands, it can’t simply fill ever-growing closets (or garbage dumps). Instead, the competition for time and attention becomes ever fiercer…”

The takeaway? Giving away content for free isn’t a sure-fire key to success. You need to be interesting.

The subtle difference between Free and free samples

Giving away samples is an old marketing tactic. The strategy of Free is more sustainable: the product itself is distributed at no cost, and revenue is collected through other sources.

Thought experiment: Could a hotel be free?

Throughout the book, Anderson shows examples of how innovative organizations are giving away everything from college courses (Stanford, MIT) to stock trades (Zecco) to flights (RyanAir) to cars (Better Place) to whole stores (SampleLab in Tokyo). In each of these cases, Free is a long-term sustainable model – not a marketing gimmick.

I know there are many practical issues with this, but could a hotel give away all its rooms for free…and still make a profit?

The real value in this thought experiment is that it provides ideas for building non-room revenues, which in turn give you flexibility to offer rock-solid value to your customers.

Exploring this concept a little deeper

• Priced to Sell by Malcolm Gladwell
• Malcolm is wrong by Seth Godin
• Free: It Works, It Cries, It Bites by Alex Iskold
• Read Free by Chris Anderson for free on Google Books

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

That’s the opening paragraph in a recent article by Wired that suggests blogging is dead.  Obsolete. More suited to 2004 than 2008.

I disagree.

Now, the author does raise a few valid points:

Writing a blog today isn’t the same as four years ago. This is true.  The blogosphere has become far more crowded than it used to be. Publishing a blog isn’t as unique as it once was, and you may not receive the same attention.

When blogging was young…posts quickly skyrocketed to the top of Google’s search results. Again, true.  I remember blogging during that time, and it was far more common for posts to achieve top rankings (along with the traffic and links that come with that).

Text-based websites aren’t where the buzz is anymore. Maybe, but buzz doesn’t always equal effectiveness. Besides, blogs should only be one part of your social media strategy and overall web presence.

These arguments against blogging fail to recognize how blogs can still be foundational to an effective hotel marketing plan.

The more useful information you publish, the larger your web presence will be. A blog is one of the most search-friendly publishing methods, and you can increase the number of visitors to your site by writing prolifically on useful topics.

Blogs provide the opportunity to be an authority of the subject you cover, whether it’s a destination or a niche in the hospitality industry.  Your writing is compiled into a library of knowledge that visitors can browse through, and you can re-use in future marketing material.

The popularity of social multimedia websites like Flickr and YouTube do not mean an end of blogging.  In fact, I recommend embedding photos and video content into your hotel blog, making it a destination resource.

So while blogging’s buzz factor may have worn off, its usefulness to a hotel marketer has not. (Just look at Bill Marriot, whose blog has brought in $5 million in additional revenue.)  This is just another reminder not to jump on the blogging bandwagon without carefully considering the advantages and disadvantages of hotel blogging.

This is great news for hotel marketers.   Potential guests will be more open to hearing how staying at your hotel will be a meaningful experience.

Let me ask you this: How will you take advantage of this shift in priorities?

The budget hotel, which caters to the young, hip crowd, offers many high-tech amenities: iPod docking stations, free WiFi, and flat-screen TVs.  But its PodCulture forum is most innovative.

After registering, guests are sent an email with a code that allows them to register on the forum. Once there, they can begin communicating with other guests under categories such as “Eat With Me” and “Shop With Me.”

The full story from The Globe and Mail contains even more information on the broader trend of making your hotel a destination.  I’d recommend you take a moment to read it.

As expected, the travel industry has taken a hit with this news.  A new survey by Travelocity showed that 66% of respondents’ travel plans are affected.  Many marketing professionals in hospitality are worried about how they can weather this storm.

But let’s take a step back and look at the big picture.

With all the gloom and doom going around, there remain some good opportunities for the savvy hotel marketer.

Life will still go on.  Business travel will still take place.  Weddings will still happen.  People will still take vacations, even if they tend to stay closer to home now.

You now have the opportunity to gain market leadership in this environment.  While everyone else is cutting back on marketing, you can gain market share by consistently running a smart promotions strategy.

Now is the time to increase your marketing, not decrease it.

Of course, you’ll have to play smarter.  The same old tactics and campaign may no longer be sustainable.  You’ll need to think outside the box, and develop a campaign that takes into consideration new trends in media and travel.

How can you play smarter?  That’s the subject of this series, and I’ll be showing you specific tactics in the days ahead.

Let me ask you this: how has your hotel been affected by the economy?