I spent part of yesterday in the company of people who work for a government department.
They spoke, almost entirely, using acronyms - you know, using abbreviations instead of proper words. Hotels do it too, using expressions such as EPoS or GDS
I still have no idea what they were talking about. Mind you, neither did they.
It set me thinking about acronyms for marketing in hotels. It doesn't seem to matter if you sex it up by abbreviating it - many hoteliers try to avoid doing marketing properly. These people seem to view a £ not spent on marketing as a £ saved, instead of a £ invested.
Those same people then spend £1,000 on a painting for the lobby. Still, I suppose it's their train set, they can do what they like with it.
Anyway, let me introduce you to WSIBIFY.
Instead, people follow patterns of behaviour.
If your instructions fit with their normal pattern of behaviour, things will go fairly smoothly.
If your instructions are at odds with their normal pattern of behaviour you will struggle to get the result you want. Let me give you an example:
At the gym this morning, they were fixing some plumbing.
To let the plumber get into the ladies changing room to carry out the work, they swapped the changing rooms around. "Ladies" became "Mens" and vice versa.
So that we all knew about the change, the gym attendants had written the words, "Ladies" and "Men" on two bits of A4 paper and had stuck them to the changing room doors. Job done you would think. They certainly must have thought so...
...because they didn't mention it when I picked up my towel.
I nearly walked into the wrong changing rooms. Fortunately I noticed the sign, turned around and headed in the other direction.
To cut a long story short, at the end of my session I went for a shower, wrapped myself up in a towel and wandered, gently steaming, through the changing rooms towards my locker.
...to be greeted by three women!
Fortunately, they were better dressed then I was. Unfortunately, I seem to have grown beyond the size of towel that covers everything necessary all at the same time.
There was an awkward silence.
Eventually I broke it,
"Morning girls! Nice to see you!"
"Umm, is there not a sign on the door?"
The ladies were kind enough to stop staring (I'm not at my prettiest in the cold light of day) and trooped out towards the changing room entrance.
To my great relief, the sign declaring that this was now the "Mens" changing room was still there.
Red faces all round.
"We didn't see the sign, we just came in like we normally do!".
Still, we're all pals now.
My new friends were following their regular pattern of behaviour and demonstrated just how difficult it can be to make people change from that behaviour.
A sign isn't enough, you have to intervene, you have to declare what the new course of action is and show them what to do. People don't read signs, remember?
So it is with your website. People follow patterns of behaviour. Some of it they learned on other sites, Amazon or the BBC perhaps.
Most of it they developed themselves. Often, the behaviour pattern is influenced by words, but you've got to lead each and every visitor through the course of action you want them to take.
Get your website to match the general pattern of behaviour and you've struck gold.
If you manage this, you won't forget to tell me what it is, will you?
Instead, people follow patterns of behaviour.
If your instructions fit with their normal pattern of behaviour, things will go fairly smoothly.
If your instructions are at odds with their normal pattern of behaviour you will struggle to get the result you want. Let me give you an example:
At the gym this morning, they were fixing some plumbing.
To let the plumber get into the ladies changing room to carry out the work, they swapped the changing rooms around. "Ladies" became "Mens" and vice versa.
So that we all knew about the change, the gym attendants had written the words, "Ladies" and "Men" on two bits of A4 paper and had stuck them to the changing room doors. Job done you would think. They certainly must have thought so...
...because they didn't mention it when I picked up my towel.
I nearly walked into the wrong changing rooms. Fortunately I noticed the sign, turned around and headed in the other direction.
To cut a long story short, at the end of my session I went for a shower, wrapped myself up in a towel and wandered, gently steaming, through the changing rooms towards my locker.
...to be greeted by three women!
Fortunately, they were better dressed then I was. Unfortunately, I seem to have grown beyond the size of towel that covers everything necessary all at the same time.
There was an awkward silence.
Eventually I broke it,
"Morning girls! Nice to see you!"
"Umm, is there not a sign on the door?"
The ladies were kind enough to stop staring (I'm not at my prettiest in the cold light of day) and trooped out towards the changing room entrance.
To my great relief, the sign declaring that this was now the "Mens" changing room was still there.
Red faces all round.
"We didn't see the sign, we just came in like we normally do!".
Still, we're all pals now.
My new friends were following their regular pattern of behaviour and demonstrated just how difficult it can be to make people change from that behaviour.
A sign isn't enough, you have to intervene, you have to declare what the new course of action is and show them what to do. People don't read signs, remember?
So it is with your website. People follow patterns of behaviour. Some of it they learned on other sites, Amazon or the BBC perhaps.
Most of it they developed themselves. Often, the behaviour pattern is influenced by words, but you've got to lead each and every visitor through the course of action you want them to take.
Get your website to match the general pattern of behaviour and you've struck gold.
If you manage this, you won't forget to tell me what it is, will you?
There's been a lot of debate in HotelSphere about this, with two schools of thought on the subject.
As you might expect, there are two approaches:
The first takes the view that your prospects "self qualify" on the basis of price. You state your price, they decide if it's within their budget. If it is, they carry on reading about your offer, if it's not, they move on to somebody else's offer. Leading with a price saves an awful lot of messing about.
The second takes the view that there's nothing unique about a price. Every product has one. Leading with a price means you're not telling your prospects about they key benefits of your product or service. Price led customers are not loyal customers - if they come to you because your price was lowest, they'll leave you for someone elses (price).
Customers appear to be fickle.
You build websites and only 2% of them book anything.
You advertise in a newspaper and nobody remembers your business.
You send direct mail and they never open it.
Customers aren't fickle. They're overloaded.
There are too may people like you competing for their attention.
It's not that they don't want to buy from you - it's just that with all this noise, clutter and interference from everyone else, they can't immediately recall what it is you do and just how wonderful their experience could be.
There is an answer. It's called permission marketing.
You see, all that noise, clutter and interference is caused by normal marketing methods, reaching out to prospects and customers using "interruption" marketing (you have to grab their attention). Permission marketing is the way ahead - it's the way to cut through all the clutter and go direct to people who are truly interested in hearing what you've got to say.
Remember that blog entry that popped up on page 2?
It's now on page 5!! In just a few hours, a small change to the blog itself appears to have moved the listing down by three pages!
So, remind me how these SEO companies can guarantee a Google page one listing?
Google is obviously a fluid, turbulent place to list yor web pages.
These guaranteed seo guys must be really clever.........
Yeah, right.
The first chance I had to check progress today was just a few minutes ago.
This very blog (the article which is part 2 of the experiment) now lists near the bottom of page 2 on Google) - within 23 hours of the original listing.
The actual website article hasn't appeared yet. Maybe we need to wait until Google revisits the website? I see from my website stats that it's been "slurped" - let's see what happens when the sitemap.xml is next visited...
Page 1, position 1 on Google! For the search term "hotel website copy". It took less than one hour.
The social networking site Ecademy.com was used.
Some social networking websites can be very useful for getting listed fast because they are spidered regularly by the search engines. Google in particular seems to like Ecademy.
Now we'll just have to keep en eye on the Hotelsphere.co.uk listings!
Well, that's the article published. It's on both Ecademy and on HotelSphere. Let's see how long it takes to get noticed.
Just for good measure, here's the article again:
This article forms part of an experiment to find out how long it takes for different parts of the Internet to find and rank – this article!
It’s about hotel website copy. That is, the words you use to tell visitors to your website about your hotel.
Good hotel website copy follows simple rules and is all the more effective for them. For example:
Use short sentences.
Use short words – words with lots of syllables are hard to read.
Tell a story about your hotel with your website copy. People love to read stories. Do not underestimate the power of the story when it comes to website visitors remembering what you’ve told them.
Use lots of active verbs in your copy. The “action” sparks lots of connections in the readers’ emotions and imagination.
Talk to your visitor! Say “you” a lot.
Answer their primary question – if you don’t know what this is, you can always ask me…
Tell them what to do next.
The problem with most hotel website copy is that it talks all about the hotel and what it is, rather than what it does for the visitor.
You’ll find descriptions of décor, trouser presses, “tea and coffee making facilities” and all sorts of clichéd nonsense. All of it written for the hotelier, not for the visitor.
Your hotel website copy needs to sell the feeling and experience of staying in your hotel.
If you’d like to find out if your hotel website copy could be improved, you can ask for the free hotel website copycheck at HotelSphere.co.uk.
What is your website telling your visitors?
One of the features of specialising in copywriting and online selling for hotels, is that people who aren't clients (and in some cases have no intention of becoming one...) call up to "pick your brains" about the way their current supplier is performing.
Now, farbeit from me to cast doubt on the skills, services and products sold to hoteliers in the UK, but there does seem to be a bit of a gap between what is being provided and what could be provided. We'll leave aside any arguments about seo "snake oil" services for the moment. I hope you don't mind.
Today, we're going to consider a problem that was presented to me over the weekend. An hotelier emailed me yesterday asking for advice about getting his hotel listed on Google. The poor man felt that his seo "specialist" wasn't providing the service he could have been. The key phrases this chap wanted to use weren't difficult ones to work with. They weren't too short (anything short with "hotel" in it can be difficult, competition is strong for that keyword) and looked reasonable enough to me. Yet his advisor was telling him it would take three months to secure a page one listing.
Of course, most of you know that nobody can guarantee page one on Google. So I started thinking about how fast one can get a listing for a particular phrase. To find out, we need to run an experiment.
The HotelSphere website performs rather nicely for the search phrases "hotel website copywriter" and "hotel website copywriting". Both currently enjoy position 1, page 1 on Google.co.uk.
The challenge today, dear reader, is to secure a listing for the phrase "hotel website copy". For some reason, I've missed this out completely for HotelSphere. The best performance for the phrase is on my Ecademy listing, which appears on page 5 of Google. The HotelSphere website is effectively invisble for this phrase.
So today, I'm going to find out how long it takes for Google to find copy which has been designed with the phrase "hotel website copy" in mind.
There are a few things which need to be prepared, not least my lunch, so I'll be back soon.
Every now and again, companies run seminars to tell you all about their products/ how to do things/ how not to do things.
It's often worthwhile going along and taking a look - especially if the seminar is being run by other players in your market. It's good to know what the competition is up to.
Yesterday, I was at a seminar given by a company which advises people how to get more sales. That's of interest to me.
Sitting next to me was a very nice man who started his business last year. He does clever things with video cameras. He's been working hard on his marketing and reckoned he could be working smarter - that's why he was there.
The seminar droned on. Sorry to say, but it appeared the "consultants" had pulled out a marketing textbook and were reading the paragraph headlines to us. let me give you some examples.
We were told we had to,
"Establish competitive differentiation and positioning"
then we found that we should be,
"Developing and implementing a marketing programme"
My video camera friend started to look a little frustrated. He let out a big sigh and put his hand in the air...
"I haven't come all this way for you to tell me what the result is." he said,
"I need you to tell me how I'm going to get there - and what the hell is differentiation anyway?"
Several people around us murmured support.
The speaker gave him what might be described as a cold stare and told my new friend to "find him during the coffee break".
Video man slumped in his chair, leaned towards me and muttered, "I feel a right prat now..."
What a pity.
Anyone can tell you what you should be aiming for, anyone can tell you what you should be doing.
What is much, much harder is helping people to find out what their business needs in terms of real marketing work.
Before you start working out what you need, you need to understand what you've got, where you are and what you're doing NOW.
At HotelSphere, you can now take advantage of the Three Minute Marketing Audit from the Results Academy.
Find out where you are, then you can plot your course to where you need to be.
Little steps, not grand designs. That's the way to real sales improvement.
The challenges posed by the economic downturn always seperate good marketers from the rest.
It's a question of waking up, realising what's going on and understanding how your market segments will respond.
There is certainly going to be a recession. It's probably already here.
My information is that house prices will "reset" by at least 30%. I have no reason to believe this won't happen - this insight comes from a man who predicted the Northern Rock debacle as well as the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac problems. When he speaks - I pay attention.
Energy prices will not stabilise.
Governments will continue to tinker with the economy in the mistaken belief that they can fix it.
But it's not all bad news. You are not all doomed.
There are market segments out there who will be doing very nicely. They still have money to spend. They might be more discerning and they might not be willing to pay full price - but they're out there.
Good marketers will find them, attract them, embrace them and sell them stuff.
Bad marketers will blame the economy.
...they're all doomed.
Reach out to your prospects.
It's the part of your selling process that can easily be overlooked.
If you want people to make a booking to stay at your hotel, you need to introduce them to your sales process. "Reaching out" is stage one.
There are all sorts of ways you can reach out to your prospects: Direct mail; advertising; direct sales force; networking; email; seminars; newsletters and exhibitions are just a few examples.
You might have noticed there is no mention of your website in that list? It could form part of the list, if you define the work involved in making it appear on page 1 of Google for key phrases you have targeted carefully for a particular market. But for the purpose of today's chat, there are other things we need to talk about and we should think of your website as representing a platform on which the rest of your sales process is based. Is that ok?
The unfortunate thing about "reaching out" is that it uses up your resources. You only have two kinds of resource - time and money. The truth is you are going to have to use some time and/or some money to reach out to your prospects and customers. The more of each you can deploy, the more likely you are to be successful. However, if you deploy these resources unwisely, you can use them all up and still not achieve any results.
"Reaching out" takes a bit of preparation: Who do you want to reach out to? Where are they? Why should they want to buy from you? How do they decide to buy? What sort of messages are they going to respond to? How much are they going to spend? What are they going to expect?
Then you need to consider which media you're going to use to reach out.
Some hoteliers use advertising. This is expensive, you you'd think a lot of preparation would be in order. Here's a fact for you: Not all hotel adverts are great. In fact most of them are very poor.
Go and look at the wallpaper hotel adverts in the travel section of any Sunday newspaper and the typical advert will start with a headline of either the hotel name or the price, the body copy will be about either the price or the location and will be full of jargon or abbreviations - there will often be a picture squashed in there - and the whole lot sometimes finishes with a telephone number or a website address.
- No attention grabbing headline.
- Nothing unique to attract your interest (everyone has got a price, there's nothing clever about your price).
- No attempt made to appeal to your buying instincts.
- No effort made to tell you what you should do next - the telephone number is there of course, but why should anyone call it?
There's one small group of hotels advertising in a major Scottish Sunday newspaper which only two weeks ago changed its' headline from "Spring Breaks" to "Summer Breaks" - still at least they're not using their business name as an introduction.
People who have never visited before don't know your hotel from a hole in the ground. You need to take them by the hand and lead them through your selling process. You need to use small words and make everything as simple as possible.
Reaching out needs to be quickly followed by a process which embraces your prospects and introduces them to what your business can do for them.
There will be some more on this tomorrow...
Sitting huddled round the laptop this morning, waiting for the Google adwords report to appear on the screen, I asked them what they thought their sales conversion figures would be...
All eyes turned to the hotel owner.
"Oh, about average for the time of year" he said, almost apologetically.
This hotel is actually getting three sales for every hundred website visits.
"Ah! That's above average!" He beamed at me. "That's alright then!"
It all depends on how much business you need I suppose. It also depends on how much it costs to get those hundred people to visit your website.
Who knows what "average" really is anyway?
We already know that Google analytics, wonderful though it is, never returns the same statistics as the web stats package on our own servers. Who do you believe?
You could come up with any number and call it "average". Indeed, there is a school of thought which says that nobody really knows what "average" hotel sales conversion figures are.
You either make money from this route to market or you don't.
If 3 out of 100 is "good", we risk ignoring the reasons why the other 97 didn't make a booking.
You can blame the poor sales conversion on any number of factors. Today, my clients chose to blame it on "researchers" and "tyre kickers".
That's a bit unfair. Researchers are simply potential customers who haven't made a purchase yet, but they could make a commitment to you in another way, by joining your newsletter perhaps? Then at least you could help them with their research.
As for tyre kickers? Well, they found their way to your website as a result of your efforts to attract visitors. It probably cost you money to get them there. If somebody walked into your restaurant, would you let them wander about for a few minutes, kicking a few chairs and running their fingers along your shelves before watching them amble out the door?
No, I bet you wouldn't! You'd try to find out why they have walked in and you'd find out what they want. If you can sell them a meal or a drink, so much the better. They might just want to look at a copy of the menu.
They're not your customers yet, but they could be soon.
They're not here to kick your tyres, they're here to decide whether or not you're good enough to justify spending money on.
Your website helps these visitors to decide. This particular website is making 97 out of 100 visitors just walk away.
When you speak to "web" people, you can sometimes be overcome by their use of complicated phrases:
"database driven " (er, yes, I use that one a lot...  Guilty m'lud)
"dynamic" - gets applied to a lot of terms in an attempt to make them sound more interesting.
"optimised" - usually a kid-on to make you believe that something works better when nothing has actually been done to it at all (as in search engine optimisation or the Emperor's new clothes)
So today we're going to strike a blow for the rest of us. Use this term and watch the colour drain from the faces of your web design and techie people:
Ask them to give you a "sales driven website".
Better still, ask them for a "customer driven website".
Tell them you want something that can hold a conversation with your prospects and customers - something that will improve your online sales by "a lot" (you fill in the number or percentage you want).
They'll quote you a five figure sum and then beat a hasty retreat to their car.
...but what's wrong with wanting a website that actually sells? Your website is a marketing device isn't it? It's a route to market isn't it?
You deserve a website that has a sales process that actually converts visitors to paying customers.
Isn't that what you pay your money for?
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