Aug
19
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...
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...
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