The Hotel Marketing Blog from HotelSphere

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.

Posted by HotelBlogger

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.

Posted by HotelBlogger

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...

Posted by HotelBlogger

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.

Posted by HotelBlogger

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?

Posted by HotelBlogger

I was sad to read an article on FT.com this week which noted the demise of that TV advert Clarion Call exhorting tourists to visit Australia.

The article went on a bit about the quality of the series of adverts - "ham acting" and several other criticisms were levelled at the creators. Shame really, I rather liked the ads. Mind you, I didn't actually go to Australia, but that's hardly the Australian tourist boards' fault. The fact that there were lots of other people who - like me - stayed on the top half of the globe, probably is...

It seems that tourism around the world is waking up to the fact that we are not all the same.

I'm delighted! At last we can expect a little bit of segmentation with properly designed messages for carefully researched customers.

You can do this stuff with your website you know. You can tailor your marketing messages to particular target markets. It means learning how each market segment thinks, researches, makes purchase decisions and above all, learning how they communicate.

Learn the words your potential customers use when they speak to each other and use them on your website.

It's not new is it? If you want to sell to the French, it's a good idea to write a French language version of your website.

So it is with market segments.

Posted by HotelBlogger