Bringing It All Together

Like many other businesses, hotels are trying to keep up with changes in customer behavior brought on by a new business environment, modified customer behavior, and the new technologies that are empowering consumers like never before. The Great Recession of 2008-2010 caused many hotels to adapt their notions about pricing, customer retention, and accessibility to a new business paradigm. Those hotels that execute successful customer outreach and acquisition strategies will find themselves surviving and even thriving in the Age of Information.

The Good News is that robust and profitable customer outreach is easier, faster, and cheaper than ever before. The Bad News is that the same low cost threshold exists for your competitors. In this race, size matters less than speed, and speed matters only slightly less than quality of content. Agility, intense customer focus, and open content that reflects hotel values and brand identity will win every time over lower pricing, mass email delivery, and old school opaque pricing strategies. In the new paradigm, information wants to be free, and generally is not only free but is everywhere all the time.

In the mind of the modern consumer, your hotel exists as much online as it does in brick and mortar. What you do through every technological customer experience – from customer search, selection, prior to booking, purchasing, to pre-arrival, then onsite, in-room, and after departure - must reflect your guest experience as much as the Concierge, Bell staff, or Lobby décor convey your niche in the marketplace.

Traditionally - and in this case ‘tradition’ dates back only 12-15 years - hotels have separated their Marketing functions from their Information Technology functions.  Similarly, the roles of Catering banquet event orders, Banquet-AV setup, and Rooms management for conferences was once divided among two or sometimes three competing offices. The position of Conference Service Manager evolved as a reaction to customer demands for one authoritative source of pre-conference planning, thus replacing the old model of separate Catering, Banquet-AV, and Rooms contacts prior to group arrival.

Likewise, a Chief Marketing Technologist (CMT) is now needed by multi-property hotel companies to coordinate the many aspects of customer acquisition, customer retention, brand identity, messaging, distribution channel management, and the myriad technologies available by which to accomplish social media outreach, SEO/SEM maximization, special selling strategies for market segments, and drive property revenue growth.

The wall between IT and Marketing needs to come down, and as the function responsible for revenue, Marketing needs to lead this effort. Decisions need to be made quickly, the customer and the Internet are accessed 24/7/365, and so committees are not an answer. IT departments are protective of information and traditionally are very savvy about hardware and software, but less well equipped to handle customer outreach, market trend analysis, and craft successful selling strategies.

What is needed is a position at hotel companies that is similar to what many successful online retailers have created. At agile companies such as Backcountry.com, Zappos, American Eagle, Jetsetter, RueLaLa.com, where online sales are a high percentage or 100% of their business activity, these companies all have multi-layered customer outreach and selling strategies that are executed and adapted every day, every hour, based on the continual feedback of data mining-business intelligence-customer response-buying activity-customer feedback and repeat, repeat, repeat.

This means more than having a Facebook page and sending a Tweet to a couple of hundred followers. This means a continually updated process of customer engagement managed via the best technology available to accomplish the hotel’s goals.

The role of a CMT can be defined as being responsible for all of the following efforts as they relate to hotel marketing and the resources (human, technological, and budget) needed to deliver more revenue to hotels:

• Part 1: Develop and Execute Marketing Strategy together with CMO and local hotels
• Part 2: Conduct Market Research and establish Data Mining/Business Intelligence gathering
• Part 3: Online Advertising
• Part 4: Website and Strategies to maximize sales via the website
• Part 5: Search Engine Marketing and SEO maximization
• Part 6: Online Reputation Management and Customer Forums, Monitoring, and Rapid Response processes
• Part 7: Social Media and Special Markets, Promotions, or PR
• Part 8: Press and Media…dovetails with PR, Operations, and Marketing
• Part 9: Metrics and Measurement for Distribution Channels, RM interface, Customer Acquisition, and Online Revenue maximization
• Part 10: Service and Customer Response Management
• Part 11: Integration of Hotel property Guest Experience with data mining, business intelligence, and cross-selling.

Many hotels now perform some of these functions, nearly none of them perform all of them, and most of them do so via local efforts that are fragmented, that use different technologies that often are incompatible, and that are either outsourced or are dependent upon the presence of local employees who are quick to migrate to other opportunities.

The rapid growth of mobile devices also provides new opportunities to market to customers who are now tied to their tiny screens more than they are to their laptops or desktops. There are multiple recent studies of online travel buying behavior that point to mobile devices as the fastest growing portal into the hotel guest’s wallet. Developing and executing strategies to capture the mobile customer is no longer an option. It is a necessity if a hotel wants to gain market share or preserve its existing customer base.

So back to the Good News/Bad News. The cost barrier to developing and executing successful strategies is low, and some very efficient means of accessing and retaining customers are available to hotels. The speed with which a program can be implemented is also very rapid, a matter of weeks rather than months. Finding the right solution that integrates well with a hotel’s other systems and processes is the job of the CMT.

The reality is that it is extremely easy for you or your competitor to get started and get to market with the beginnings of either an SEM. SEO, or social media campaign. But it is more challenging to maximize the potential benefits of a successful SEO, SEM, or social media by bringing them into a hotel’s culture, technology systems, data mining-marketing systems, revenue management practices and revenue-generating mentality.

This is the critical mission for a CMT – to leverage the democratization and 24/7 accessibility of information to the hotel’s advantage in an ever-changing and complex ecosystem of multiple sales channels, hotels with different needs, rapidly evolving technology, and super-empowered yet fickle customers.

Ask yourself some of these questions:

·       Do you think your IT department can handle the marketing outreach to your customers?

·       How are your current marketing resources deployed?

·       Does your online marketing ROI generate growth in revenue or guest counts that can be traced to your online efforts?

·       What is your most effective marketing spend: online, traditional media, social media, special events, advertising, direct selling efforts?

·       Are your online marketing and business intelligence efforts focused on the customer, or merely on maintaining and updating your website?

·       Do you have committee meetings to decide how to attack the marketplace and review the best technology to use? Who is empowered to negotiate and purchase the technology or vendor or new hires to make your efforts effective?

·       Do you have an ongoing program of systems, training, and monitoring/metrics in place to determine if your efforts are successful?

·       Do you know which metrics you should use to determine success?

·       Who responds to online and searchable customer reviews such as those posted on Yelp, TripAdvisor, or in other online networks and communities? How do they respond? Do you have local property processes in place to react to negative customer reviews?

·       Do your online communities have a real-time booking functionality tied into your reservations system?

·       Can your small group or SMERF customers book their short-term business online in real-time, or do you force them to email you and continue to shop the competition?

·       And finally, who is in charge of all of this, and are they the right fit for the job?

The Chief Marketing Technologist should know the answers to these questions. Your CMT should provide the strategy and manage the vendors critical to online marketing efforts, and take responsibility for the leadership and consensus-building required to move forward among a group of hotels with differing markets and needs.

Importantly, the CMT should report to the CMO or in the absence of a CMO, the CEO or COO of the hotel company to define brand strategies and to have the credibility within the organization to effectively provide the necessary leadership of all online and technology marketing efforts.

The CMT needs to be technology-savvy, not in the sense of writing code but in being literate and up-to-date on all available technologies that could assist the hotels in business intelligence, data management and data mining, social networking communities, SEM/SEO strategies that work, and Intellectual Property (IP) issues and laws that impact guest information, privacy, and the hotels’ ability to use this data to obtain more revenue.

The CMT needs to comfortable with analysis, financial and marketing metrics, market research, budgetary management, revenue management, and business plan development.

At the same time, a CMT for Hotels needs to be intimately familiar with the operational challenges and tempo of busy hotels, the sales and marketing needs of the hotels, revenue management principles, advertising channels and the metrics for successful online advertising, and the financial drivers from both the hotel management and from ownership perspectives.

The successful CMT also needs to have strong relationship and negotiating skills for vendor management, excellent presentation and selling skills, the ability to distill complex concepts into simple value propositions for stakeholders, and the charisma and drive to lead teams of colleagues and third party vendors to success.

With so much at stake in the fast-changing online travel world, with so many viable technology solutions to choose from, and with great rewards achievable for the Quickest Quality Content to market, we have just one more question:

What are you waiting for?

posted by Tim Brooks, Founder & CEO of MeetingTrader