Hotel Marketing Podcast Episode 210 – Takeaways From Our Favorite Episodes of 2021
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Join us on today’s podcast to look back at the top episodes from 2021. If you missed these episodes, now’s the perfect time to catch up and hit the highlights:
Phil’s Top 3 Episodes of 2021:
- Episode 185 – How To Differentiate Your Hotel & Get A Leg Up On The Competition
- In this episode we discussed things that you can do on property to differentiate your hotel from your competitors.
- We discussed things like transforming under utilized interior and exterior spaces such as the hotel’s rooftop and gaining incremental revenue from the guests using these spaces by serving food and beverages.
- Just as important as creating these differentiators is promoting them via all possible channels to previous and potential guests.
- Episode 174 – 21 Tactical Hotel Marketing Things To Do In 2021
- Despite being released January 18, 2021, nearly all of the information provided in this episode will be applicable for 2022.
- Obviously, some of the COVID-related information will change based on how the world has progressed over the past year, but the sentiment remains the same.
- In this episode we covered technical items to evaluate on your website, your site’s content and SEO efforts, growing and communicating with your database, paid advertising tips and a few miscellaneous items.
- A couple of my key takeaways from this episode would be:
- Check that your analytics is working properly.
- Ensure everything is tagged correctly and easily identifiable and segmentable in your analytics system.
- Also, evaluate and update your paid advertising audiences.
- In this episode we mentioned limiting audiences to drive markets because of the state of the world in Jan 2021, but it’s still extremely important to know who to target currently and when it’s time to expand or condense the size of the audience you’re targeting with paid advertising.
- Check that your analytics is working properly.
- Episode 191: How To Analyze The Performance Of Display Demand Generation
- In this episode we covered demand generation opportunities and some tips on how to find new potential guests that may not be familiar with property.
- More importantly, we covered how you should judge the success of these types of campaigns.
- Too often we see hoteliers stop demand generation advertising efforts because they rarely result in direct ROAS.
- What we encouraged in this episode is shifting the mindset away from ROAS and looking at specific data points that hoteliers & hotel advertisers should reference to see if these efforts increased awareness and demand for the brand.
Pete’s Top 3 Episodes of 2021:
- Episode 202: Top 5 Hotel Operations Efforts That Support Marketing
- Not only did we get to hang out with Bruce Jordan in this episode, we also learned what we need to do to break down these silos that still exist between marketing and operations.
- Great communications between revenue management and marketing
- Better back-and-forth with your sales team
- Obtaining employee testimonials
- Finding out what your corporate guests need
- Leveraging your relationships with 3rd party vendors
- Not only did we get to hang out with Bruce Jordan in this episode, we also learned what we need to do to break down these silos that still exist between marketing and operations.
- Episode 198: Eight Marketing Strategies For Hotels With High Occupancy
- Any hotel with every room available can drive some form of occupancy, however it gets tougher as the field gets smaller and smaller. This episode discussed what can be done when you’re in the “red zone” of occupancy and have less than 20% left to go to full occupancy.
- Build your guest relationships
- Drive revenue through add-ons and on-property purchases
- Build demand for down the road
- Minimize your high-commission channels
- Refine your marketing to only the most lucrative avenues
- Any hotel with every room available can drive some form of occupancy, however it gets tougher as the field gets smaller and smaller. This episode discussed what can be done when you’re in the “red zone” of occupancy and have less than 20% left to go to full occupancy.
- Episode 183: Building Your Hotel’s Disaster Communications Plan
- This episode not only had a ton of downloads, it also helped hoteliers start planning in advance for troubling times. 2021 ended up being way better than we anticipated and that disaster communications plan really wasn’t needed, but it’s a great tool to have in the toolbox. Is now the time to dust it off and update?
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Newsaroos:
Check back for new and exciting news that will shock the hotel world!
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60 Seconds To Success:
2022 could be a tough year, so make it easy on yourself by automating what you can, specifically your data. Google’s Data Studio is by no means new, but we’re not seeing a lot of hoteliers adopting it. So, if you’re not already using data studio, it’s a fantastic tool that brings all your data into one place. Even without Data Studio, you can still set up automated dashboards in Google Analytics that will give you a snapshot of your key performance indicators. To go along with your automated reports, make sure your tagging is properly structured and you’re using the right UTM tags for Source, Medium, Campaign, etc. Tagging at the beginning of the year makes the rest of the year’s tracking WAY easier for you.
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Stat of the Week:
Stat of the Week:
Check back for new and exciting stats that will shock the hotel world!
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Submit your questions and topic ideas on Twitter to @_travelboom or info@travelboommarketing.com.
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