Ms. Payne

Sales & Marketing

Targeted Lifestyle Marketing Initiatives Can Increase Sales

By Anne Payne, CEO, BeDynamic

Engaging your guests through highly targeted, relevant destination content is critical to your bottom line. Susan Jones* recently spent a week visiting her favorite city. A theater buff and connoisseur of fine art and wine, Susan was looking forward to a week of taking in plays, visiting the latest gallery exhibits, and sampling the latest syrahs.

After booking her hotel room, she spent several days working to create an itinerary, which meant spending some time doing research to find out what shows were in town and which art exhibits had just opened. Yet, despite visits to numerous Web sites, calls to galleries and theaters, she had found just two new shows, was unable to find any new gallery exhibits, and still had not tracked down a restaurant that served that new syrah she'd been reading about.

"I assumed that by visiting Web sites of galleries and theaters, perusing city guides, or the local convention and visitors bureau, I would have more than enough information to put together my trip," says Susan. "This turned out not to be the case."

In fact, filling her itinerary proved more difficult than Susan could have imagined. Over and over again, she came across static information on events - in one case she found a promotion for a Fourth of July celebration - even though it was well into the Christmas season.

"At the very least, I thought once I arrived in town, I could have the hotel concierge help me develop an itinerary, but he was only able to point me to a few good places," lamented Susan. "I knew there was much more going on in the city, yet accessing the timely, relevant information I was after was nearly impossible."

While she enjoyed her visit, Susan also decided to cut her trip short - meaning hotel room nights Susan had previously booked went back unsold.

As more and more travelers like Susan emerge, hotels and venues are missing an opportunity to reach out and market to specific lifestyle interests - and also the opportunity to sell more hotel room nights.

Changing demographics and lifestyle attitudes influencing travel

According to Travel Industry Association of America (TIA)'s Travel Insights, volume 2 issue published in April 2006, changing demographics and lifestyle attitudes are playing a major role in the choice of activities Americans make while traveling. Traditionally, activities such as shopping and dining have topped Americans' travel lists, followed by entertainment, sightseeing, beach, nightlife, and theme parks - each with varying levels of interest based on consumer demographics. While these activities remain popular, TIA's ongoing survey TravelScope(R)/Directions(R) by DKS&A reveals major shifts by age group - with preferences often dictated by whether or not there are children in the household. For example: golf has become an increasingly popular activity for the 18 - 34 and 55 and older age brackets - or households without children, while adventure activities tend to be a lower preference for these groups. However, households with children tend to prefer vacations that include visits to theme parks, national or state parks or adventure sports.

TIA's Leisure Travel Planning: How Consumers Make Travel Decisions reveals even more interesting breakdowns of traveler attitudes. Research reveals that travelers seeking more sophisticated and interesting experiences are selecting cultural and heritage-based activities. Other segments of travelers seeking action-oriented trips are including activities such as specialty sports, adventure and even volunteer-driven activities like Habitat for Humanity volunteer trips are basing travel decisions based on these activities as part of their destination planning process.

Yet, how many hotels and travel suppliers are aware of these changing attitudes and proactively doing something about it?

The importance of lifestyle marketing

Given these shifts in consumer attitudes, lifestyle marketing is becoming more and more important for hotels to embrace to improve guest service and communication and increase sales of hotel room nights. Lifestyle marketing is highly targeted to the interests, attitudes, opinions, and way of life of consumers - connecting with how customers and potential customers live. To the travel industry, it means reaching out to target audiences and marketing events, venues and activities to your core audience. This can be category driven, such as the initiatives in Susan's case. If her hotel had access to the rich content about cultural activities that Susan had sought, it could have readily offered her a rich itinerary and likely would not have lost room nights. Or, had her hotel leveraged destination content with Susan's lifestyle interests, it could have proactively marketed to her, offering her a travel package that combined room nights with activities in the city - a win for Susan, the hotel, and the local organizations offering those activities.

Implementing lifestyle marketing programs

Because travelers follow predictable patterns in their planning, hotel marketers need to consider their visibility and presence in the places travelers would look to shop for destinations both online and offline. This may affect a wide range of marketing efforts including media placements, cooperative marketing agreements with destinations, online link strategies, use of referral websites that evaluate travel destinations, participation in blogs or podcasts that promote destination and lifestyle content.

To begin, you must first be actively collecting data about your guests since the only way you can effectively implement such a highly targeted program is to truly know your guests' preferences. The various CRM software packages available to the hotel industry can aid in this process once they are configured to captured lifestyle interests in addition to property and room preferences.

Use of database technology can help deliver top-notch service by taking valuable guest data about individual preferences and using that information to foster guest relationships and improve communication. For example, many CRM systems can be customized to incorporate traveler preferences as part of the transaction record, with the capability to capture information such as whether that traveler is a theater or wine enthusiast. Using this data, hotels can develop packages in conjunction with other businesses or organizations looking to promote their events and venues to target a particular guest segment. Whether a guest wants tickets to a show or dinner reservations, your hotel will have the tools in place to easily accommodate each guest's needs and anticipate future requests - as well as create campaigns for targeting specific guests for future promotions.

Once you have the resources in place to effectively track your guests' preferences, partner with your local convention and visitor's bureau - or better yet: implement destination content about your city into your marketing efforts. There are companies offering rich destination and lifestyle content, available as monthly or yearly subscriptions, that track and monitor up-to-the-minute information about what is happening in your city.

Additional opportunities to target market to your guests' individual lifestyles:

Embracing lifestyle marketing as part of your overall marketing efforts doesn't have to be rocket science. It all comes back to knowing your guest and creating customized, targeted programs to attract guests in the name of selling more room nights on a sustainable, ongoing basis.

*Not her real name

Anne Payne is CEO and co-founder for BeDynamic, a digital content management company. Anne leverages a comprehensive information management background with expertise in business development, project management, and sales to drive BeDynamic’s business strategy. Anne spent more than a decade at Nordstrom, where she served in roles ranging from sales to leading the development of systems to improve the customer experience. BeDynamic was launched to combone the best technology, quality information, and service with the need for business to build meaningful relationships with customers. Ms. Payne can be contacted at 425-641-0725 or annep@bedynamic.com Extended Bio...

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