Mr. Walsh

Social Media & PR

Connecting Search and Social Marketing

By Richard Walsh, Vice President of Business Development, Lodging Interactive

While hospitality marketing will continue to evolve in the coming months and years, there is one constant and that is the value of interconnecting each marketing initiative. In their order of importance, the marketing initiatives that will determine your online success are: website, search, reputation, social, online advertising, mobile website and print. To produce the best possible returns on your marketing investments, you need to apply QR codes and print to reach out to new prospects and SMS text messaging to pull in prospects from your past guests, website visitors, social networks and followers.

Your website is your storefront and it need to remain clean, fresh and informative. Your content should be written with your target market(s) in mind and edited accordingly. Your site should also prompt visitors to navigate through your pages. Make your toolbar page descriptions easy to understand, keep your booking widget along with your toll-free phone number on all pages, offer onsite guest reviews and avoid widgets or links that will take your site visitor off of your website. A photo gallery and a video to show the property features are great, but keep in mind how if you use flash it may inhibit certain consumer access methods. You want your website to be accessible for all prospects including those who have slower mobile access, weaker computer connections and other connection considerations.

Plan to upgrade or replace your website every two to three years. This is necessary to have the latest coding and to be compatible with all access channels. Keep your connecting widgets current and make sure there are no broken links. Include your own guest review system into your website for better reputation management direct guest communications. Remember: social engagement widgets should not take visitors to anther website.

The core optimization of your website is essential and it requires frequent submissions to the leading search engines, unique meta title, meta description and meta keywords for each page. Keeping the keywords in your source code in synch with text on the webpage is also important. Optimizing the site will require some ongoing changes, as the search engines implement new methods of searching and prioritizing your content. So, clearly, this is not a one-time operation.

Search marketing is the most important aspect of your online marketing initiatives and how you connect these initiatives will determine how you connect with prospective customers. Content must be refreshed frequently; your optimized content should connect all channels including your website, blog, guest reviews, social and mobile. A blog is an advantage because it provides easy frequent optimized releases that are preferred by the search engine that are hungry for fresh content. Your goal is to relate your hotel website, specials and services to your location, value, local events, local attractions and other demand drivers relevant to your market. Consumer search phrases will continue to grow and will relate to more than your hotel’s name and location and this will require major changes on the large database driven systems.

The websites with database driven systems that accommodate multiple hotels located in a widespread set of diverse markets, are OK as brand-driven directories, but not so much for more local or geo-driven requests and searches. The hotel’s Places profile content and its incoming links are also important for effective search optimization. Keep the profile information current, and where possible, negotiate incoming links. Purchasing links or adding links that do not relate to the hotel or local demand drivers may be considered black-hat marketing practices and this can hurt your search rankings and even result in restrictions from the search engine provider.

Your online reputation is exactly that, it is your reputation, and your public online reputation will determine a major share of your sales. Having a good ranking in your market on the OTA and social websites is great, but your focus should be on how you can benefit from your reputation and generate business. Effective reputation management will utilize the trends found in consumer scoring and reviews of services to address internal operations. Finally, take advantage of the opportunity for a public response. In addition to a brief apology or thank you, you need to focus on the story in the review and create a social engagement that will produce results that attract prospective customers.

Social marketing is interconnects the links that create an effective combination of push and pull marketing. This mix will improve guest relations, attract new website visitors and create more sales opportunities. For example, your Facebook presence is a push with pages to promote specials, reviews, location and increase your likes and follower network. Your wall posts and tweets are the pull initiative that will generate consumer comments and chatter to help personalize your social presence. Re-tweets by your Twitter followers will expand your market penetration and tie your hotel’s search presence to local demand drivers. A social blog is essential for its optimized blog posts that facilitate an essential push for quicker and more effective search presence. Most important is how you respond to guest reviews and I mean all reviews. This is also a pull marketing effort that will pay off with better guest relations, word of mouth advertising and provoke interest that will produce visitors to your website.

For the average hotel, online advertising can be an expensive investment and is often not the best return on your investment. The one exception is a well managed pay per click campaign. Unlike those ad channels where you are required to make price concessions or pay higher commissions, pay per click assures you of a website visitor and without any pricing concessions. Other options such as the OTAs, location based discounts and remarketing ads may work for brand awareness and large businesses with large ad budgets, but there are better alternatives for the average hotel.

Have you created a unique mobile website, yet? It continues to surprise me how slow the hospitality industry is to adapt to the fastest growing marketing channel available and one that is so integrated with travel. Mobile does have its own set of marketing methods, but the one most important is that you have a user friendly website. This is a site that is visible and easy to navigate on a two inch screen.

Last, and still a consideration, is the need to make a limited form of print materials available for local marketing and on-site incentives. Brand directories still have a user base and a property brochure is helpful. Other print opportunities include tent cards and signs that offer QR codes for guests to use their mobile phones to provide reviews or to access immediate special offers or to opt-in for future SMS text messages about promotions and special offers. Always invite guests to opt-in for text messages. Invite them with QR codes on their invoice or other materials to come to your website and complete a guest review or a comment card. How you build the relationship for word-of-mouth advertising and receive guest feedback that can help you improve your services is important to marketing success.

In summary, a casual or adhoc approach to your online marketing is not worth your time or effort and it may hurt your business in the end. Effective online marketing demands time, the right resources and a certain skill. Emphasis has to be on search rankings, and this is a result of how you optimize and update all of the channels connecting your search and social marketing aspects. What you know about your hotel or even your local market is not as important as knowing how to communicate online with the best possible push and pull marketing techniques with a controlled optimization of your content.

When it comes to effective online marketing, hotels and resorts have their own unique issues, but overall they are not really much different from other service businesses especially in regard to the value of planning, implementation, maintenance and measuring results. The bottom line is, of course, the ultimate measure and knowing where to find the ROI is the key. Your best measure of your online marketing ROI is found in your short-term investment and the quality of your Return on Engagement (ROE). The ROE is measured in the size of your social networks, credibility of your network followers, re-tweets, reviews and service trends, likes, Google +1 and other consumer responses and comments. How you engage with consumers in online social channels will determine your success. The right engagement will result in a strong, connected search and social marketing plan. As your plan is properly implemented, maintained and measured, you will see the Return on Investment you expect. Connect your marketing initiatives effectively and you will connect with more prospects.

Mr. Walsh is currently the Vice President of Business Development for Lodging Interactive, a leading hospitality Internet and social media marketing agency. He lives in the Atlanta GA area and enjoys local sports teams, tennis, skiing and researching local historical sites. Previously, Mr. Walsh was President of Amadeus USA (a global distribution system), Wizcom (technology division of Avis Auto Rental) and founder and president of Innovata (travel content aggregator). Richard was the founder of CASMA, the Computerized Airline Sales & Marketing Association a global association of airlines and related marketing services. Mr. Walsh can be contacted at rjwalsh@lodginginteractive.com or 770-533-9787 Extended Bio...

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