Hospitality Marketing Podcast Show 238

Hospitality Marketing Podcast Show 238 Transcripts (English US)

(Announcer) –Welcome to this week in Hospitality Marketing. The podcast show number 238 with your host, Loren Gray. Hello, everyone, and welcome to hospitality marketing in the podcast I’m your host, Loren Gray, and this is episode number 238. So each week we spent around 20 to 30 minutes sharing the most interesting tools, news and techniques being used in marketing for the hospitality industry. We also do a quick recap of our weekly live video show this week in Hospitality Marketing, which also airs every Friday at 11:30 a.m. Eastern US time so that lets get started.

(Announcer) — And now today’s new resource tool okay to start things out, we always start with a tool. And given current circumstances that we’ll talk about when we do is discuss this week’s top news feature. I’d like to talk about a tool that has been open and available quite readily and is on one of the largest platforms we can use for our marketing strategies. And that’s Facebook. More specifically, Facebook insights. Now there’s a reason that I’m bringing this to our attention today because, of course, we’re dealing with different economies now, and for those who haven’t been, is strategic in their usage of how they interpret their guests and their personas and the demographics that they’re reaching.

This is an excellent tool to begin to understand the people that are engaging with your content. Now, Facebook insights isn’t the only tool, but the two will feature today because we can go on and on and on. There’s multiple platforms that give you Maura Maura Insights will address some of them in our discussion of how to use the tool in their techniques discussion, living in a few minutes. But Facebook insides is unique because it has some of the most robust, if not the most robust interpretation of your demographics that you’re engaging your Facebook page.

Now, if you don’t have a large audience, of course, that could be a very skewed perspective, because if you’re not doing active quality engagement with your Facebook page, if you’re not just doing anything more than announcements of events or announcements of rates and dates, first off you’re using the platform totally wrong. Secondly, you’re not really gonna get an engagement, little from people that’s gonna be relative to what you really need to understand them to be so. This is a blending of dialoguing with your front office. You’ve drunk task as to whom there seeing what they historically have seen during different times of the year because it’s not the same person every year, obviously or same type of people and even the same person.

That may come back now. But he may not be coming back for the same reason. And we’ve had that discussion on the podcast and live show many times that each traveler is different based on why they’re traveling. If I’m on a business trip for myself, comparative, I’m asking my wife to attend with me and doing something on a transient level or blending work with transient travel or with family. There’s lots of reasons. Medical travel. There’s a variety of reasons why people do travel and knowing what their travel interests are and the seasonality of that travel demand.

Obviously, we have what’s called in season off season. We have event driven activities. We have cyclic things that happen. All those things drive different types of people traveling of Facebook. Insights is a great tool for helping you define some of this. Now the predication to this. If you haven’t already done that, this is the time to do. It will explain that a little later in the podcast as well. If you haven’t created a Facebook pixel and put it onto your website and started tracking what pages there touching and for how long and for what reason where they from when they do that and all the rage in that Facebook is aware of their Facebook users, then you need to do that immediately.

You need to start garnering that information to begin to use it effectively going forward. If you already have set this up, congratulations. You have a depth of data that you can begin to use now. That is not the only inside value proposition. Facebook isn’t just limited in your perspective of insights to those who touch your page. You can literally, on Facebook insights, which the link will be on our show notes so you can go on directly to Facebook insights to see it. Hopefully you have a business manager.

If not, then just simply going to the insights tab on your page for your business and you’ll give you the same perspective. But it’s not as robust as a tool in interpreting, other than just the traffic to your website. So again, for those, make sure you have Facebook pistol pixel. If you have not developed when then build a business manager account, it’s free. Facebook wants you to use them and from the Facebook manage a business manager platform created Facebook pixel that you put onto your website to begin tracking the individual engagements of the pages within your website.

Obviously, if you’re a brand hotel, E, don’t get that opportunity, but it does still allow you with insights on your page to determine what demographics information you can garner from those who are engaging with your Facebook page. But it’s mentioned it’s a little limiting since you may not have the large enough audience to really use it as effectively as it could be. Should you have a business manager page, you could look beyond all of that now. Keeping in mind, you can still build a business manager page and still use the tool.

It just won’t have the ability to use the pixel on your website. If a brand hotel exists that that you can put the pixel on, it doesn’t allow you to do that. So you’re only going to go look at General Facebook pics of information in generalities, which is still an incredibly powerful tool. You can to choose, for instance, the geography that you’re interested in the country that you interested in. You can break that down to the city level so you can see your local market as to what the engagement is.

Demographically, that brings you into the age categorizations the genders interests associate it, and this is very powerful because interest is very broad spectrum. You could be looking at them for a variety of reasons. It could be event driven. It could be seasonality. It could be destination. Interesting could be cultural calorie off the beaten path. There’s so many interests categories that you could begin to pursue and BC how they interact demographically because once you choose those interests, it’ll tell you ages and what other things they’re interested in.

Whether coming from it’s very powerful tool when it comes to interest categorizations, you also have their connections. Whether there connected to different pages, people, they’re connected to your pages versus not connected to your pages. You have things like from your advance things. You have language, segregation. You have relationship status. Whether the married divorce have kids family size, family age, Where do they have kids that are between the ages of three and 5567 eight and then Infeld 9 10 and 13. All these segmentation scissors, you know, with different family age groups.

There’s different travel considerations, different travel interests and all of those haven’t impact on who you’re bringing into your hotel. You can look at their education level, their work history, what they’re looking at for work, what they do for work, where they come from for work, what type of work have they done? Market segments Very powerful stuff is as to different ethnicities as well as different categorizations. You have again going back into the parents segmentation. You know, Children from 0 to 12 months or two years, three or five years you have all these segmentation is to know if they’re traveling with her family.

The difference. Being traveling with 5 to 7 year old is dramatically different than travelling with a preteen or team if they re still traveling with you, right, So you have that you even have political segmentation as to their preferences of conservatism versus liberalism. Liberal e. I don’t use that one very much often because I don’t have the need for that as much. But the idea is that there’s all these flexible points of data that Facebook has about the users of the Facebook platform, and you have two fundamental functionalities of it within the insides, the inside representation of their engagement with your page, which is what those that have a brand Seiken still do.

They can also still build a business manager account, but they won’t have the added benefit of adding a pixel to their website to determine how the engagement also amplifies by those to their website. But it does still give them a great tool toe. Look at the demographic personas of people interested in their destination market and then use it as a sounding board against those people that you’re talking to with your front desk that are telling you what people are walking through the door different times of the year and seeing if they match.

There’s other tools, as I said that we can talk about and have and pointed to in times before, like Google trends and so forth. Well, being to create these correlations. Just don’t take one platform at face value. So this is all the defendant of source. The point of truth. Everything that this platform says is exactly who I need to be chasing. Absolutely not. Facebook’s insights is a tool to be used in collaboration with other tools, but always as a sounding board to the reality of who’s walking in your hotel or restaurant as affirmation of confirmation or a discovery of those that you may not have considered.

So our tool for this week was Facebook insights and no, our technique now for this week’s hospitality technique. So our technique is to extend into the conversation of what we’re talking about about the usages off, using Facebook insights and other platforms like Google trends And like Pinterest and like Twitter, all have ad campaigns go. They have ability to finite and choose what information you can correlate with. Demographically geo geographically persona based and creating these filters that you’re going to use to better target whom you’re trying to reach Now.

This is a key element or discussion today because our news is of course, prevalent into what’s happening into our industry now and to our economies and our global humanity at this point, um, and we’ll get to that. But the idea of it is is it is sad to watch. But as the world unfolds with its concerns over what’s happening, the first thing that hotels and big boxes and brands are doing exactly what they said they would never do. And that is run off to the O. T. A’s and dump rate and throw inventory in to maintain occupancy.

And I have several. Collins is several markets, different markets and not a single market isn’t reacting the same way. Meanwhile, for those that I’m working with were running into the fire we’re looking at exactly who still needs to travel, who still wants to travel, who has the propensity to travel and finding out where they’re located. What’s the motivation for travel? What, what, what what what’s the purpose of their travel and identifying that messaging tailored to those interests to continue to communicate with him? And so these tools these like Facebook Insights and Google Trends and Twitter ads for business, which gives you great insights on engagement in people’s interest levels as also ghouls demographic and ability to create custom audiences and look up like audiences we’ve had those discussions before are all the sharper, sharper tools to be used now?

This is the time to use thes things, even Maur effectively, as the diminished demand for travel continues on as people begin to pause in their choice for travel and to listen to the recommendations of governments and so forth to diminish their travel choices. Going to conferences, going to group events, traveling on cruises, flying to different countries all of these things are like, Whoa, stop! And we’re seeing in the news cancellations every day of large scale events simply out of the concern of what’s happening. These tools these uses of Facebook insights, as we have identified identifying demographics, sitting down and creating personas of who still is going to travel, wants to travel That, you know, could be reached by what you have is a product to your destination and communicating with them via social channels versus paid presence on all these different channels and content within your website.

To communicate value proposition what your concern is doing with about of the concerns that people may have addressing it, head on. This is the techniques and methodologies that are going to really help persevere through the process of diminished demand to your market. So our technique of the week is truly using these functional filter bubble tools toe, identify, classify and target through filtering information content that is relevant to the consistent traveller through this process. And that is our technique of weak. Now, this week’s hospitality news that you should know.

Okay, so for news and show review, I’m sorry to make this enter dramatic visit at any point. You probably only know we were talking about the Corona virus, and its impact on our economy is at this point by this stage, you’ve seen that the diminished economies markets falling. People’s banning of travel companies doing moratoriums on travel conference is being cancelled, recommendations of not traveling certain means by cruise ships and flights toe off the country’s and so forth. And as many people point out that this isn’t really a means of containment, this is a politicization of reaction to show that there’s something being done.

But besides, from trying to publicize the statement, it is a per Vaillant aspecto what we is hotel use and hospitality professionals need to address now. We need to understand now that we’re gonna be working in a diminished economy, whether it’s short term or long term, and the projection is long term. This is going to be treated as a recurring thing. It travels and functions much like the flu. We know the flu is an annual thing for us, and it never stops. It just goes up and down, depending upon its ferocity and exposure.

We know that there’s still a lot unknown about this. But even on the long term of discussions by the time that the process is acquired, whether there’s trials for vaccines and even if there’s a success to those trials and there needs to be creation and distribution capability we are months, if not years, away from this being a non impacted aspect of our life community. And this isn’t the only virus. It’s just the one that has made The shoot is your of the day because of its newness and uncertainty.

But we also know the flu has a dramatic impact on our lives and high death toll as the other types of viruses and so forth and arm or invasive pervasive and mortality rate painful. So these are all persistent conditions of our culture and our environment of globalization, and they always must be considered for mussels. Hotel yours that we need to take active steps to ensure that we are aware of the concerns of our guests. We are at the core hospitality. We don’t shy from what they needs to be discussed.

Maybe we even started to bring into our discussion content development. What we’re doing is addition of precautions for our guest travelers and how we have may have changed our processes at our hotels to ensure a more clean environment, considering the conditions that were concerned with different cleaning processes, with the rooms for the housekeepers and also, from our own safety perspective, that we train our team’s howto handle themselves more hygienically under the concerns that there’s a high transfer rate of this and that it can create issues for not just the guest but also the staff and team.

We are at the core, our team. So these are all things we talked about in the top story, which is provided by Robert Cole, who was one of my co host this week on the live show, along with Cat Mohammed, who is the director of education for HOA. We really dove into the the negative impacts associated with what’s going on in the economy and the opportunistic values of things with this as we talked about. It’s interesting. There’s a very high percentage of people, and I don’t want to misquote the percentage but very high in the 60 plus percent of category upwards that management within our industry has never worked through a down economy.

And we say that is a down economy, ruining that the 2001 to 2003 genre and the 2008 to 2010 genre that most people in management are in a position that they’ve always worked with a growing economy, a positive growth, that there’s always suspect that your month over month, year over year and now for the first time, we may be faced with the blacks one event, whether be temporary or long term in which that isn’t the case, and are they prepared to know what measures they should be taking and steps they should be taking?

We had a quick, brief discussion before early part of this podcast about how that if you haven’t done these tool, finite improvements where you’re doing proper tracking pixel ization of what those engagements and looking at the insights and the resource is that they provide, then you need to start now. And if you’re already have been doing it, this is the time you need to actually get more precise with its usage. So this isn’t one of those. Hey, it’s a blip on the radar. In two weeks from now we’re going todo squirrel, looking at something different.

This is something that’s going to be a part of our discussion for a while. This impact is profound. During our live show, we actually got notification that the ITV in Berlin, which is attended by over 100 and 60,000 people, was canceled. Anybody with a pencil can tell you that’s a lot of dollars. That’s a lot of money of flight hotels, common space, coming restaurants, everything about the Berlin market, 160,000 people have been told not to travel to the event and the event itself being canceled. That was a very painful decision, I’m sure one that was probably overcautious, but by the same token, probably well founded, consumed that very shortly. Thereafter.

They’re making announcements of quarantines within Germany as well. Two in the hopes of containing the spread of what’s already happening. So these are very powerful things that happen in our economies right now and very much about us as hotel hotel, your hospitality people were the canary in the coal mine. The impact on our industry is one of the first to be affected because it is a diminishment of travel demand. Think of this. It’s not about rate. It’s not about the quality of product. It’s not even about our destination interest.

It’s literally the lack of are the concern of travel that is going to keep people from traveling to our area. Then there’s no control ability to that from those three things. But there is methodology of making sure that you can reach those that still need to travel. We actually put together an online summit where we’re gonna talk about doing marketing any down community or down, down. We’re trending to make a market where we’re going to define specific strategies, specific market type specific travelers and how to reach them and how to look at your property and the means that may be different than what you’re used to.

Looking forward to find the business that you need to find to make sure you make payroll and that you still can’t control cover your debt and so forth and so on. So we’re putting this summer together. We’re hoping to maybe make it towards the end of March. Where will be online So you don’t have to travel, go figure, and that you’ll have the opportunity to join us and collaborate with us and be a part of the program. And we’ll share more information as we start putting this agenda together.

So there we have it. That is our news and show review for this week. Now remember, you can find us on Google play apple iTunes, I heart radio, soundcloud, stitchers, Spotify, Pandora Tune and List goes on. Actually, 36 different platforms. Ironically, much also share with you the fact that you know, I built an Amazon skill and I also did for Google assistant in Syria. So you can actually just go to your Amazon or your godless system of Syrian justice, a hay or okay, Alexa Google assistant Siri while you have the hospitality, marketing podcast and no play our last podcast.

And that is almost out of all the 5000 people, plus that are watching or listening to our podcast now on this show. Almost 48% of them are. That’s how they’re listening to it. So thank you so much for that. But for those that do use other platforms, please, if you would recommend us and also refers and braid us also, any positive comments will be most helpful if you have any negative comments. By all means, I would love to hear any feedback that you have from that. You can reach me directly via email at Lauren at Hospitality digital marketing dot com.

You can send any of your suggestions for Thompson conversations as we move forward with our plans for the summit. You could definitely reach me there for your interest or anything, insights that you may have our participation if you feel qualified to go over and continue to contribute content will be happy to take a CZ. We look for contributions to that summit. We will be happy to go over and talk with you of that as well for the show notes links to everything that we talked about. You can go to hospitality digital marketing dot com forward slash podcast podcasts Within s Okay.

And don’t forget our live video talk show that you can join and participate in every Friday at 11 30 Eastern US time. Called This Week in Hospitality Marketing the live show that is simulcast on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and its base platform, which is live webinars. And we have people from all over the world over 15,000 people join us out of 28 countries every week for that, and you can always join us on that as well. So and you could get links to this. The all previous shows and the current show, the next week’s show to show number 2 39 is that bit Lee Ford’s last HTM show 239 There you could register so you get reminded when the show starts at 11 30 on Friday morning.

And, of course, you goto hospitality digital marketing dot com Ford slash live and see the link to the current show, which is number 2 38 plus all previous shows to 37 beyond. We’ve been doing this for over six years, every week. And for that I thank you for the privilege of your time, and I look forward to talking to you next week. You have been listening to this week in Hospitality Marketing, The Podcast Show 238 Brought to you by hospitality, digital marketing and support of the HSMAI, the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association.

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