Hospitality Marketing Podcast Show 252 June 5th 2020

Hospitality Marketing Podcast Show 252 June 5th 2020

Hospitality Marketing Podcast 252

 

Hello everyone and welcome to Hospitality Marketing the podcast, I am your host Loren Gray and this is episode #252 where each week we spend 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 am Eastern US Time.. SO let’s get started;
0:01 — Our tools for review this week are; https://publer.io/ https://hootsuite.com/ https://socialbee.io/
00:04— Our Technique this week is; “So, What Do We Talk About Now?”
00:10 — News and Show Review
CoHosts
Melissa Kavenagh
Stephanie Smith
Stuart Butler
Ben Hanley
Tristan Heaword
Adel Gutmine Milne
Dean Schmit
Lily Mockerman
Show Notes
00:01 — Melissa reviews the latest numbers
00:56 — Is it safer to stay at a hotel or an Airbnb during your summer vacation? ‘We need to balance sanity and risk’
01:01 — What an AirBnB and hotel have different?
01:10 — Big brand CEOs predict eventual return to ‘golden age’
01:34 — Experts say buyer beware when it comes to Expedia partner recovery program
02:02 — Show ends
Experts say buyer beware when it comes to Expedia partner recovery program
Remember — you can find us on Google Play / Apple iTunes / iHeart Radio / Soundcloud / Stitcher / Spotify / Pandora / Tunein / Pocket cast /  Breaker / ACast and the list goes on, 36 and counting to be exact. We’re even on Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, Just ask to play “ The Hospitality Marketing Podcast”  No matter which one you may use, if you like the show please rate us and leave a comment. That will help others find our content. Also if this is your first time hearing us, you can subscribe to our show on any of those 36 platforms as well. For an archive of all previous podcasts, you can go to hospitalitydigitalmarketing.com/podcasts 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”.  simply go to https://hdmagency.wpengine.com/live/  Thank You for the privilege of your time. Talk to you next week!

Hospitality Marketing Podcast 252 Transcripts (English U.S.)

Announcer — Welcome to this week in Hospitality Marketing. The podcast show number 252 with your host, Loren Gray.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to hospitality marketing the podcast. I’m your host, Loren Gray, and this is episode number 252. 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 showed this week in Hospitality Marketing, which also airs every Friday at 11:30 a.m. Eastern U. S time so that lets get started.

 

Announcer — And now today’s new resource Tool.

So our tool this week, or actually tools of this week are a review of AM two different platforms that I get from absolute No. One. That, of course, is pretty much a mainstay in its industry type for a long time. That suits week, but the two that I like to add to that conversation with Hoot Suite is publisher. P u B l e r dot I o and social. Bee dot io social be dot I owe these platforms are aggregate platforms, much like hoot suite is which allows you to Bulk, load up your scheduling for your post on social platforms, all different types of platforms so that you can be a ahead of the game.

 

Often times people think that social media is the spontaneous. Oh, I should post this now or let me drop that in right now, But actually, it’s a very strategic, timely timeline. Choreographed conversation. It’s an open timeline. Dialogue on these tools are very helpful and supportive in that process. Public doubt Io has been very successful in integrating itself into anti multiple platforms, creating book loads much like Who suite, which has been a feature that a lot of these other platforms don’t tend. Tohave is the ability to literally put into an Excel sheet date in times of what it is that you want to post content of what your post links of which one post images want to use for those posts and then literally bulk load that up onto the platform.

 

Hoot suite has been one of the few. They have been able to do that for a long time, and now public is one of the other ones. Now there have been other platforms were not going to go. There’s a Pandora’s box of these, actually that do all this type of loading and scheduling and so forth? There’s alternative platforms we’ve talked about before that from a authority point of view like Plan Herbal, which allows you to post but not actually authorized. Only one person or a couple people designated can authorize whether that’s scheduled post goes out.

 

So there’s a gatekeeper as it were. We’ll these platforms do the same thing. There’s a gatekeeper that if it’s not approved, it doesn’t go out as scheduled. Plan Able has a calendar and so forth, and that’s nice when I thought we’ve talked about it on the show before the podcast before, I want to talk about these. Both upload capabilities this way of strategically looking forward into what it is you want to talk about in the timetable associated with it and why you’d be talking about certain topics and so forth.

 

And these tools Publer, Hootsuite and SocialBee. Two additions to that conversation, Hootsuite I think my personal opinion has kind of sat on its hands for a while, capping content to be on top of the pile, and because of that, they’ve given a lot of uniqueness away to the market. As other up comers, like publisher and social, we have come into play, one of which, and is very strong with social be, and that is it allows you to be offered volunteered content.

 

It helps you designate content that could be helpful in your strategy is to topically what it is you want to speak about. We talk about writer’s block and so forth. Social B has a component to it that allows you to selectively choose things. Now we’ve talked about other platforms like social horsepower, and there are variations. All of the things I’m talking about today. And if you like to know any more about those, you can, of course, look them up on Google. But also you can go back into our archives and podcasts and see them indexed and referred to, and you can listen to our comments and suggestions as to their use abilities in past tense is well, and I use all of them for different capacities as well.

 

So please don’t think that these are the newest over those. These air differences to those, and that is social. Be dot io and publisher dot io. They allow their own unique feature abilities, but they also have their value propositions as to how their use for but for evergreen content, scheduled content broke up loads suggestive content based on topics of interest. There’s other platforms we’ve discussed that help you with your creative content. There’s shells of creativity that’s been created that’s there, and you just have to modify it to your own message on the fonts, colors, images, there’s catalogues, images to use.

 

You can use your own images. There’s like set a Pandora’s Box of variations to these platforms that will help you with your social posting these air to that, I feel have usefulness in our context today, which is about our technique off the week

 

Announcer — Now for this week’s hospitality technique.

So our technique this week is about “So what do we talk about now?” We’ve gone through and are in three in the middle of the pandemic. We are when our own strife right now with the protests and unfortunately, rioting, which is not protest, that is any way.

 

We’re not gonna go political today, but they’re the our world is in flux, our society is in flux, and we as hoteliers and hospitality professionals and restaurant tours are all influxes to How do we get ourselves out there? What do we talk about now, Of course, early stage conversations about what we’re doing about making feel people people feel safe about traveling with us. We had this discussion about videography and video content to help walk through guests on our properties or facilities for them to better understand what it is that we’re doing on their behalf and our staffs behalf, keeping people as safe as possible, given the fact that we’re still unfamiliar with what to do about Cove it and how it affects people.

 

We don’t want to put people on that unduly at risk. Get them sick for our negligence, of not keeping track of reality. We keep things clean, our housekeeping standards change and so forth. So there is that messaging about what we’re doing. But what’s next? When I said that we talk about now, I mean, we don’t want to get political about our conversation. We don’t want to certainly, as a business, have the necessity to try to start justifying our political perspectives to this we’re looking to do. What we do best is hoteliers and hospitality professionals is the heart of the servant.

 

We’re here to provide for those who want and need our services the best service safely as possible. So we have to look at our conversational dialogue now. The reason why I brought the tools that I did publisher who’d sweet Social B and referred to yet others in the Pandora’s box of choices and toolboxes is we need to look at our forward thinking conversations, not just what we think we should be talking about at this moment. Because, as we all know, what is at this moment may not be at the same moment tomorrow.

 

We know how quickly our conversation of Cove it changed from it to the to the protests. Um, what’s next? What could be next? We don’t know yet for us. We have to begin to put a dialogue together for those that as fatigued as we are about this conversations, we need to bring them back to the conversation that we’re related to, and that is travel and hospitality now to do this best, and we’ve had this conversation both in the live Show many times. And also on this podcast is the development of personas.

 

The critical look, the dean t the very granular look as to who comes into our door. For what reason? At what time of year now, a lot of that has turned into uncertainty. People that were traveling for events that events were canceled for for business. Second, the business was canceled for for conferences. The conference was canceled for those dialogues air out of our context. At this point, we don’t know right now, whether the very same event that is still scheduled in August, in your market, making something up, it’s still going to be actually running in the market.

 

And if so, who is going to be willing to get there? And at what conditions of interest are they willing to look at making that decision for whether it be the Clinton, this issues and videos we just talked about, whether it’s the assurances off the safe travel from wherever they’re at to where they need to get to to enjoy this event, the density, the amount of people that are allowed to participate in the event? There’s so many questions as to what will motivate or allow person to get that.

 

C’mon, we’ve talked about that is your movers transaction that says, You know what, that’s worth it. I feel safe. I know I can get there. I believe I have enough understanding of what I need to understand, to make myself make myself feel safe, that I could get there. I want to go there now For others who have different criteria, they have different criteria. So we have all these different personas now you know, be in the show notes for this podcast. Obviously interestingly social be did put out a really nice persona builder.

 

It’s, ah, relatively long article how to create a buyer personas and social media. 71 pages actually really good. And it’s not that that just happen to be that when I brought in social beings the dialogue for our podcast for tools this week, I saw that they were offering this and pulled it down, and it’s a very nice, actionable step by step methodology as to how to create personas. Now, if you’re not familiar with what personas are, personas are the avatar creation of your guests that you’re targeting Now this change is quite regularly.

 

It’s not a once. Set him Forget the same person doesn’t walk into your door day in and day out. And ironically, for all the person is that if you had done this before or we went through this exercise that you had in times past, they need to be re evaluated. You need to look at whether or not they still are accurate for the type of guest that is going to come into your hotel at the time that you create that percent of four. Now, let me explain.

 

Personas are kind of an amalgamation of aspects that you are familiar with as to what drove that person in, whether they’re by gender, whether there by age, whether they are by income, whether they are by family status, whether they are by motivation of travel. Now you’ve heard it said many times before that there are different fragments that we put into our social context when we talk that our interest based whether it is cultural, whether it’s culinary for food, whether it’s off the beaten path is for discovery.

 

Soft adventure, family travel, romantic get away. These are all aspects of the motivation of travel. You have others that were still in flux with which is business travel. Why they’ve traveling for what purpose? Conference, travel event, travel business cycle that because your market is the place where most people go during that time of your say friends, is Key West in Florida during summer, Something or not summer fall Whenever those variations are those your business cycles on top of your event driven, holiday driven business cycles, Summer travel for family going to amusement parks is a business cycle, so all of these things were in consideration when you create these personas people that you think you’re talking to when you write this messaging and posting on social now, as we often discuss before Social is a timeline, socialist in about a jumping.

 

And here’s my rating date and course, especially these given times, especially not now rate and date is not a big concern right now. It is more about safety, security methodology, and what is there to do if I get there or from passing through what it is I feel safe and Kim coming through with So our method of conversation has to change a lot, too So in this timeline, if there is an event that you still feel has a durability to it, that people will be coming forward in in spite of or in deference off or feel more comfortable later down the road of that, they’re going to come to then you begin to go backwards from the event.

 

What person attends these? What persons historically has attended thes are they of what age of how much money does it take for them to go? There is, It’s an expensive end of affordable event. Is it a family event? Is it a UNAIDS based event? Is it a interested mate like music is at that event of you begin to identify aspects of them while they love. They love jazz or they love rock n roll. And these are all real filter herbal things on our social media platforms that you can target your postings for.

 

So you piece these pieces together to create a buyer persona, and it doesn’t have to. Granularity is great, but at first just putting a stick in the sand and creating some or around it as to whom this person might be in generalities will help you a lot in determining what did you want to say to them. And then how soon do you want to say that, too? So here’s this event on X Y Z date, let’s say October. Let’s put it far enough out to think there’s some safety margin to him.

 

Now you know that that in your history of this event, your booking window is usually 21 days prior to that, that it opens up and that you know that that’s your prime bookie. What it was 21 days of that that allows for airline travel to come to market. Those for Dr Tracking travel to come into market, whatever it may be. And you know that that’s the time that you get your increased conversions and so forth. But that means that that that moment, 21 days forward from the reverend management perspective, is the conversion.

 

That ZMOT, that’s when people are in the process of decision, is to purchase or not to purchase. But that is not the time you begin to talk to them. That’s the time you begin to re change your conversation from what you’ve been talking to them about prior to them. to what you have available for them to make a decision on seconds even farther back into the research and discovery phase, the mysterious land of marketing where you begin to look at trends of interest when people are looking at your market for this event.

 

What what is that that impacted? We’ve gone through lots of tools in this past few weeks as how determined trend a trend analysis and explore and discover where people are coming from. From what reasons, when did they start searching? So when do you begin? Now that maybe your advertisement phase, But when do you begin to prior to that to join the dialogue and that comes from defining your interest from the very person is that you’ve created where what they’re interested in, and you begin to look for those conversations on social.

 

You begin to helpfully contribute to those conversations not from a cell of a room and rate, but from a while. We’re excited about this, too, And did you know that this little tidbit of information about that and those are fragmented by the type of reasons for their travel? If it’s for this event in particular that it’s a talking about the event. If it’s because it’s associated with the fact that it opens up a season of of soft adventure than you also talk about. All the other things that are going on because of this is kicking off part of that.

 

Whatever the content of dialogue is you, is your hotel your restaurant or no, this best? And from there, the weeks and days ahead of that is when you begin to put that content into your social media, and that’s when you begin to lay out from if you kept any historical data of your social engagement, what days are best now? We’ve talked about social media tools that help you determine this like social insider and what have you that will help you figure out when is the best days of engage more people, see your posts or engage with your posts on what posts kind of time that they like to the like the videos, the images, which is most of the time, the videos and images do they like links to have things that they didn’t know about?

 

These are all things that you test and try. If you haven’t already done it in the process of talking to this audience. This persona audience that you know is coming towards this event, and this is weeks ahead of the event itself. Months in some circumstances that you begin this engagement process of conversation again. It’s not showing your lobby, your pool, your room. It’s not talking about you. It’s talking about the event and what to do and what’s around, and you begin to slowly added to that conversation, your proximity or whatever value proposition you have.

 

Whatever you’ve done in collaboration, your sponsorship, your relationship, whatever that is, it slowly gets peppered into the conversation, your frequency of how often you post what days you post what time of day your post are all based on how people engage in direct. Either has been historically, or you testing this out for your first time doing it now. So these tools I was talking about where you begin to schedule out multiple posts at different times of day, with different content and different images or video pieces that you have to create for yourself and you monitor those engagements to determine Oh, you know what Thursdays at two seem to be really good for this type of audience engagement.

 

They seem to always be interested when I have to say during that time. So let’s now do a bi or multi very testing. Is that the images that the video is that the text is that the link? You change it? And if they if it goes up or down thin, you know that you’ve been to refine that messaging even more so. And these tools, these social insiders, the the publisher, the hoot suite, even our tools that do that for you they allow you to take and put out in a schedule format what it is you’re planning for far ahead so that you’re not rushing to react.

 

You’re rushing to pre programmed pro well pro reactive, pro pro react. You know the word anyways, it to be proactive. Thank boy. That was a hard one to get out. Um, you’re looking forward to what you need to do next. You modify your scheduling, so you’re weeks ahead of what you already have in the the breach. So to speak as to what you’re gonna be talking about at what time of day you’re talking about, what day you’re talking about that so you can make modifications based on engagements that you’re monitoring your spending, more time monitoring.

 

Then you are creating because you are so far ahead of your postings being scheduled on these platforms that it allows you the opportunity to be very granular in your perspective as to what they’re engaging with and how they’re engaging with. So because of that, you now can continue the dialogue with them in a very engaged way. And given our current times and circumstances, people are looking for that aspirational dot conversation. They want to talk about how pretty the beaches. They won’t talk about how beautiful the mountains are.

 

They want to talk to you about the joy of being able to go visit the place that you are in right now, and to enjoy and experience of relaxing travel experience safely or whatever this conditions in the interior of conversations are. So what we talk about now is not about what to do tomorrow or this weekend, per se, as it is talking forward, enough thinking is that the things that people should be interested in wanting to hear more about because it is something that they enjoy doing, and people want to go back to the joy of doing it.

 

So if you’re blocked us to content or context of what you’re talking about now these are some suggestions that you begin to lay out. It’s a methodical process in the sense that you just not what comes out of the top of your head. Sometimes oftentimes, engagements and reactions from people on what they’re comin on lead you to war. Suggestions is what you should dialogue and continue looking at. Um, all those things help you refine what it is you want to speak about, and it gives people a reason to keep engaged with you.

 

So when it does come closer to the time of ZMOT, the choice of transaction to one of conversion, they feel that they had to make a safe, comfortable, informed transaction decision about you. And so that is our technique of the week. So what do we talk about now and next is now this week’s hospitality

 

Announcer — news that you should know. So news and show review. We had a lot of fun if we had the privilege of having Melissa Cavanagh from fuel travel come back for their fifth installment of their travel sentiment Saudi that they started just at the beginning.

 

Covert, of course. Always hindsight’s better. They always wish that they had a baseline prior to covid, that they have some comparison analysis. But it was actually inspired through covert that travel sentiment. They have gotten much better in segmenting and separating their questions to better define and refine the audiences that are engaging with their survey. They have almost 5000 people engaged with this past survey, which is very enough very much a large enough sample size to have trend analysis Be accurate. I’m going through lots of fun notes to that way more than we can talk about it in our podcast.

 

At this particular moment, I highly suggest you go back to listen to our live show. Most of the show hour and 1/2 of it minimum, if not more, was dedicated simply to going through item for item. What the survey was actually showing as insightful nous as to who’s traveling for what reasons why, what is their motivations? One of their concerns, and demographically, and who are they so fun conversation with Melissa on it again? We always level, which gets to make it join back with her cohort in crime.

 

Who is our regular co host? Stuart Butler, both from Fuel travel. Also with us early on the start with Stephanie Smith, a cogwheel marketing, Mr Ben Hanley and Tristan Heawood with three and six marketing of England. They’re  brilliant guys, putting together quite the evil plan to take over the universe lots of insights and questions that came from them, obviously, as we continue the conversation, new to us was Adele  Gutmine Milne. She’s been with the library collection for as long as I can ever remember.

 

She has the distinction of being the only person that hasn’t been able to have the top four hotels and improviser in the world. 123 and four. And she has been the person that was created, that she has a method to hotels being good in their reviews, not just trip Advisor, but Google. And what have you by Creon the culture that creates that service level that creates those standards, and it was great to have her on the show with us. Also popping in from us was Dean Schmidt, formerly of Derby Soft meta Search maniac.

 

He knows meta search better than just about anybody that I know. The ins, the outs, the who’s the does. It was great to have him always on it. And, of course, Lily Mockerman, who has a great podcast on revenue management. And it’s also part of TCRM and services and thinks up enterprises, which does revenue management services so great to have Everyone on, Um, we were talking a little bit about the content. The comparison, after talking about Melissa’s numbers, was Airbnb how they’re out against the hotels right now, trying to say that they are safer than hotels because of the minimization of the number of people that you engage with this kind of, ah, splitting the hair of a bald man kind of thing.

 

I guess I contest that to some degrees because there’s also a lack of standardization that they have. So it was an interesting back and forth dialogue. With that, um, we talked a little bit about what is different between your baby and hotels in the sense of operations and expectations I’ve contested in one of the articles, By the way, Robert Cole always provides us a great contextual list every week, which he provides free to everyone that wants to sign up forward at Rock sheet. If you would like to get a copy of yours.

 

Well curated, less brilliant man unable to join us recently on the shows because of his dedication of work to J D. Power. But if you would like to send it for his newsletter that we get and that is at a bit Li bi, i t dot L. Y Ford’s Last Rock cheetah. All lower case. Sign up there and you get the same list that we refer to these articles. Off course. All of these articles and links are available on our life show recast and showed us links that you can find, which I’ll tell you a little bit later.

 

Um, so we were talking all about these different aspects that he gave us is great contextual things. One. The articles he brought up. His big brand CEOs predict eventual return to golden age. I say it’s too soon, too fast, and I don’t think it’s gonna be the same, even if it is a little disagree to me to a slight degree fund back and forth about it, and for me, this ends to something. I would like to believe he is the future news piece, because I believe it needs to have a more expanded conversations.

 

We got to on the show. There was an article from Focus. Why, the says experts say buyer beware when it comes to Expedia, part of recovery program, I would like to add that that link, which is on our show Notes with podcast today, also has expanded to Google’s commission based model being now mainstream. If anything, doesn’t reek of o. T a insertion that someone that does. Expedia is saying that it has to have all inventory availability on and on and on for this discount relationship to exist.

 

There can’t be closed doors so forth and so on. They’re going to be doing lots of things when it comes to bulk rates for wholesalers and so forth. Basically getting into revenue streams they never had a chance to before. As they try to rebuild their empire Google on their side with this commission based model, they’re relying upon the weakness that a lot of hotels don’t have a lot of money in the coffers to do their own ad and marketing campaigns. And here’s this wonderful commission model that Google is going to offer you that you don’t have to pay unless you actually book and actualize on.

 

And it’s lower than other things that were the market right now. So a lot of hotels and this might be something that does help. Where I had this discussion with Max Arkoff on Lincoln, he felt that it was a great rescue tool and I says, Great rescue tool Maybe, But unfortunately, industry is prone to complacency and laziness and return. It is a crux, and that’s exactly what Google wants us to do. He agreed to that component, but feels that it’s still a useful a tool for hotels to get kind of out of their hole right now, back into the market with minimal months of money because they’re only having to pay for what’s actualized.

 

And to that, I say yes, but caveat to a buyer. Beware is if you get lazy with it and replace your marketing strategy with that, thinking that oh well, Google will just keep doing it for us. Yes, they will, until they run everybody else out of business. They’re the only game in town and up goes the rating. So I do think that we have to be aware of these wolfs in sheep’s clothing as to they offer these great services, but they also are asked a lot of us in the usage of them as well.

 

So that was my news article of the week there. So remember, you can find us on Google play Apple iTunes I heart radio soundcloud stitcher Spotify, Pandora tuna data that about 36 actually 37 platforms in 38 platforms. Kind of good gosh, we’re even on Amazon. Alexa, Google assistant in Syria, just asked to play the hospitality marketing podcast on any of those, and no matter which one you may use. If you like to show, please write us and leave a comment that will help others find our content. Also, this is your first time here your shoes to subscribe to our show on any of those 38 platforms as well.

 

For an archive of all previous podcasts, you can go to hospitality digital marketing dot com, Ford’s last podcast That’s within S. And don’t forget our live video talk show that you can join and participate in every Friday, 11 30 Eastern U. S. Time called this week in Hospitality Marketing The Live show. Right now, we’re in about 32 countries at this point, but over 20 25,000 a week, which is great. Oh, you can simply go to hospitality, digital marketing dot com forward slash live. And there you can see an archive of all 200 to 2 shows of the live shows.

 

Well again, Thank you for the privilege of your time, and we look forward to talking to you next week. Announcer — You have been listening to this week in Hospitality Marketing the Podcast show 252 Brought to you by hospitality, digital marketing and support of the HSMAI, the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association. International rights reserved copyright 2020

 

Founder / CEO of Hospitality Digital Marketing

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