Hospitality Marketing the Podcast Show 262

Hospitality Marketing the Podcast Show 262 Transcripts (English U.S.)

Announcer — Welcome to this week in Hospitality Marketing. The podcast Show number 262 with your host, Loren Gray.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to hospitality marketing The podcast. I am your host, Lorne Gray, and this is episode number 262. So each week we spent around 20 to 30 minutes during 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 U. S time so that let’s get started.

Announcer — And now today’s new resource tool.

So we have several tools for review, all with a common theme, and all related to what will be our technique discussion of the week. And the first two we’re going to talk about is one for support. Hero now support Hero is actually an F A Q builder. Now, for those that listen to last week’s podcast, you know that I was talking very much about how our websites must become answer services that we, rather than guessing what our guests want, be able to provide them the information that they’re looking for, and we talked about some really cool tools last week.

Like Frase and a couple others. Ah, but primarily Frase, because it was a fat F A Q generator as well, but it allowed for a more robust data collection. This is a more traditional F A Q builder. Not that it is old school like you just writing type and put things into categories. This one also keeps track of how people interact with your website, what questions they’re looking for, more questions they used in answering to their information requests, and what was the content that was most helpful for them as well.

So support here is more on a again traditional F A Q builder for your website. Um, it’s a very important for us on our websites has mentioned last week, and I’m reiterating this again today because it is that valuable that we provide a diversity of content and not about just our rates. Dates, rooms come in and mentees and what have you but beyond that content, that’s really too our destination content. This related to the proximity of to our hotels or restaurants, our processes air protocols. What it is that is there is available or does or does not work, or all these details that people are very much in tune with.

Looking at this time of day involvement in these times, I should say the second tool that’s related to this, but different because of what it does is live agent dot com. Now, live agent is literally your more traditional. There’s a little tab you taint, you ping it, and it can engage with you. If you want to use that to talk to somebody on the other side of it, so to speak. Now why put this tool then, as again with the other tools? It’s a means of getting information to the guest in whatever platform they find most comfortable.

And in this case, this would be the lifetime going. Hey, I don’t want to send an email that I want to get a contact doesn’t like all phone number, but here’s a little live chat button click, and if it’s during business hours, because we can’t unless you have the staffing, which I don’t think all of us do at this point to cover 24 hours, then It simply tells you if somebody is available. If not, then you can continue on and leaving your email or whatever message you would like to do.

For that, Um, it is war. We won linear usage. It does have the ability to provide base information and of course it does allow you to immediately interact with a person on the other end should the fall within the business hours that you are monitoring it and again it will be connected to our technique. The third tool is one of the use of my own website, which is a little bit more robust and diversified. But it provides immediate content to the guest as to what they’re looking for from my case, and the total is called bird seed bird si dot io Bird seed allows for me because we do the podcast.

We do the live show. We have always updating content to what’s going on. Plus, people want to contact me for speaking at their conference were not conferences but online webinars and what have you now that days and corporations want to go over and we speak towards ownerships in a remote location. Whatever I have these different aspects that when it pops up to the side for your tablet pops up. It’s like the latest of life Show. We complaint right there. The latest podcast could be played right from there.

If you want to contact me or schedule something with me, those those buttons are also in there, so it’s more defined to answering specific content pieces. What makes Bird see kind of fun is, and why use it is I can make those tabs do whatever I want them to do. I can have them. There’s a whole library of things for them to do. Whether it’s again making a schedule request, making a phone call, making a text, watching a show, listening to a podcast. I can put whatever I want to in those functions that the guests, when they come to the website over news and that is bird seed, that I owe the fourth tool that I want to refer to, and you’ll see the diversity of all these tools and how they all come together.

Hopefully, in a grand plan of technique is mobile monkey dot com. Now I mentioned mobile monkey dot com in the same breath I would say would mention many chat Now, about three episodes back. I believe we had a all but podcast discussion in which I referred to Mobile Monkey into that and was more in depth about many chat. So this time I would like to refer more about mobile monkey. Um, it is a very neat tool when it comes to be able to interact with on multiple levels your conversation with your guests.

It pops up on to the bottom, and with it you can do anything from SMS messaging to member um Facebook Messenger messaging on its A. Bott. So butts have a great primary role in that is, ah, logic string of what you think the guest is most interested in and providing a very quick and easy access through it through the baht, there are rules for bots. One is never make a But many people go through about to get to a human. Never, never say Oh, finally, at this point, we’re gonna let you talk to him because we ran out of answers for you on the butt.

Always make it available. That should they want to talk to human at any time, they just have to click that button to have won. Talk to human, Just just connect me. Don’t go through this process. I want to talk to somebody much like the live person dot com Best  also to it creates a form of instant communication to this entire process. It allows you to go over, and multiple platforms will just be Facebook. Whether on your website threats, mass messaging texting, it allows you to talk to the guests at any comfortable chapter channel that they’re interested in talking to you about or on.

I should say so. Those are the four tools together that we’re bringing up two together, but you can t technique in just a second. The first is again Support Hero, which is a fundamental F A Q builder and monitor and refinement for F accuse. The second is Live Agent, which is a straightforward live engagement, talked to some human on the other side during business hours. The third is bird seed, which allows you to create certain specific functions that pop up that have repetitive, Lee requested. So they’re easy and community to be gotten to without having go through navigation at the site and the fourth is a bought called mobile monkey, which allows you to talk on Facebook Messenger SMS messaging and on your websites through a logic sequence or logic flow of Q and A and Discovery. And that is our tools in review for this week.

Announcer — now for this week’s hospitality technique.

So our technique of the weak ties, of course, all of these together and continues our conversation from last week again, I was very emphatic about the need for our websites to provide answers to our guests, answers that go beyond the spectrum of business questions associated with our product and our services, but rather a chance of discovery of content that helps them make the decision as to their travel plans and whether were included with them.

So my technique this week is how to make the few seem like so many now. I chose that statement because of the tools. I was referring to allow for the fewer of your staff to be able to keep in more persistent communication with your guests without having to have more staff to do it. We all have had our guest service stations in our hotels and restaurants are hostesses are back at the house, whatever off people answering phone calls and how that can get overwhelming. If there’s more than, Ah, a handful of people calling at any one time, the larger the organization, the larger the issue in the older times.

For those of us that could go back that far, there were rooms full of people answering phone calls. That was how you communicated. We still exist in the room of Reverend reservation centers for branded hotels that have rooms full Now, of course, that has changed for due to our current circumstances, where now there are people that are able to facilitate this support system via phones at home. But it still requires one person talking to one person at one time. So you can easily overwhelm the system, depending upon how many people you have in the system at any one time off, so that people are now frustrated trying to call the queen, put on hold or putting put into Q. They’re trying to send emails.

Who’s answering? Those emails were sent in Texas instruments texting going on social platforms, who’s in some of the social platforms. It begins to fragment very quickly, so the tools that I picked to bring into our conversation this week to support Hero, the live agent, the birdseed mobile monkey are all variations of 11 people can help facilitate a very large amount of people at any one time, so they give examples to that’s support here. F A Q development is to mitigate. How many questions get asked.

That could be easily answered once if you find it. And this is a routine that you should always do for your websites, that your front desk is constantly asked the same question over and over and over. And people are calling and asking a question over and over and over. Then you know that one. You have not provided enough content where they have found it so they could answer their own question. The second is that answer should go into your F A. Q. They’re Google one index it and possibly if it’s based on something that is usable by beyond people’s constantly asking a question, it may show up in an answer bucks for them in the search page.

The second is it actually solves the persistent Level one support for those who could get the vernacular of it. The easy stuff like, Hey, is the sun shining out there right now? You know, it answers the simple stuff. So building the F A Q gives you answers to things that people most commonly asked for that are static. The live agent would be something that, well, you know what? We don’t know what they’re asking. They know what they won’t ask. They just want to meet him in which to ask it in.

Well, in Live Agent, you can have several people asking questions, and one person can facilitate those answers. They have canned answers that are short quickly. Yeah, that’s fine. We put that there, which are F a Q based in their essence. And they do create, if accuse from those and that if there’s being asked the same way, they can just literally type and drop it in, type it up it in and they can handle more than one person compared to just a phone call. One person can only talk about one time on the phone.

The birdseed as an example where the most frequent things that people are most connected to I want to get to the quickest, like your latest biggest special and or what’s events going on and orderly your covert updates and orderlies. Protocols, wherever it is, can be hyperlinked in that kind of opening. So people don’t have to find where you put it, or maybe just reach out to you to find where you put it, because they don’t spend the time going through your entire websites. So they’re going to reach out to other platforms, and here they just simply see other.

It is click boom, and they get their answer. Mobile monkey as abroad as a bond as an example of bots, means that you can create more robust depth answers based on their conditions of what they’re interested in. All these other things tend to be single questions. First answer may be that inspires a second answer, but usually it’s. There’s my question that I get an answer with mobile monkey. It can be more defined. It can bring you down a path of discovery, so if they don’t even know what they’re asking, but they’re interested in something bots can help with that because they can bring the guest to a point of content they didn’t even know existed.

Maybe they didn’t even know that you had a hot springs hot tub on the top of beautiful cliff overlooking about a beautiful valley until through the process of do you like this? Yes. No. What do you think about these things? Whatever you like, vistas. Visa. But look what we have. There is a way of getting to it. They may not even have known to even what question to ask. And that’s what bots are very helpful for in guiding them through a process. And this is too complex and they just want to talk to somebody but guiding them through a process of getting to a place that they can understand.

But that also means that a human doesn’t have to do that. Ah, human doesn’t have to sit on a discovery call of 14 17 21 minutes with somebody while everybody else is in acute waiting and maybe roles often hangs up in frustration. Because the baht could handle a lot of that dialogue doesn’t mean we answer the complete answer. That may still want to talk to some of it. By that point, they’re very specific about getting a very specific answer because they’ve been introduced to content that didn’t know existed before, and because that it allows for one person to be able to handle multiple enquiries because and that point, maybe, if the answers were handled by the baht, they never had to make it to a person.

So here you are having with people overtaxing by doing so many things wearing so many hats as we all are and doing now, giving them tools in which to me would help facilitate the ability for the few. To be many, you’re giving guest satisfaction. You’re giving guest communication giving guessed the answers they’re looking for and they think, my gosh, these guys up running there, rocking and rolling. And it might be two people in the durable gauge running in the back. But keeping all these platforms when he allows them to handle that many people coming through the process.

So please understand these tools are meant to be to make sure that the few seem like so many. Which brings us to our next section.

Announcer — Now, this week’s hospitality news that you should know.

So news and show review always awesome toe Have we have Melissa Cavanagh with fuel travel. They just wrapped up their sentiments. Study the consumer sentiment Standing Volume eight. They’ve been doing it every three weeks beforehand. No, this is the second time doing it every three weeks before him. They were doing it every two weeks.

It is a fatigue factor on the survey sampling because people are eyes. All of us are getting absolutely tired of the stress associated with the constant fixture of how this is impacting our lives. Everyone’s lives globally around the world and our businesses and their families and hopefully not tragically in that sense. But through that there has been a growth of questions, a change of questions and the mission of questions. They no longer relevant that they’ve been rolling through with their survey volume as to what it is.

Sentiment wise now. The last time they did the sentiment study results was just at when everything blew back up again, and we just found ourselves in the dark, worst despair compared to what we were going through, and we didn’t get through the first week. We just blew up the first way to being larger than what we were up to. That point so the central was exceptionally low, where there was some optimism as to traveling, when to travel, wanting to travel where they would travel. That turned into a very negative worry and threatened.

The board cloud was very dark in that survey. This one has been approved mint on that, but it also is being to show signs of fatigue where people are just tired of worrying about this, tired of worrying about what they’re going to do, resigning themselves, that this is going to be a part of their existence for a while. And it’s not exactly Albright bring bows and sunshine and unicorns. There is a tepid hat positives that there is possibilities of future tense but not overwhelming. Boy, just wait until this happens.

Boom on. This is going to make me want to go do this. We know that people that are traveling now are either out of necessity as essential and required, and they exist in that world to do that and those that have a high tolerance for risk that are less concerned about the risk they put themselves at. When they do travel. There is a large number because obviously our businesses so far down at this point, industry wise off people that want but aren’t going to travel until they hit certain conditions in their mind for their individual safety concerns.

Of course, the biggest one that seems to be brought up through the survey competitively is when a vaccine, a durable vaccine, has been introduced into society. That seems to be the big push to all of that. There’s other fractions as to whom other what other people consider. Maybe that there was some responses in relationship to if they would have ways of ensuring the way to handle the conditions that covered presents to people you know, methodologies of improvement, to make it where it’s not as dramatic of a pain or challenge or a threat.

But it’s still you contracted because the virus is not is not in play yet, so we went over a lot of that information. Of course, the link for that is in the show notes for the podcast and Legal. As also, of course, that showed us for the live show with us. On the discussion was Stephanie Smith, with cog wheel marketing Dean Schmidt with Metta Search With Face Came Medicine, also with those was 10 Peter and Computer and Associates, Melissa’s partner in crime but her boss. Technically, it’s Stuart Butler, chief operating officer of fuel travel.

Tammy Carlisle with Milestone Media and Edward ST Onge with flip to eso. We had great dialogue about all of that. With course, we hit a lot of the highlights associated with going through the impact of what all that means to it. We did also discuss much what we did to the podcast today about cues and the need and the necessity to educate and inform our guests and help them find the information that they’re looking for to make the decisions for those that are looking to make decisions.

Um, we talked about how the new marketing would be working or is working because it’s not like we’re waiting for it. It is happening right now and how we may be facing this moving, roving hot spot scenario situation, um, over and over for quite a while. And so it’s a part of our marketing process that we’re not just created a single marketing plan and putting it on a shelf and using his road map, but rather it’s more a boundary guideline with a lot of contingencies and a lot of critique as to what to include in the potentials up.

So when you’re building one direction, you’re hopeful and optimistic that it might be that way. But then also, you have to prepare for the things that might skew to the other side of things. So in that sense, marketing has changed dramatically. In that sense, the one article I want to bring up from Mr Robert Coles well curated list that we did not get to this week, which he always gives us at the last minute. Which is great because it’s the latest stuff, and if you ever want to describe it, it’s amazingly excellent.

Curated list members to Robert Cole, the founder of Rock Cheetah. Just simply send up a bit Li bi i t dot L Y forward slash rock cheetah All lower case. No space. So the article that he pulled him from hotel news now written who do do this? Brian, Brian Rodent did this, um, and is called how hoteliers air budgeting for new tech in 2021. Now, why I brought this in was because I found it very interesting of how they were pointing towards us. There’s an obvious captain obvious moment, which is obviously contact list tech.

Now Stuart Butler would feel traveled to making absolutely excellent key, less entry app, along with the features of them doing all of their cell for immigrations and so forth. Other GPR compliance is there the ache and level two complaints? Exceptionally excellent platform, but they’re really being hab just bombarded right now because they have the tech built that integrates with multiple PMS platforms that if you have the hardware on the door, you can do keyless entry with your mobile app from fuel travel, so that makes it very, very popular.

So come contact list check will definitely be a direction that is going to go. That’s kind of Ah, yes, for those who can keeping in mind, there’s a lot of businesses and we’re getting longer and longer obituary list of businesses that, especially the false start that we had that came back out but don’t have enough to get back out again. And we’ve seen a lot of hotels, very large notable ones. That one that comes to my most for me is downtown Midtown, New York, the W that closed permanently.

Posters Couple more around than man Fact 15% of all hotels in midtown New York are not ever going to reopen. Its not a matter of just waiting as a matter that they’re never going to reopen as hotels. Eso lots of inventory, which, you know that was a very dense market, probably if not one of the densest markets outside of things like Las Vegas or international Devon or land up. Um, and because of that you have this attrition that comes out of this. So, you know, a lot of businesses may not be poised to take on new technology because of the financial burden of trying to get into that space there, looking simply to get back into business and then maybe skills or what they might be doing it after that tense, when they could solidify their finances war.

So contact list. Asking tech is with the first one, obviously, the other is, And this goes also towards the the New World Order of Things Business Intelligence. It’s funny, not funny. It is. It is a sign of the times that, prior to all of the pandemics impacts on our industry business intelligence was kind of, ah, flavor, a diamond flavor thing, like all the other. We have this way of its but never really talked and boys that frustrating. But, you know, we get five different platforms and between all of those and Scotch taping and duct taping them together.

And, you know, changing content over way had a semi clear vision of what our business intelligence was telling us. The or they were working silos. Uh, you know, we were still pushing the concept of convergence between sales, marketing and revenue management. And now it’s Ah, that’s the way the world it works. It has to be all one mans map fact. Because of reductions in staff, it is maybe even in some cases, a person or just two people that are engaged with that. So it is a forced aggregation of those services and profiles and silos, and all of them had their individual business intelligence tools.

So now what’s being discussed is the adoption of new tech will be the integration of business intelligence tools, the ability to eliminate the redundancies of these and aggregate their source data’s, whether it’s through the technology of AP eyes or whether just interfaces and smart people. They’re building great code like happy and putting all together so that you have a single view from all these sources with the perspective of how they all impact each other. So the business intelligence is definitely I see a foreseeable future. Tens positive result out of the form of necessity that the pandemic has created into our industry.

So there you have it. Remember, you can find us on Google. Play apple iTunes I heart radio SoundCloud stitcher, Spotify, Pandora pooed Let’s goes on 38 platforms to be exact or even on Amazon, Alexa and Google Assistant and Siri. Just ask to play the hospitality marketing podcast on any of those and 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 and gives us great feedback as to how well we’re providing what you’re interested in listening to also this your first time here?

Yes, of course. You still subscribe. Twist on any of those platforms that you would like or find us on the website for an archive of all previous podcasts. We keep the website. You can go to hospitality digital marketing dot com ford slash podcasts. There you see all episodes all the links to all previous tour in 61 episodes just simply for this one. Look for episode number 2 60 to hit the playback For it, you’ll see the show Links of fuel travels consider sentiments Saudi plus also the links to the tools that we discussed today s So you take your own look at those in some cases, the offer a free platform of them to get started.

If you have to compete capabilities of doing something like that and work into it if you feel the need, is there the values there for itself again? We don’t know what we’re gonna forget that we have a live video talk show that we do each Friday. Right now we’re a little over 25,000 people a week. 32 countries. It’s ah the subtitles Air now translated in over 10 languages On that is every Friday 11 30 Eastern U. S. Time is called this weekend Hospitality marketing. The live show this past week, of course, is also episode tour in 62.

And there if you’d like to go to our website, you can go to hospitality. Digital marketing dot com, Ford slash live and look for show number 2 62 There you see all the notes of all that links and also all of the links to all the articles that Robert Cole  Rock Cheetah provided in his excellently curated list. So 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 262 brought to you by Hospitality Digital Marketing in support of the HSMAI, the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association.

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