May 30, 2012

In-bound marketing is a godsend

by Keith Sammels

In-bound marketing offers marketers a wonderful world where companies no longer need to ‘walk the streets’ searching for new customers. A world where even expensive TV advertising and direct marketing campaigns may no longer be necessary and a world where the question ‘how do we measure our campaign?’ is becoming completely redundant! John Wanamaker would no longer be able to say 50% of our advertising works and 50% of it doesn’t, if only we knew which half’!

In-bound is the recognition that customers have a choice as to when and how they want to interact with brands and that those customers and contacts will increasingly switch off to ‘interruption marketing tactics’ by brands.

In-bound marketing is intrinsically linked to social media influence… but just how influential is social media?

Twitter has over 500 million active users, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries a day. 80% of British account owners logged on to the site from a mobile phone in the past month.
Facebook has over 900 million active users, more than half of them on a mobile device. Ignore mobile at your peril! The world’s population is around 7 billion. There are already 5.6 billion handsets in the world. And mobile will undoubtedly be the remote control on which we run our lives!
LinkedIn reports more than 161 million registered users in more than 200 countries.
Trip Advisor branded sites make up the most popular and largest travel community in the world, with more than 56 million unique monthly visitors, 20 million members and over 60 million reviews according to comScore Media Metrix
Over 4 billion videos are viewed every day on You Tube. There are 800 million unique users each month and over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month. In 2011 YouTube had more than 1 trillion views.

People power is capable of electing a President or bringing down a government. There is no longer any hiding place for any of us. Everything is ‘out there’, good and bad!

Social media has had a major effect on hotel marketing

Five years ago if you were planning on visiting a particular hotel you would have gone to the hotel website for information and you would have been likely to believe what was written on the site. Today your first port of call would more than likely be Trip Advisor or another social network. You will probably believe a random Trip Advisor Contributor’s views on your chosen hotel more than the hotel itself.

According to Caterer & Hotelkeeper, Trip Advisor influences £500m corporate hotel choices. And the BDRC survey of 1,000 business travellers says that 41% of travellers decided to change their original hotel choice after reading reviews.

Trip Advisor for Hotels – what works in 2012?

It’s 2012 now, Trip Advisor gained last year more than 50% new users making them a force to be reckoned with. Single handedly, this online tool has quickly become the “bane of existence” for any hotel GM. What are the best approaches for 2012? We put some tips together:

Tip 1 – Beyond guest reviews

Consumers looking for a hotel online can be positively influenced in many ways on Trip Advisor;

Update your primary listing photo regularly – keep your primary listing photo current. A good idea can be to adapt and change it with the seasons. If your photo does not reflect reality your guests will be disappointed and will verbalise that.
You’ll need a lot of good images of your hotel – the more the better. The consumption gets higher and higher. Make sure you have more than 20 photos for your property.
Add videos – even more important than photos nowadays
Highlight key features – show off with your key features – make the offering unique and stand out from the crowd

Tip 2 – Master the popularity ranking

The Trip Advisor ranking is based on reviews and reflects your standing within a geographical location. Just like in Google, the higher the popularity the more clicks you’re listing will receive. The ranking algorithm uses the quality, quantity and age of the reviews to rank the hotels. For good reviews a superior experience is a precondition, however it makes sense to actively encourage the guests to write reviews (but don’t incentivise, this is against the tripadvisor rules) and continue to do so for keeping them fresh.

Tip 3 – Get awarded and gain from it

Consistent great reviews from guests will result in Trip Advisor awards. Proudly display this decoration – and attract new guests for your property in the process. This could be: notify existing customers to make them come back, promote the heck out of the award through e.g. press releases, social media, put a badge on your website, put it on company collateral etc. This award shows the appreciation of your customers and other consumers trust them, so it’s hugely important to show these awards.

Tip 4 – Business listings and the dashboard

Use the business services Trip Advisor is offering – they’re worth it. Some best practices are:

Boost direct bookings – display any three contact points – websites, email addresses, or phone numbers – to bring potential guests directly to you
Target the right consumers – create ads to promote offers, promotions, embrace the mobile users with the click-to-call functionality.

We believe that despite all the bad press with regards to fake reviews Trip Advisor recently received it is the social platform “to rule them all”. We have seen social media platforms come and go and the same might happen to Trip Advisor. However for the foreseeable future Trip Advisor is the place for hotels to actively engage with potential customers, and it’s imperative and crucial to participate in this discussion.

So more and more hotel guests are choosing to research their hotel via a social media network, reserve their hotel room via Trip Advisor or a whole host of booking engines and make that booking using one of the 5.6 billion mobile devices that exist in the world. Oh and they might visit the hotel’s own website for a quick look at the room. But even here guests know that if they view shots of the room that other guests have taken, they will get a more realistic view than if they look at the glossier, art directed shots that are taken by the hotel’s advertising agency.

Given these trends it amazes me that for some hotel group’s social media strategy is still the ‘elephant in the room’! LAW Creative is a specialist hotel and marketing agency and many times in meetings we hear that a particular hotel is still reviewing its social media strategy. Almost as if the whole thing may soon go away! Not all hotels are properly engaging with guests on the social media networks and responding positively to guest complaints. Possibly hoping that the good will outweigh the bad. There are many ways that Hotels and other businesses can engage with customers on social networks but engage they must if they are to harness the power of the phenomenon. LAW Creative can assist with all aspects of in-bound marketing especially for hotel and leisure clients.

Creating millions of advocates for your brand, service and product.

In-bound marketing is basically the use of social media marketing, on page SEO, pay per click, video production, premium content, blogs, effective landing page design, mobile, sms voting, high quality websites, content writing and other digital tools to positivity engage with client targets. It’s simply about customers, members, guests, patients, and others wanting to find out more about you and your brand. In-bound marketing is about warm (or even hot) leads and creating millions of advocates for your brand service and product.

Like anything else in-bound marketing needs to form part of an overall integrated marketing strategy. And it most certainly doesn’t need to be farmed out to dozens of disparate groups of individuals or companies who do not have a clear understanding and direction of your overall brand strategy.

But for those companies who can ‘close the circle’ in-bound offers a powerful and relatively inexpensive communication method. And it is totally measurable.

In-bound marketing provides clients with enormous benefits and possibilities but it also has the potential to disrupt and derail their marketing activity too.

Effective in-bound marketing can be a total game changer!

There have always been a myriad of marketing channels. First there was advertising, then TV advertising, direct marketing, promotion and everything else in between. And now it’s social media marketing. There have always been plenty of choices for marketers to make. But of course this one is a total game changer!

Don’t inadvertently derail and disrupt your brand marketing strategy.

It is paramount to remember that a clear, single-minded brand proposition will always be the key to your success. If you do not have the correct brand strategy in place… no amount of TV advertising or social media exposure will help you. The marketing channels may change, but planning, strategy and creative will always be the crucial to brand success. A bad idea or brand proposition will always be just that. And no amount of technology or exposure will rescue it!

Clients are currently being persuaded to employ countless experts particularly in the digital arena. I wont even start to list them all but they’ll have a strategic and creative agency, a digital media buyer, SEO partner, a video partner, a video SEO partner, a CRM systems partner, a digital company for websites, etc., etc. Right now it is endless as client companies desperately seek to cover all of the possible bases.

Often this self-interested group of suppliers are not ‘singing off the same hymn sheet’. In fact they are more likely to be interested in gaining market share from each other than working for the good of their client. The time and staff that it takes a client company to manage these groups is enormous.

In the nineties there was a substantial move towards a fully integrated agency approach. And because brand strategy must always be king clients may once again want to integrate the emerging technologies within one agency or network, for the sake of their own sanity and the cohesion of their brand message.

At LAW Creative we continue to employ industry experts to deliver best in class services in the emerging technologies to ensure clients enjoy ‘joined up’ strategic and creative thinking as well as integrated execution across all key disciplines.

LAW Creative offers a fully integrated offer from Planning to Programming including the supply of innovative on brand strategies for in-bound marketing. Especially for the hotels and leisure sector.