Marketing is the ability to tailor appropriate messages to customers across different channels with the ultimate goal of driving an action. To properly deliver the right message at the right time on the right channel to the right audience requires a range of skills and holistic understanding of the buyer journey.
What makes hotel marketers different than typical marketers is their skillset. To visually represent this point, think of a generic hotel bed.
This bed represents the skills a hotel marketer needs to deliver value. These are comprised of four discrete components: breadth, depth, reach and footing. The length of the bed stands for the breadth of channels; the bed’s depth equals depth of expertise; the height of the headboard shows reach and the feet represent the four foundational pillars that support the bed. Here’s how they come together:
There are four footings that make hotel marketers unique.
1. REVNUE MANAGEMENT AND DISTRIBUTION
Key partnership alignment: Marketing puts words and images to the pricing that the revenue team creates and the distribution team sends out.
To be a better partner, hotel marketers must know KPI’s for the revenue management/distribution teams and help them achieve their goals. In addition, marketers should understand how the hotel’s compset is structured and watch each for changes in competitors’ campaigns. Marketers need to know their hotel’s breakeven cost and budgeted ADR for each room category when it comes to suggesting new promotions. They must understand the segment breakdown and expected percentage allocation of each to meet budget. They’ll need to help revenue management/distribution police OTAs since this has a direct impact on existing in-flight meta-campaigns.
Strategy: The marketing team must leverage web analytics to help drive direct bookings based on customer insight. In particular, they need to review rate driven campaign performance and provide insight into the campaign conversion rate. These learnings will help the revenue management team tweak pricing models related to marketing campaigns.
Key partnership alignment: Marketing needs to understand the sales team’s motivations, along with their goals in terms of channel contribution and their individual KPIs. Marketers must speak to each audience and anticipate sales’ needs.
Strategy: Using analytics, customer insight and feedback from the sales team, marketing can drive highly qualified leads directly to the sales team. Moreover, when it comes to leads from B2B landing pages, marketing can share key insights on demographics, locations, age, income level and affinities to help the sales team focus their efforts.
3. CALL CENTER
Key partnership alignment: Marketing creates scripts and promotions to help agents convert incoming guest calls.
Marketers need to know how the call center agents’ success is measured in terms of revenue targets, conversion and handle time. They should talk to the agents to learn more about the guests who are calling or listen to recorded calls and review the call categories. When a marketer creates a campaign, they should understand how it might impact the call center in terms of call handle time. Knowing the types of calls the call center receives and what kind of information guests want can help as well. Are guests calling because they’re more comfortable talking to an agent? Or because they can’t find the information online, the web descriptions are confusing, and/or there’s an issue with the booking engine.
Strategy: The call center should only handle bookings. By providing key customer data and sharing the brand persona with agents, marketing can help them visualize callers and drive conversion. Leveraging analytics to update content, such as FAQs, and making certain information more visible and accessible online can help reduce non-revenue related calls. To reduce call center activity marketing should anticipate guest questions about a specific promotion or the hotel in general and make sure the answer is easily found online.
4. OPERATIONS
Key partnership alignment: The marketing team creates the story of the guest’s on-site experience. The operations team brings that story to life once the guest arrives.
Operations must understand marketing campaigns in order to create a consistent guest experience. Learning how campaigns impact the front desk allows the marketing team to optimize the campaign. To do that, marketing needs to know the operations team’s roles and limitations, then find new ways to collaborate and bring initiatives to life.
Strategy: As marketing pilots onsite initiatives, they can partner with operations to collect guest feedback. Collecting opinions about on-site amenities helps determine what’s driving profits. Marketing can analyze the amenity cost along with opportunity costs of having operations explain them to guests and fulfill them on property.
Depth, breadth, reach and footing are the hallmarks of today’s hospitality marketer. Given recent industry downsizing, and the consolidation of roles, it’s not surprising that marketers are the glue that holds the revenue generation and operations teams together.
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