Posted in Tips and Ideas

Smart & Powerful Ways to Use WiFi Marketing In The Hospitality Industry

Posted on by Daniel Wilson

Hotel and resort visitors expect to find complimentary WiFi access during their stay, so hospitality businesses must incorporate this benefit into their offerings to give customers what they want and need.

But, offering free WiFi isn’t just a way to please and serve guests — it’s also a powerful way for hotels to improve their marketing, operations, and customer service.

WiFi marketing in the hospitality industry gives hotels many smart ways to improve their business. Here are a few ways that a hotel can benefit by giving free WiFi access to their guests.

Collect Demographic Data on Guests

When you use WiFi marketing, you have options for how you require guests to sign up to access the service. You can create your own login system, or you can sync with Facebook and enable guests to sign up using their Facebook accounts.

The benefit of using Facebook as a log-in source is that when guests sign in via this method, you get access to troves of customer data. You can learn about guest demographics, interests, and even spending habits. This data can provide valuable insights as you strive to learn about your customer base and craft messages that will be most likely to resonate with them.

Create Guest Profiles and Track Brand Engagements

When guests log in to WiFi marketing, you can also set up a system that creates a profile for them. This profile may include information pulled from the user’s Facebook page or connect with other supporting data systems that add details to their profile. It can include information about the user’s engagement with the hotel, tracking how long they stay, how often they visit, duration of time between stays, etc.

With WiFi marketing, you can also require an email address or phone number for users to sign up, which gives you a way to remarket to guests at a later time. You can then use details from the guest’s customer profile to determine what messages would best resonate with them based on their interests, habits, and engagement with the hotel property.

Share Marketing Messages on Login Splash Pages

A large portion of guests use free WiFi when it’s offered at a hotel. That means most guests will visit the designated WiFi splash landing page to enter their information and log in. Knowing that most of your guests will visit this specific landing page gives you the opportunity to market and connect with audiences on this page.

You can design this page to share important information about your property and highlight upcoming events and time-sensitive details. You can also use this page market to guests and promote offers, up-sells, and paid on-property amenities. It’s a prime place for sharing essential details and deals.

Promote Using Personalized Page Redirects

Once guests use your login landing page, you can use their data and guest profile information to set up page redirects so they are sent to a new landing page personalized just for them.

For example, if the guest has stayed at your property more than once, you can send them to a page about your customer loyalty program. Or, if the guest is staying with you for the first time, you can send them to a page that offers a virtual tour of the location. The personalized approach improves customer experience and gives you an opportunity to engage in more targeted marketing. The customer experience can also be improved by through guest check in app.

Track Foot Traffic on Your Property

A feature of WiFi marketing in the hospitality industry that many businesses don’t know about is the tool’s ability to track users as they move around a location. When guests log in to free WiFi via their mobile devices, the system can track where the user is on the property.

This information can be used to create heat maps that show you where guests spend the most time on your property. It can also offer insights into guest habits. You can see what parts of the property guests use most, what areas they ignore, how long they wait for amenities, and even if they take the wrong routes to rooms. All of this information can be used to improve your operations process, optimize your on-site digital way finding, and develop ideas for changes to on-site amenities.

Use Geofencing to Trigger Relevant Push Notifications

When you can track guests as they move throughout your property, you unlock another powerful communication opportunity. You can set up on-site geofences that trigger relevant push notifications to guests based on their position on your property. Geofences can also use guest location to trigger changes to areas around the guests, such as changing digital signage content or adjusting overhead music and messaging.

For example, you could set a geofence around the spa at your resort. When a guest walks into the spa, the geofence could trigger a push notification to their phone to alert them of spa specials. It could also use data from the customer profile to change content on the digital signage in the spa reception area. If the guest is a repeat customer, the signage could change to feature the guests most frequently purchased services. Geofencing is just another powerful way to use WiFi marketing in the hospitality industry to personalize and improve guest experiences.

Start Using WiFi Marketing In The Hospitality Industry

On the surface, it might seem like offering free WiFi to guests at hotels and resorts is just a way to please guests who expect to have this amenity. But when you dive deeper into what is possible with WiFi marketing in the hospitality industry, you find that this tool serves hotel management just as much, if not more, than guests. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

Posted in Tips and Ideas

5 Tips To Increase Your Average Occupancy For The Independent Hotelier

Posted on by Daniel Wilson

As a hotelier, there are a few metrics that you absolutely must be keeping track of each week. The most basic of which when it comes to the performance of your bedrooms is your average occupancy percentage and average room rate.

Quite simply Average room rate is your total weekly room revenue (excluding food and beverage) divided by the total number of room nights sold for the same week.  Let’s say your total room revenue is £20,000 for that week and number of room nights sold is 200 then your average room rate is: 20,000 / 200 = £100.

To work out your Average Occupancy Percentage you first need to know the total number of hotel rooms you have multiplied by 7 days.  For example, if your hotel has 50 bedrooms then in one week you have 350 available room nights available to sell.  To work out your average occupancy for the week take the number of room nights you actually sold in that week, multiply it by 100 and then divide by the total maximum number of available room nights.  For example, in a week if you sold 200 room nights your average occupancy percentage would be 200 * 100 / 350 = 57.14%

Now you understand the math what we want to try and achieve is to increase our occupancy percentage without adversely affecting our average room rate.

As every hotelier worth their salt will tell you… You can’t sell yesterday’s empty room! So, increasing our occupancy levels will certainly help the bottom line.

However, it’s not quite that simple as most hotels have peak seasons or days of the week when they are full and unfortunately you can’t be more than full.  So, what we need to do is fill our rooms during quieter periods.

1) Photographs.  Yes, you may have a 40 megapixel on your smartphone but photography is one area that I believe you shouldn’t try and cut corners on.  Old photographs can really date your hotel and cost you business.  If you’ve recently updated rooms or parts of the hotel make sure your photos are updated at the same time. Interior photographs need to be lit properly, they need to be staged properly with flowers and accessories and they certainly need post-processing to make sure they really pop.  The biggest jump I saw in bookings is when we redid the hotel’s website and replaced all of the OTA sites with professional photos.

2) Voucher and discount sites.  Get this right and it can dramatically increase your occupancy levels get it wrong and it will dramatically reduce your average room rate!  The aim here is to increase our occupancy levels during the offseason BUT NOT discounting rates at busy times.  In the case of my hotel, our quietest months were January to March but excluding Saturday nights as we were always full on a Saturday night with guests paying the full rate. The discount/voucher site will be looking for a 40% + discount so how do we pull this off without our average room rate taking a dive?  The answer is to add things to the deal with a perceived value and then apply the discount.  Lets say your room only rate is £100 if we add a late checkout which we charge £20 for (but costs us nothing) and a bottle of prosecco in their room on arrival that we charge £24 for (but costs us £7) and 2 x full English breakfasts which we charge £30 for (but only costs us £10) we now have a package with a perceived value of £174.  If we were to sell this package for £99 we have effectively given the guest a 54% discount which looks like an amazing deal.  In reality however, it’s only cost us the trade price of a bottle of Prosecco, and a few eggs, bacon and sausages!  Be careful what you throw in for free however as it would be nice to be able to leave a few things to upsell the guest when they arrive at the hotel.  The sales person at the discount site will probably suggest selling a dinner bed and breakfast package with a bottle of wine included.  The problem here is that you’ve lost the ability to sell them dinner in your restaurant when they arrive and you’ve even included the bottle of wine so you probably won’t make much in drink sales either.

3) Reputation Marketing. So, your website looks great, your photographs look stunning, you’ve got a strong offer that’s the deal of the century, your prospective guest is about to book but decides to check your reviews on TripAdvisor first…. Oh!

With 93% of people reading reviews before making a booking it doesn’t bare thinking about how many bookings you are losing if these are the first reviews a prospective guest sees!  So what can we do to improve our hotel’s reputation online?  The first thing we should do is make sure our reception staff are asking the guest before they pay their bill if they have enjoyed their stay.  Make sure they are trained to professionally handle a legitimate complaint and try to deal with the complaint, or at least escalate it and tell the guest a senior person will be getting back to them before they leave the premises.  By doing this we are trying to stop the disgruntled guest from leaving a negative review online before the manager gets a chance to look into the issue and attempt to make things right.  Obviously, if the guest had enjoyed their stay there is no harm in politely asking them if they would leave a review.  Most people will agree, but whether they remember to do it or not is another matter.  A much better solution is to automate the process and use reputation management software to get in front of a disgruntled guest and increase your positive review volume.  If a negative review does slip through the net and ends up on an OTA or review site you need to respond to the review and give your side of events as soon as possible.  Remember this is not for the disgruntled guests’ benefit but it’s for your prospective guests who are reading the review and may be about to make a booking. Some hotel reputation software will constantly scan OTA and Review sites for new reviews and alert you as soon as a new one is posted.  This can be extremely useful as it’s pretty much impossible to manually check every possible review website and OTA multiple times per day!

4) Snail mail. Before email marketing was a thing we use to send postcards with a special offer to guests that had stayed before.  With GDPR rules in Europe it’s becoming increasingly difficult to market to your repeat customers using email.  OTA’s are also shielding the guests’ real email from you which ads a further barrier.  GDPR does not apply to postal mail so I believe this is a marketing channel that is due for a renaissance. If you do a quick search on the internet you will find companies that will allow you to design the postal campaign online and they will take care of the postage.  With rates as low as 32p per letter and no stuffing envelopes or queuing at the post office, I think this is a great method to increase your occupancy levels in the quieter periods.

5) Dynamic pricing.  If your prices are set in stone you are probably leaving money on the table AND missing out on bookings.  The idea is simple – your rates change based on demand.  If the hotel is busy and you only have a few rooms left the price goes up.  If the hotel is empty the price goes down.  Things to keep in mind:  Don’t put on a mask! If you charge too much on a very busy day you may well let the room but if the guest feels like they have been robbed you could possibly get a bad review and that will cost you more in the long run. Don’t go too cheap – it’s very difficult to raise prices once people have experienced your product at a lower price.  Be mindful of guests that have already booked at a higher price. Get this wrong and you will be discounting existing bookings!  There are tools like hotel mobile app out there to help you do this and some of the OTA’s like booking.com even have their own products that will compare your rates to the competition.

Posted in Hotels and Resorts

3 Ways Customer Engagement Can Be a Boon to Your Business

Posted on by Daniel Wilson

Time is precious—and people must choose wisely how to best spend their hours.

Many marketers today feel that focusing on acquiring new customers is the most worthwhile investment.

While that’s certainly a priority, adding net-new logos isn’t the only way to generate revenue. And it’s far from the most lucrative option you have.

According to this Invesp infographic:

  • It’s five times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to keep an existing one.
  • The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5–20%—compared with 60–70% for an existing customer.
  • Current customers are 50% more likely to try new products and 31% more likely to spend more than new customers.

So, if you continue dedicating too much time to customer acquisition, you risk leaving opportunity (and money) on the table.

What’s the alternative? Developing a comprehensive customer engagement strategy to generate additional revenue through your current customers—at a fraction of the cost.

Shifting your focus from customer acquisition to customer marketing will help you in three key areas:

1. Retaining your customers

Keeping customers requires satisfying them at every turn. But how do you do that?

First, make sure your product or service works as advertised. File this under “Duh” if you want, but it’s true. If you consistently fail to deliver what you promise, your current customers will quickly turn into former customers.

Of course, there will always be occasional hiccups. So, you’ll need to have a strong support system in place to respond to your customers and meet their needs.

When a product breaks, buyers want a quick, easy way to engage with your company and remedy the situation. They want your business to clearly communicate with them, provide a solution to their problem, and maybe even go the extra mile by offering a credit, discount, or freebie for their trouble.

It’s also important to establish open, ongoing engagement with your customers. By regularly giving them valuable information on how to use your product or service and sending thought leadership that demonstrates your expertise, you can reinforce their decision of doing business with your company.

2. Cross-selling and upselling your customers

If you can convince your customers they made the right choice by picking your brand over others, you’ll discover a world of cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Customers purchase a product to solve a problem. But rarely are they dealing with a single problem—they have a whole host of them. And your company likely sells a portfolio of products aimed at solving related issues.

By proving to your customers that they’ve started a relationship with the most trusted, reliable vendor, your business will become the first place they turn when looking for a complementary product.

But how do you spot these cross-selling and upselling opportunities? Well, it’s not much different than recognizing when new customers want to make a purchase.

Analyze what content your current customers are engaging with. Are they visiting product pages, watching solution demos, and checking out prices? Great! You can capitalize on that information by sending them custom-tailored content touting the benefits of the products they’re interested in. And you can notify your sales team to reach out to them and offer a deal.

Another method to consider when cross-selling and upselling is account-based marketing. If one department of an enterprise customer is using your product, you can target others within the company that aren’t.

This is especially effective because you can highlight how their business is already reaping the rewards of your product—and you have empirical evidence to prove it. Surely, your product would benefit their division, as well.

3. Turning your customers into advocates

As powerful as modern marketing is, it can hardly compete with the mighty word of mouth. People are much more likely to purchase from a brand after hearing a friend, colleague, or family member rave about it.

The numbers back it up, too. Word-of-mouth marketing generates two times as many sales as paid advertising, according to a McKinsey study.

Unfortunately, getting people to speak out on your behalf doesn’t happen as often as companies would like. But there is a simple way to incentivize your customer base to share all the positive things they’ve got to say about your business.

By establishing a referral program, you can reward customers for generating strong leads. And if you’re willing to compensate your customers for promoting your company’s products to their networks, you can inject a much-needed boost into your word-of-mouth marketing efforts.

Not to mention, customers proactively seeking out contacts who might be interested in your products deserve something for their efforts—whether a discount on a new purchase or free entry to one of your upcoming events. A well-oiled customer advocacy program is essential for nurturing your customers into seasoned advocates.

Creating a comprehensive customer engagement strategy

A truly inclusive customer engagement strategy leaves no customer behind—new or old.

So, whether you want to start an ongoing dialog with your buyers or reactivate dormant customers, the first thing you need to do is make sure you have a comprehensive strategy in place.

To achieve that, you have to assess how you’re currently managing client engagement. Start by asking yourself:

  • How many new customers do you generate each month?
  • Where do your customers come from?
  • What is the range of products you offer?
  • What key audience groups are your customers composed of?
  • How do you communicate with your customers?

Answering these questions will help you identify and address areas for improvement.

You’ll also want to set qualitative and quantitative goals—from building more customer trust to improving email open rates by a certain percentage.

The final thing you’ll need to do is leverage a customer engagement platform. These powerful tools help you implement a strategy in phases, allowing you to incrementally measure and improve.

That’s it. Just a few small steps for a mighty big impact. And now, with a fully developed strategy at the core of your marketing operations, all the time you spend engaging customers—both new and old—will be time well spent.

There are many other ways to improve the guest experience and increase the direct bookings for hotels through apps like personal concierge app.

Posted in Hotels and Resorts

How to Determine the ROI of Account-Based Marketing

Posted on by Daniel Wilson

When it comes to marketing and sales, the more precise and specific you can get with every customer, the better. Customers want to feel important and recognized by brands, and it is exactly why strategies like personalization are so effective.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is when you target prospects by identifying a point of contact or persona within an organization which you believe you’ll be able to serve the best, build a lasting relationship with them, and then offer an increasingly wide range of services to the account. As you observe how your customers move from phase to phase in the buyer’s journey, you have the opportunity to create more personalized messaging, and also collect better data for improving their experience and increasing customer lifetime value in future.

All in all, ABM shortens the sales cycle and improves your lead conversion ratio. Research from the Altera Group found that 97% of businesses that use an ABM approach saw higher ROIs than with any other marketing strategy.

The problem that arises here is proving just how much ABM is helping. Measuring and reporting ROI has consistently been a top challenge for marketing teams. Account-based marketing processes are also typically quite effort-intensive to establish and execute, given that it is hyper-personalized and requires a lot of data for segmentation.

So, how can your team ensure that you are getting a precise report on the actual return on your business’s investment for account-based strategies?

Clarify your goals and objectives

The only way to know if any strategy was a success is to first set a goal for it to meet. When it comes to ABM, you need to set realistic goals and objectives that are based on your current results and your team’s abilities.

Start off by taking a look at your current scores from whatever marketing strategies you are using—account-based or otherwise—to identify the metrics that could use improvement. You will also want to know the exact numbers for comparison so you can tell whether or not ABM is proving to be more valuable than strategies that have been used in the past.

An ABM MarTech stack should include tools like a content management system, an analytical reporting program, an email automation tool, and a CRM platform. Each of these tools plays an important role in executing ABM campaigns as well as track progress along the way.

If you have already been using an ABM approach for your marketing for some time, it may be helpful to use a solution that has capabilities for account profiling, account validation, account scoring, and tuning your model. Look for a solution with AI capabilities to build account lists (by analyzing millions of data points) for you and ranks them based on predictive scoring.

Assign fixed costs to each campaign

Once your objectives have been set, you need to set budgeting parameters on your strategies. Again, it is important to be realistic here and find a balance between what you want to do and what is actually possible. Don’t expect million-dollar results on a hundred-dollar budget here.

The next step to assign a fixed cost to every piece of content that will make up part of your strategy. This includes billable hours for content creation (for example, hours it costs your content team to write a blog piece or create an email), as well as the cost of publication (paid advertising costs, PPC, and monthly costs of platforms used).

You need to be clear about the exact cost of each piece of content or marketing campaign so that you are able to determine accurate ROI.

Identify metrics that matter

Most businesses tend to focus on revenue-based metrics like growing conversions or lead generation. These are certainly important objectives, but you should also explore account-specific opportunities like impressions, engagement levels, and brand sentiment. These may be a little bit trickier to measure, but they are important objectives that business should focus on, too.

As you set these objectives, consider how they play into your ROI. Obviously, a conversion is a direct return, but just because you don’t see an immediate monetary reward from a marketing campaign does not make it a total failure. On average, customers need to interact with your brand 7 to 13 times before they can be qualified as leads. Therefore, boosting brand recognition and reaching more audiences can help your bottom line later on down the road.

As you can see, the key metrics to track can generally be broken down into two groups: influence on conversions and actual conversions. Be sure that you keep each separate so that you know the exact return in terms of money at the moment as well as the impact it has on potential sales.

So, which metrics matter the most in terms of ROI? Does the reach or views really matter, or do you just want to know the financial impact in terms of leads generated and conversions?

Track closely and adjust along the way

It is obviously tricky to measure the potential impact that your strategies will have. One way to estimate it best is by tracking your content’s engagement, coverage, and focus. For example, you can easily measure the number of accounts who have downloaded your ebooks or followed your social accounts.

Over time, you can create data-sets based on consumer behavior to see the likelihood of conversions that occur when customers follow these behaviors to help you get a better understanding of the long-term influence that your ABM strategies have.

Once all of your goals are defined and metrics recorded, it is best to utilize software to determine the ROI and monitor it in real-time. It is very important that whatever system you use is able to tag and track each and every piece of content or element you create and connect it to a customer account for an accurate ROI reading.

Be sure to pay close attention to these numbers and look for patterns and falling-off points. If certain content pieces are failing to bring in the numbers, adjust and test the results until you find the strategies that work best.

Ace your ABM

As with any marketing strategy, account-based marketing will require a rinse and repeat approach until your marketing team finds the ideal mix that works best for your target prospects. The ultimate goal is to reach and convert the largest number of accounts using the least resources possible. For this, you need to

  • Amass and analyze data that will help you zero in on and convert the best-fit accounts that you can work with.
  • Know exactly how you will work out the ROI of your ABM initiatives.
  • Define KPIs that are comparable with your previous or alternative marketing strategies.
  • Constantly track metrics and refine your attribution model as you grow.

How do your ABM-related metrics differ from your traditional ones? How long does it take for you to identify accounts and convert them? What’s the quantifiable impact on your bottom line? We’d love to hear your experiences in the comments.

Concierge apps can help you get last-minute deals, keep track of your rewards programs and increasing direct bookings. Please feel free to share your experiences, tips and ideas.

Posted in Hotels and Resorts

5 Ways to Create the Optimal Customer Experience on Your Website

Posted on by Daniel Wilson

I am sure most people have quit while waiting for a website page to load. Waiting is a hassle; we all expect fast-loading sites—anything less isn’t worth the wait in today’s time-poor world. If your website is like this, then you probably haven’t upgraded or even thought about your website for a little while now.

And that’s why website speed is an essential part of your site’s performance. Whether your goal is reducing customer care calls, getting more targeted leads or being the hub of your digital strategy, website optimization can make your site more effective in achieving those goals.

Most consumers state that load time is an important factor when it comes to searching for information online. According to Google, 53% of mobile phone visits are abandoned if the page takes more than three seconds to load. Moreover, the study suggested that fast websites generate higher revenue. Mobile sites which take a maximum of five seconds to load earn two times more ad revenue than those loading for 19 seconds.

Furthermore, Google asked users whether they would prefer 30 or 10 search results to be served up per page. When Google incorporated 30 results to a few search pages, the traffic dropped by 20%, and the page load time between the two result pages was only half a second. If half a second has such an impact on traffic, imagine the difference it would make if you reduce your site’s load time by three seconds.

Key aspects of website performance optimization

Hosting

There are several important web hosting factors to consider when choosing whether to stay with your existing provider or move to a new provider. It goes without saying that you must make sure the hosting service has a dedicated 24×7 customer service. Check out reviews of their service on third-party review sites as well. Make sure there are no common themes in complaints as that would suggest there is likely to be a similar issue for you.

When browsing, you are trying to access remotes files found in web servers and the faster the computer, the faster one accesses the requested pages. The same applies to web hosting: effective web hosts invest in web server architecture to make sure that every page on those web servers run at full speed. Additionally, look for more advanced hosting packages that come with enhanced memory and increased power. Enhanced resources boost the speed of your websites because requests are executed more quickly. Advancing from shared web hosting to better plans will also do the trick.

Studies have found that 47% of consumers expect a web page to load within two seconds or less, with 40% abandoning a website that takes more than three seconds to load. There are lots of valuable guides and tips about there to speed up your site whether you need to speed up a WordPress website or any of the other content management systems out there such as Umbraco, Drupal, and so on. Speed really is king, so do what you can to improve yours.

Size of images

Files and images are crucial tools for your site as they help increase conversions, elicit your audience’s emotion, and tell stories about your site. It would be hard to develop an effective website without using visual content. The primary roles of using images on your website should be to improve the user experience and also enhance your content marketing. If the images negatively impact your site’s performance, then you need to fix this ASAP as Google will also start punishing your site by ranking it lower.

Also, consider “page bloat.” As new technology and new methods come along for content marketing and lead generation, try to avoid cramming too much onto one page. Images, scripts, flash, HTML, style sheets, forms, video and so on—one page could have all of these on them. Try to avoid this. Simple, clean, and easy to understand is the best approach.

Images can often be quite a problem for load speed. If images are not properly optimized, they tend to consume valuable page loading time and contribute to providing a poor experience for your website visitors. Optimizing images helps boost your website speed and performance—the larger the file size of the image, and the less optimized they are, the slower a site will load and the worse it will perform. It’s as simple as that.

When selecting a file type, consider the purpose of your image and what it consists. Choose the format which results in the smallest size while retaining the quality. Furthermore, ensure you choose the right dimensions. Identify where the images will be used on your website and make sure they are not larger than needed for that space. Your hosting provider will be able to advise on not just how best to optimize them.

Apps/Plug-ins

Plugins offer different features and functionality. Some plugins load assets on the front-end such as images, JavaScript files, and CSS style sheets while others are used in making database calls on the back-end. Most plugins need HTTP requests to load assets, and each request impacts your website’s page load time.

When website plugins are installed and set up properly, their impact on website speed is minimal. However, a conflict between plugins can negatively impact your website speed the same way as failing to keep them updated. Moreover, if you are using too many plugins that are making a lot of requests to load assets and files, or your plugins are not up-to-date, then your site’s user experience and performance will be negatively affected.

Mobile-first

Mobile-first can be described as the as a way of designing a mobile version of your site before the desktop version. Responsive design is ok, but mobile-first is ideal.

Mobile-first has three key benefits:

  • It improves the user experience for your website
  • Performs incredibly for backward compatibility
  • Google loves mobile-first websites and favors them in search engine results pages.

This means that even before coding and designing your website, gear your focus towards a great mobile design to get a better, simpler and faster web experience across all screens and devices. Aside from most of us browsing and searching on mobiles more than desktops now, Google’s mobile-first indexing is changing the game—this means that Google is crawling and indexing the mobile version of a site instead of the desktop version.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

CDN is a geographically located server which host copies of your website’s resources to deliver content based on the user’s location. CDN shortens the RTT (round trip time) of your content and brings it closer to the geographical location of your site visitor.

When online users request specific content from your website, the content delivery networks look for the most optimal edge note which can fulfill the requests. This means that automatically choosing servers that are closest to the requesting user, are least expensive, and have the highest capacity.

Conclusion

Aberdeen Group conducted a study which found that one-second delay in a page load time leads to 11% fewer page views, 7% loss in conversions, and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. The findings imply that page load times directly impact sales, search engine optimization, as well as overall customer experience.

The fact that many customers say that they will never return to a slow site means that you should keep them happy by using proper website performance tools and incorporating the aspects mentioned above. You’ll be surprised at the difference it makes to not just your overall website traffic, but all key website metrics.

Develop your hotel mobile app to delight your guest quick and easy. It helps you empower your sales team to sell immediately.

Posted in Hotels and Resorts

Find Your Ideal Customer with Account Insights and Profiling

Posted on by Daniel Wilson

The digital revolution has raised customer expectations massively. People want much more than just a product—they crave a complete experience.

The success of your marketing campaign no longer depends on the number of leads you generate. It rests on your ability to maximize your customers’ experience.

That’s why forward-thinking marketers are prioritizing account-based marketing—determining together with sales which accounts to target, why they should be targeted, and when they should be targeted. In fact, 87% of companies report a higher return on investment when adding account-based marketing (ABM) to their engagement strategy than traditional lead-based only marketing initiatives.

As we covered in our overview blog, a successful ABM strategy has people and experience at the center of it instead of random, individual interactions.

In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the first step of how to create epic account-based experiences (ABX) with the right account insights & profiling. 

With the right data—and a platform powerful enough to use the data effectively—you can gain highly accurate account insights and effectively profile your targets to create hyper-personalized account-based experiences that your customers and prospects will enjoy.

The first and most important challenge to overcome when wanting to truly maximize your ABX is knowing who your ABX should be for. What data should you be gathering? And how can you make the most of it?

Leveraging account insights in the new age of data

We’ve come a long way from sales-based account selection. Previously, sales teams would create a target account list based on the sales data they had available in their CRM. The process was time-consuming, took the sales team away from selling, and relied heavily on gut instinct.

But since the digital revolution, marketers have gained access to huge pools of data that can be used to help sales create more accurate account lists. Using these three key data sources, you can have better insight into which accounts to target:

Fit data 

Fit data often includes firmographics that detail a company’s location, number of employees, size, and other basic details. While this information is useful for gaining a high-level view of whoyour ideal account is for targeting, it needs to be combined with other data types to become useful. 

Intent data

Intent data identifies accounts that are actively searching or engaging with content related to your service or products. Whether it’s from paid media advertising data sources or opt-in data cooperatives, intent data can help you prioritize WHEN you should focus on certain target accounts over others and what messages to include in your content.

Engagement data

Engagement data helps you take account targeting to the next level by adding a third layer of insights to help hyper-prioritize which accounts to allocate resources on immediately. By identifying which accounts have already engaged with your content in the past—whether by opening emails, reading blogs, or registering for an event—you can get greater insight into which accounts have an even higher propensity to turn into closed-won accounts as well as the best way to reach them.

Great experiences aren’t just created from one data type—they come from combining all three to help you select the right accounts to target. But with so much data at hand, how do you effectively manage it?

Ideal customer profiles and predictive target account lists

Assuming your account data is clean and accurate, having lots of it can be both a blessing and a curse. It can bless us with the ability to create robust ideal customer profiles (ICPs) that help us select accounts with confidence, but it can also curse us with the daunting burden of having to manually analyze it so that we can actually use it. This is where AI can step in and help us speed up the process in a scalable way. However, AI is only as powerful as the amount of data that it is trained on and the quality of that data. It can help us leverage ICPs to create predictive target accounts lists that support your ABM strategy.

For example, if your ABM strategy is to cross-sell existing customer accounts with a specific product, you first need to know which of your existing customer accounts are ideal to target. With AI-powered look-alike models and the three data sources mentioned above, you can upload a list of customers who recently purchased a specific cross-sell product along with even having a high deal velocity. The model will analyze all the fit data and engagement data, along with enriching intent data to learn common attributes and even weigh them differently based on unique importance to you and your business to create your ideal customer profile. Next, you’ll want the AI to use your ICP to scan your existing customer base to pick out the best-fit accounts to cross-sell. 

Here are a few common examples of predictive target account lists:

Predictive best-fit lists: List of prioritized best-fit target accounts based on recent high-value, closed-won deals 

Predictive quick-win list: List of prioritized best-fit open opportunities with accounts that have high propensity to close faster than others

Operationalizing your predictive target account lists 

Once you have your predictive target account lists, it’s time to actually do something with them. Successful account-based marketers adopt marketing automation software that can operationalize their predictive target account lists.

With a best-in-class marketing automation platform, you can use AI to identify your ideal customer profile and match it to those in your account list. But identifying and prioritizing accounts is just the first step. The real magic of ABM comes when you put that data into practice by strategically discovering specific contacts within each target account 

While most marketers initially think the next step is to start engaging with the accounts on their target account lists, the next steps inevitably become hydrating those accounts by discovering net-new contacts within those accounts through the art of contact discovery. Remember, account insights and profiling uses mass amounts of data to primarily help you identify what the “perfect account” is,  but it doesn’t help you identify people within those accounts. 

Paving a path to step two of creating epic ABX: Contact discovery

Gathering accurate account insights and profiling your ideal customers is only the beginning of your exciting quest to create epic ABX. In our next blog in the series, we’ll look at how to discover contacts in your existing target accounts—as well as net-new accounts—to ensure you’re targeting the right people.

Mobile app for hotel is a best app for hoteliers to know about the reviews of guests about their hotels and they can improve their services according to the customers.

Posted in Tips and Ideas

5 Tips for Getting Hospitality Hiring Right

Posted on by Daniel Wilson

It’s a competitive market out there and with the recent booms in the economy, people are always on the lookout for new travel, entertainment, and leisure experiences. While this is great news for hotels, restaurants, and casinos, it sure can be a challenge trying to keep up with the demand. So how do you ensure your customers have great experiences to keep them coming back? It’s all about providing an enjoyable customer experience.

How often have you been to a restaurant or hotel and something goes wrong? The restroom isn’t functioning or the WiFi is so slow it’s not even worth using. Most people are willing to forgive an issue or two, but it could come at the cost of a prized customer. The right staff, equipped with exceptional customer service, can turn that negative experience around to result in a lifelong customer. So how do you find talented employees that know how to skillfully interact with guests? How do you identify a good hire? We’ve got 5 quick tips that you can put into practice today!

1)    Look for Service Intuition

Some employees seem to know just what’s needed before it’s even considered. Like the waitress that always keeps the coffee cup full or the hostess who’s checking in coats while processing a payment. It’s the dedicated and well-trained staff that keep your operation running clean and smooth.

By including qualifying questions as part of your application or interview process you can better recognize candidates who have the intuition to provide the exceptional service you’re looking for. Adding a few hypothetical examples of day to day operation challenges and asking how they would handle the situation can give incredible insight into how well the candidate might perform on the job. You may even get some unique ideas and creative replies that you can put into practice.

2)    Seek Performance and Personality

It takes a combination of hustle and the right attitude to work in the hospitality industry. Having a weak link in the service chain can throw the whole operation out of whack and end up costing you precious time and energy in the long run. Finding the right talent takes a little work on the front end, but it ultimately pays off.

Hiring managers often make the mistake of being too nice and avoid asking difficult questions. Don’t rush through and miss the opportunity to get a good glimpse into how the potential employee will react in a real-world scenario. Interviews typically last only 20-30 minutes so it’s crucial to quickly recognize tactful traits and problem-solving skills. An effective way to determine what an interviewee is capable of is to have them describe an instance where a guest was not pleased with the service. Does the candidate take responsibility or lay blame elsewhere? Are comments negative or derogatory towards guests? Their answers are your first clues into the type of worker you will have on your hands.

3)    Demand a Professional Demeanor

Most people put their best foot forward when interviewing and the hiring manager has the task to envision the candidate performing on the job. It’s easy to hire out of desperation, compromising ability over quality, but for some roles and positions it is just not negotiable.

Customer facing roles demand that you have personable and approachable staff. Every employee should meet your requirements and should be prepared and trained to deal with any customer situation. By surprising candidates with questions that go beyond their role, such as asking a dishwasher what they would do if a customer needed seating while the hostess was away, you can convey that customer service is a high expectation no matter the role they play in the company. Don’t be afraid to challenging your staff.

4)    Identify Integrity and Responsibility

Trust is a key factor to consider in a candidate when hiring. Whether they handle cash or the have the duties of locking up each night, having employees you can rely on is priceless. Is it possible to screen candidates for trustworthiness?

Background checks can help to screen out risky applicants, but how do you identify excellent work ethics? Situational interview questions, such as, “Can you describe an instance where you thought a co-worker was doing something wrong, what happened?” If a candidate doesn’t have an answer, it could be a good indication that they may be hesitant in sharing reports, problems or issues with their manager in the future.

5)    Improve the Quality of Candidates

If you’re still struggling to find the right hires, it just might be the source. Placing ads on job boards can bring in applicants but you’re looking for a dream team! StaffedUp is a hiring platform designed by restauranteurs created to tackle the challenges that hiring managers face in high turnover industries.

If you are in search of best concierge app then please contact us and know more details about it.

Posted in Tips and Ideas

The Receptionist is Dead – Why Hotels Need to Embrace Automation

Posted on by Daniel Wilson

The world is becoming more and more automated in all aspects, and this trend will continue. Automation has two main functions. The first is that it makes life easier for everyone. And secondly, and the most important for businesses, is that it helps increase revenue. With this in mind it raises the question: Why are hotels so awfully slow at adapting new technologies?

Let’s look towards airlines as an example, they are very good at embracing new technology. There are very few airlines that don’t have either online check in or self service kiosks, everything that can make travel as smooth and efficient as possible. Today it is unthinkable in most places to go to a check in counter and waste 45 minutes to get your boarding pass, when you can get it directly on your phone. So why are hotels so slow to adapt? You could argue that there are fewer airlines, so you have to stick to their ways. Fair point, but all airlines still have the option to choose check in via their counter. Check in via counter at airlines is expected to drop from 49% in 2017 to 26% in 2020. This is illustrative of how people would choose to check in given the options in a hotel environment as well. It’s difficult for consumers to use a technology when it’s not readily available to them to use.

Another aspect is the feeling of difference and superiority among hotel managers. If you ask 1,000 random hotel managers if they feel their hotel is unique and different from other hotels, chances are you will get 1,000 positive answers. But the hard fact is that almost none of them are. Truth of the matter is, most hotels are just another tool for guests to get a night’s sleep, and the cheaper they can get this the better. Of course, you have hotels that offer 5 star services, where they even make your bed ready at night, but that’s not what the average guest is looking for, and these guests don’t care about price at all. Time and time again studies find that price is the decisive factor for why guests choose price over any other factor. Except for location though, because location is actually the determinant factor for guests when deciding hotel. But let’s not bring that into the equation because you wouldn’t book a hotel in Paris when you are going to London. Let’s get back to reality.

When elevators first came they needed an operator, but automation made this redundant. Of course this person had to be paid, and in the end who ended up with the bill? Yes, the guest! Today if you ask guests if they would like to pay more money for their stay if you have an elevator operator, what do you think the answer would be? The same applies to a receptionist. What do you actually need the receptionist for? To give information to the guests you say. Sorry, but a receptionist will never be able to obtain Google’s up to date knowledge or have the varied opinions of TripAdvisor. Most are insistent on having a receptionist though. Maybe to tell the guests about the facilities in the hotel? This is something that the guest can read about on the website or even in a leaflet in the room. The receptionist has outplayed his/her role in the hotel world. Almost everybody has a smartphone these days, and they can use them to find any information they want, as long as the information is readily available.

Hotels can also be excused for being hesitant to take on technology because they have seen the drawbacks of automation. A lot of hotels jumped on the hotel automation train when it first came. But unfortunately for them they were on the wrong platform, the Bluetooth platform. It has become evident that Bluetooth as a technology for hotel automation systems has been a failure. It’s a great technology, but not for this specific use. This requires guests to actually use Bluetooth, and how do you solve the fact that people run out of batteries? No battery = no Bluetooth. Then usually with the Bluetooth technology comes an application you have to download. Automation is supposed to make life easier for everybody involved, not harder. So maybe it’s not so much lack of willingness among hotels to try automation as it is scepticism to the tested and failed technologies.

Then there is the argument that having a reception free hotel will make it feel cold and empty when checking in and there is nobody there. That is a fair point, but as long as price is the determinant factor for why a guest is choosing a hotel over another one, then automation is the only way to go. There is a reason why airlines such as Ryanair EasyJet and Norwegian have become so popular. Price!

Personal concierge app provide facilities to the guests and also it is best app to know about the reviews of guests. Our experience tells us that guests want automation more than the hotels themselves. This is an interesting observation, but not a surprising one. At the end of the day people want to be able to check in as conveniently as possible and at the lowest price, and that is done easiest with no human interaction, no downloads and no Bluetooth.

Posted in Tips and Ideas

3 Reasons Hotels Fail On Social Media

Posted on by Daniel Wilson

Some hotel brands are phenomenal with Social Media Marketing. They use every trick in the book brilliantly and see significant traffic and new reservations as a result. Many, however, make mistakes with their Social Media that not only hinder sales but conveys their brand in a poor light.

Here are 3 common mistakes Hotels make that you need to avoid:

1. Poor content

Content is very important, and it’s all too common we see hotels posting poor content on their feeds, discrediting their brand. Your content needs to be high quality, of genuine value to those you’re targeting, posted in the correct frequency, timings and with perfect typology (all of which are subjective to your brand).

Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience, and ask yourself if you’d gain value from following your social feeds and if they’re genuinely interesting to you.

2. Not using social to its full potential

Social Media not only consists of several very different platforms, but each platform has a wide variety of unique features; from bios to Instagram Stories and Facebook Groups. The list of ways you can use these platforms is endless.

Hotels should have their Social feeds branded brilliantly, with enticing bios, profile pictures, cover photos, groups and, of course, content. Hotels need to be using Instagram Stories, giveaways or contests, paid campaigns, and (if budgets allow) social media influencers. It’s a lot to take in, but your competition may already be doing all of these, and the rewards are massive.

3. Not responding or engaging

Try communicating with 10 different Hotels on Instagram, and I guarantee not all will respond. Some Hotels post, but then do nothing else. The high importance of customer satisfaction and personal interactions in the Hotel industry mean all Hotels should be speaking to and, more importantly, listening to users on Social Media. Ask questions, run polls, respond to all tweets, and like others’ content – it all makes social a bit more human.

Founders Media manage your Social Media with an eye for perfection and algorithm beating, innovative ideas, all while conveying style and sophistication. We also provide Audits and Consulting for brands seeking an external perspective.

Hotel mobile app for hotel is a best app for hoteliers to know about the reviews of guests about their hotels and they can improve their services according to the customers.

Posted in Tips and Ideas

How Do You Attract Millennials To Your Hotel, Apartment or B&B?

Posted on by Daniel Wilson

These days you read a lot about Millennials. Millennials are born between the early 1980’s and the mid-1990’s and make a very interesting target group for you as a hotelier. Why? Because Millennials are young professionals, adventurous and both willing and able to travel. They are very into social media and sharing the fun things they get up to in their free time. And that’s where your opportunities as a hotelier come in: you can make sure your hotel, apartment or B&B gets featured on their feeds so it will be shared by many and liked by even more. With this, you can build a strong online community for your hotel, apartment or B&B. As Millennials – and every other customer for that matter – value these word-of-digital-mouth recommendations and see this as their number one source of reliable information your online reputation matters.

So the question is: how can YOU attract these Millennials to your hotel, apartment or B&B?

Make booking easy

Perhaps the most important recommendation for attracting Millennials to your hotel, apartment or B&B: make sure booking your rooms is easy. It might sound like an open door but you’ll be surprised at what a quick-win this will actually proof to be. Make sure your hotel is listed on the big, famous online travel agency sites such as Booking.com and make direct bookings on your own website available. This needs to be possible instantly. No contact forms, no telephone numbers or e-mail addresses with the promise to get back to them. They will not fill out your form. They will skip your hotel, apartment or B&B and go to the next one.

How to do all this when there’s already so much on your plate? Or how to do all this when you’re not technical at all? Get a reliable property management system, booking engine and channel manager. These systems will help you to take control over your bookings and manage everything that’s happening in your hotel, apartment or B&B. Need a suggestion? RoomRaccoon’s all-in-one hotel software solution provides you with all these systems in one, is easy-to-use and very affordable.

Visuals are key

A key feature of Millennials – as touched on before – is that they are highly active online. If possible, 24/7 and without a pause. So being visible online with your hotel, apartment or B&B is absolute key. Make sure your website is attractive as Millennials are extremely viable for “instagrammable” content. With this, I mean not only to focus on the functionalities of your room but on the atmosphere. Everybody knows a hotel room has a bed but Millennials want to know how that bed looks like. Focus on the pictures. Millennials are extremely visual so if your pictures are dull or do not represent your facility in the best way possible you already lost their interest before they even had a proper look at your room(s).

It’s the little things

Focus on the complementary bottle of champagne, fresh roses in the room and chocolates on the cushions. As clichéd as it may sound, these are the things Millennials look for – as they make for nice pictures they can post on their Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook -and might be the very good reason they choose your hotel, apartment or B&B instead of your competitor’s. There’s also another site to this: as stated before Millennials are very visual and online. This results in them more inclined to post a review or photo report online. As we all know people are quicker to post a review about a negative experience than about a positive one, Millennials will not hold back to show everybody the curtains in their room had a hole in them, the bathtub was dirty or if the doorknob was falling off. These are also the little things that count. Make sure your rooms are in perfect shape for every visitor, as you  – and the whole Internet with you – will definitely know about it when it was not!

Concierge apps can also help you get last-minute deals, keep track of your rewards programs and increasing direct bookings. Please feel free to share your experiences, tips and ideas on how to attract Millennials to your hotel.