Hospitality Marketing Podcast Show 233

Hospitality Marketing Podcast 233 Transcripts

Welcome to this week in Hospitality Marketing. The podcast show number 233 with your host, Loren Gray. Hello, everyone, and welcome to hospitality marketing the podcast. I’m your host, Loren Gray, and this is episode number 233. So, every week we spent around 20 to 30 minutes sharing the most interesting tools, news and techniques being used in marketing for the hospitality industry. Let’s do a quick recap of our weekly live video show this weekend. Hospitality marketing as well, which airs every Friday at 11 30 Eastern US time. So with that, let’s get started And now today’s new resource still Okay, so our tool for review is actually a timely one this week because it’s actually a CZ. People know me from both the live Show him from our previous podcast.

I’m an ardent fan, if not addicted purchaser on a platform called APPSumo. Actually, it’s not a app. It’s a software to market service, Um, and there they provide a lot of start up software companies the opportunity to get critical mass by selling them at a very high discount sometime with limitations in comparison to their normal service profile offerings of that software. But to get it out to markets, people get hooked on it, like it use it, one expanded and so forth and so on.

And to that end, they brought it to market. Something’s been in market before and is very expensive to actually click on to, and that is called brand mentions. Uh, the pricing for brand mentions is pretty severe. Usually, for most of the time. It’s in the $1000 plus market. Ah, annually to have. And the reason I bring this up is as tool today, because brand mentions is being made available on Appsumo, $49 for a lifetime. Now it does have some restrictions as to volume, usage and so forth.

But those restrictions for most users will not be a problem. The restrictiveness of the usability of it when it comes to buying through Appsumo is really from an agency perspective. They need to buy it to scale. As for me, I have to buy several what they call codes to expand, how many key words I get to use and so forth and so on. and the average annual cost of this platform is roughly $1440 a year to have this. Now, why am I bringing this whole up? Well, because what I want to focus on today is the use of tools like this being at the early part of this year.

I’ve been developing webinars for HSMAI and podcast for each of them behind their closed circuit pay for service is that are trying to help them pretty much for people will put the stick in the sand. What I find from my client their actions is, ah, lot of my clients. I don’t know what channels they have access to if they even have a platform on that channel, whether they know who’s doing what for them it’s a hot mess. So I’m stepping people through the process of discovery, saying, Okay, first, go, go, find out what you’re connected to and who has access to it because it’s very messy business.

A lot of times when I start with a new client, they are full of people that still have access to their analytics, can’t pant platforms. They’re booking platforms, they’re marketing plan forms. Uh, they add pant campaign platforms that don’t even work with him anymore or are agencies they don’t work with anymore. And also they have no sense about who they’re competing with. And this brings us back to this tool, which is called Brand Mentions. This is one of many platforms that I’ve discussed about competitive set Awareness and your presence online brand mentions as a tool.

We’ll track on all social platforms on all Web and blog’s and reads everything on all these platforms. And if you’re not familiar with these platforms, that’s why you need something like this, because it will track you. It’ll follow you. It’ll make sure that if something said in relationship to you and or keywords that you want to follow along with, as in destination terms and so forth, it will show you what has been set on what platform to what success. It will also send you notifications. So how many times have we gone over and seen the unfortunate circumstances of a company that was not paying attention to what was being done for it on social media?

Something unfortunat negative happened at their property. Meanwhile, their ad campaigns they’re still running sunny and 72 come visit us. And this is a great place visit how cool this is. But meanwhile, all over the headlines is this tragedy or this unfortunate negative impact news. And they didn’t respond fast enough because they were unaware off this actually happening in a way that they could go to say, Oh my gosh, I got to suspend all my campaigns and ads and stop social postings because we’re in the crisis mode at this point.

Well, this platform brand mentions will actually set up notifications for you, so that when something is said about you one, you’ll get the notification but also has a really cool function to which is a sentiment program which will tell you if what is being said is considered positive, neutral or negative. So you get a good sense of whether or not there is a trend happening all of a sudden where something is getting said about you, and then it’s beginning to cascade in the direction you don’t want it so that you can preemptively get into that dialogue early to maybe stave off some of its expansion and virility as go blows up because what happens unfortunately is there’s a paralysis of when something goes negative.

The most quick response that most companies do because they’re not prepared or have planned for this is they freeze and they say nothing or they don’t engage or they say the wrong thing, which is also Justus bad. And it spirals and it blows up and expands even farther and without a voice to represent your perspective and to try to alleviate or address the whatever the issue. Maybe it’s left to all the trolls and negative impact people out there that we just want to just pile on and do terrible things or say terrible things to you.

So it has a wonderful notification feature that you can also create filters. You can create reports and create traffic as to where the source came from. What impact it did actually have. What was the engagement value of it? What was the again sentiment of it? You can go over and use also it as a tool for discovery in your market. So not just looking at what you yourself are doing in market. You could also have a go fetch and start looking at your competitors seeing what’s being said about them, the sentiment about what that’s being said about them as well.

Maybe there’s opportunities where there’s a persistent negativity to your competitors that you are a positive of, and you can go over and use that to your advantage. You would know that had you not been watching was being said. You can see whether or not that there’s a volume of traffic that is up or down in comparison to you, your own traffic in comparison to others. So it’s a wonderful tool. Like I said, these tools are few and far between that they get offered. It’s such a great rate.

Now I make nothing off of this. Okay, this is really just me, because this is This is a source that I used to go from find software. I put a link to the Epsom Oh platform. If you want to go pick this up for $49 you can’t go wrong with just having it to use in the sense of a research tool in a discovery tool for monitoring. Just hook it up and put yourself in so that you won’t get caught waiting for your agency should they be monitoring?

And you have to pay for that A lot of times. These agencies? Oh, sure Well, well, baby, said you. But it’s gonna cost you X hours or X amount of dollars per month for us to go over, and I maintain that monitoring. So this gives you a much more affordable alternative to that. You give the access or control or notification direction to somebody that maybe has more time to it. At least it’s on your team. So once again, it’s brand mentions dot com. The offer is on Appsumo dot com Currently for $49 for a year, which is normally, $1,442.

I would strongly suggest you consider something like this, which leads us into our next segment, which this ties with, and that is now for this week’s hospitality technique. Okay, so technique. As I mentioned a little earlier on a soapbox but part of our asses I was introducing the tools for brand mentioned. There is this disconnect as to what you have as assets. What you know you have access to or don’t have access to. That leads itself also into the discussion of what you’re unaware of in market Now we have covered other platforms of such like social insider, which is a discovery platform that you can put you or your competitors in of any social platform that they have and see what is what First off, what they’re doing.

Secondly, what they’re doing well, and third, what they may not be doing well. It will show you quite clearly their growth of followings, engagements, whether or not it’s up or down. What dates they were doing. What was the most prolific posts on any social platform, what their top posts were, what their engagement types were, how much was shared, not shared, commented on um, liked. You can also see what they were doing by what was reaching the most is whether or not there was a photo or a video or a new album or link.

You could see what time of day they posted that was successful, what the volume of engagement was from that particular posting in at that time. Whether or not that there’s a pattern to their postings to know whether you can work around those the this platform really helps you see clearly what your competitors are doing socially, That social incentive We’ve talked about that before. Another one that I want to mention is, well, is the platform called a War e O. Now, I’ve also reviewed this on our podcast before.

We’ve also discussed a live shell before. This allows you to once again not just look at yourself as to what is being said about you, but also whatever terms you want to follow in relationship to your market and also your competitors to know what is being said about them as well. And this also gives a sentiment score off. Whether it’s positive or negative. Don’t do. They don’t do the neutral. They just do positive or negative, Um, and from that you can see whether or not you’re are ahead or behind the sentiment associated with you.

Compared to your competitors, you can see people that are commenting on you. It has a wonderful thing called a leech generator, which will show you based on the following of the people that are commenting about you and or the engagement associate with people that are following them, whether they’re an influencer, whether you can maybe reach out to them and say, You know, you say a lot about our destination. We would love to go over and reach out to you about maybe saying something more in particular about us, and that’s one of the tools that can help you is a warrior to do that?

It also tells you when people are by sentiment and by volume of voice that they have again by followers and engagement, whether or not we might go over and want to reach out to these people directly and calm down whatever negative sentiment that they may have built up with us because they seem very upset about. That’s the name of big audience. Now this may seem like oh, well, we’re just following the squeak used of wheels, but this gives you a great insight of what people are saying about you.

Also on all the platforms, both social and Web site, and so far, the war E O and brand mentions are very similar in what they do, but they also have additional tools that each of them don’t have. Ah, worry again has the lead generation and the Influence finder plus it go over and do mention statistics, and it can create some wonderful reporting for us to trends and geography. Sze topic clouds sources in comparison. Each other has some nice graphics for it. That brand mentions doesn’t but Brand mentions has the notification, along with the sentiment and a much more granular way of looking at each of the individual platform.

So the two together are awesome because they give you a really wonderful overview of monitoring yourself, seeing what’s being said about you on every platform that is out there so that you’re not surprised with negative or positive. And maybe learn from when you can see from competitive analysis by adding them into both platforms as to what you’re competitive. Complete cups that is doing in comparison to you on also all those platforms. Now that doesn’t exclude. There are other platforms that we have talked about before that are not in the social spectrum, but they’re also into the the surveillance of what they’re doing for ad campaigns We’ve talked about I spy are super spy Fu. I spin AJ, those air two platforms that we’ve talked about before that will allow you to see what your competitive set is spending on who they’re competing with by being, and then the paid forms, as well as the organic, where you can see organically who you’re competing against based on what your product similarity is to them, and also what they’re paying for it against you, whether they’re even paying on your keywords.

Whether you knew that or not, it helps you determine whether or not you come set stepping over a line that you want to send them. A little note saying, Uh, excuse me, Get off my title. Get off my brand You know you don’t have the right to end nor do you have you know you need to trademark. We’ve had discussions about trademarking making sure that people stay off of your brand names that you have to legitimize the fact that you have a trademark associated with your brand name.

It’s only $770 on average to go over and trademark yourself within market for industry. Those are things we’ve discussed in the podcast before you go into our archives and just simply, he was word out the trade market for our podcast that we had for that. We also have had covered a cover. Jonathan the live shows Well, So why all of this? Why jumping in this all up in our podcast today? Because awareness of your concept goes beyond REV par. Where does it become? Seven goes Go beyond rate three sixties and no ta insights and all these other wonderful platforms that give you a price comparison yield compay capabilities, insights as to their strategies of occupancy and yield and fences and length of stays and so forth.

That’s all. Revenue source. This is what you’re competing with at market for which days, but as you know, we deal with short windows of opportunity. So we’re looking at that point, is being more reactionary than we are proactive we’re looking at What they’re doing is short term because long terms pretty much until they stop working within 30 day windows and other than major events or business cycles, they’re pretty much locked. And then the 30 day dance begins, and then the 21 day dance begins, and then that 14 in the seven and then the pre arrival in the 24 hour, and we’re all just jumbling around.

We’re looking at Kam sets and what are they doing? Computer. What we’re doing, How are they reacting to us? That they tried to right below us or above us on rate? Are they putting fences that we don’t have that they sell on the block that we didn’t know about? What’s our rate? Sheets that were pulling from these people is to see what they’re doing in comparison. That’s all revenue strategy, all of what we’re talking about here, these tools of what they’re doing socially. What they’re doing on paid inorganic is all about the earlier conversations, the way ahead of what actually gets down to the compressed time, where you’re looking at the impact of the jumble dialogue, the general rate strategies, the general ad campaigns.

Not that you can’t look at the short term with these platforms as well, but the real value of this is to create your logistics associated with the tactical and then the strategic. This is where you’re looking at how you bring yourself into market with your story lines and your demographics in your personas. Based upon how you’re competitive, set is also approaching the same market segments, the same demographics, the same time lines, so these tools are very valuable in the technique I want to talk about that I’ve been talking about is really using them to have that few of where you are in your market, on all the things that are being used by our guests of today with the websites and social.

And so with that, that is our technique discussion today on comp set analysis and your loan, local presence and the value proposition associate with it up next is now this week’s hospitality news that you should know. Okay, so news and show review we had a wonderful time on our live show this week. It was simply because we all got to see each other physically suffer. Ed Edward ST Hans was unable to make it to the HSM Me Eyes Marketing starts strategy conference, which was just after the Adrian’s this past week in New York City.

At the Marriott Marquis. They did a wonderful job. Adrian’s did a kind of a futuristic, um, view of what the hospital used to be like when their awards ceremony was a lot of fun. You’ll see some of my videos on my YouTube channel. LoreneeGray. If you wanna look at YouTube, link will also be on the show notes for us here, Um, where you get to see some of the guys with the lights all over them with this stilt walkers and all the support. It was a very visually engaging event that was a lot of fun. Always.

It’s great to run into people. It is one of the finest networking sessions four hospitality that you could ever go to. Both the Adrian’s and the Marketing Strategy Conference for two completely different reasons. The Adrian’s to really mingle with the people that are the movers and shakers, the influencers of our industry, because they’ve won awards because of the fact of their successes for what they’ve done. And this is a global award program. So you’re getting people that have traveled from literally around the world to come here to receive their awards for the recognition of their successes.

And these are very large scale operations and all the way down to the very small Congratulations once again to Mr. Stuart Butler, one of our cohost on the live show, He won, of course, Hey and fuel travel 17 Adrian awards to virtual gold. One was related to their award winning podcast, which is a phenomenal pockets If you haven’t listened to, which is a fuel travel dot com, Ford’s Life Podcast It is really an excellent show that I highly recommend is being with most fundamental and valuable actual item podcasts that are out there.

We only hope to follow in its shadow and as well as we can are co-host. Other than Stewart, where Edward say knowledge would flip to again the only one that physically was not at the conference with us. Holly’s Oba from Influence or sales. Tammy Um uh from Milestone Media. She was one of the top 25 most influential marking the minds and sales marketing minds this year. Award recipients again. We all, said Lily McCrimmon, who is the president and founder of T. C. R M Service is total revenue TC Total control revenue management.

And I will never get this right, I’m sure. But she is a phenomenal and very talented person that brings together a strong revenue management strategy. Fixit audit. We’ll get it all done kind of personality to it. So anyway, we had a great recap of the Marketing Strategy conference from keynote to keynote, breakout to breakout. I highly recommend that you get to watch our show over. Which is that Hospitality Digital marketing dot com forward slash live Look for show number 233 There you’ll see our full discussion about all of the topics that ran through for the conference I thought was an excellent recap.

We also, if you would like to look at our Facebook page at Hospitality Digital Marketing, you will see that we did a live broadcast while there, which we did live. Coverage for that briefly recap some of the earlier sessions on the day from what we got from the earlier sessions. And then we had a re captain the live shows. This was only two days after that. We were capped the entire conference, you to see the entire conversation from that and all of our shipments associated with them.

The news feature I want to catch before we get too long into the timeline for us today is about something that’s kind of a cloud on the horizon, something to be concerned about. We didn’t get to talk about in the lab show because we’re so entrenched with Ari chases. May I conference review that we didn’t get to hit many of the news items we had basically the right Rose and the boots, which for those of us, those of you who know our right Rose are the What were you thinking?

Covers conversations on news articles and the boop was the good and feel good conversation. So we won’t leave on the positives. We do a book at the end. Um, but this one was something we didn’t get to talk about what that is, It came from G choir and is Google wades deeper into Expedia’s territory with new traveling and cloud packed with saber. Now, as we know, Saber is the big elephant in our room. When it comes to the eco system of hospitality technology, it has been the dominant feature in industry for 60 plus years.

Ah, we have all had our ups and downs with our relationships with Sabre. I say that in the most politically correct way possible for that. But what has happened is an open collaboration connection between it and Google. The smallest aspect of it is that Saber is going to be shifting all of its stuff into Google Cloud now it could be. You know, that’s what big enough news in itself that such a big organization is moving onto the Google cloud platform. But it goes beyond that. Basically, a quote that I take directly from the article itself says now, with this deal, Google, we linked to a major technology provider for the travel industry.

Sabre’s won three companies alone with Travelport Amadeus that control over 95% of the market for global distribution systems. GDS, the primary tools used by travel agents for booking trips. Now what, you don’t travel agents TVs over its own distribution in connection to distribution? Is Steven still the most primary key element to our industry? And we also know that with Google and the usage of it and its ability, as we’ve had covered in previous articles in the podcast associated with Direct channel, the ability to go over and collect payment ability to sell directly for the hotel without having going to help that website or to go over and have the transaction actually occur with the hotel that the Google could handle the transaction?

These are all fundamental changes as to Google’s presence in the travel space plus now also in earlier discussions about Google zero and the fact that you don’t have to go to a hotel’s website to get enough information about the hotel’s website that Google will be riding in those little maps. The rates than the geography is that you’re looking for Google zero. Which of the answers to the questions that you may have a relationship to your choice. Election. All of this Google is providing before it ever gets to any organic listings or any paid listings that they’re allowing anyone else, too, and includes the O. T. A’s so very much a what do we have to continue to watch scenario as to Google’s presence?

Because if you have all of this running through one place in the one place that everyone uses, then we turn into a simple commodity, and that is a dangerous place for us to be residing, because that means that we have to deal more directly with our guests, which has been our previous conversations with C. R M and its value propositions. So with that, remember, you can find us on Google play Apple iTunes I heart radio soundcloud stitcher, Spotify, Pandora tune in podcast breaker. The list goes on.

Actually, 36 different platforms were on, including, and even the Amazons. Alexa and Google assistant. We all have to ride there. Um, if you like our show, please read it and leave a comment that helps others find this content. I hope it’s all positive contents, but if you have anything that you would like to go for an address with us directly, you reach out to me at Lauren at hospitality, digital marketing dot com and or info at the same thing. And I will answer every in each email that you send in any suggestions of topics that you would like to have discussed and or also on the associate ID interviews or people that you think would be worthy of consideration to have on the show to talk about different topics, just like we do on the live show.

Also, this is your first time hearing us. You can subscribe to our show on any of those 36 platforms, and for any archive of all previous podcasts, you can go to hospitality, digital marketing dot com, forward slash podcast. And don’t forget our live video talk show that you conjoined and participate in every Friday at 11 30 Eastern US time called This Week in Hospitality Marketing The Live show. And for that you simply go to hospitality, digital marketing dot com forward slash live, And there you can see the link to subscribe to the next show, which is usually a the Bit.ly at Bit dot Ly slash h d m show to 34 for next week.

So with that, thank you for the privilege of your time and I look forward to talking to you next week. You have been listening to this week in Hospitality Marketing the Podcast show 233 brought to you by Hospitality Digital Marketing in support of the HSMAI, the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association. International rights reserved copyright 2020