Ask a seasoned salesman what finally drove the sale. Analyse TV and print commercials that sell to find the common driving point that generated the sale. In almost every case you will see that emotion was it.

Why does celebrity endorsement work? How does beauty affect a buying decision. The answer lies in emotional rapport.

The same goes for hotels.

In choosing a hotel guests will try to make a rational decision based on the three Ps, Place, Product and Price. But the one factor that will affect the decision despite rational decision is emotion. With a great emotional impact hotels can pull guests beyond a purely rational decision.

A prominent ad man, Rob Leavitt once said “People don’t ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather have one good, soul-satisfying emotion than a dozen facts.”  which summarizes that logic quite well.

Analyse the advertising revolution led by David Ogilvy in the 50s and what was the huge change? Emotional impact, before then adverts were based on texts and illustrations, most of which were printed in black and white. Suddenly come full-page color ads with photographs. Then in the 60s when DDB launched the creative revolution they added emotional impact through great photography plus a new type of copywriting one that grabbed the reader’s emotions and made them re-think their habits.

Why did boutique hotel’s have such a success when they started in the 1980s? Because the individually decorated rooms and hotels delivered a new and exciting emotional impact.

Hotels are visual, unless you’re competing solely for the lowest price on the market, hotels are about seeing, touching, sensing and experiencing comfort.

And how should hotels deliver that emotional impact? of course they can devise great tag lines and sexy copy. But nothing delivers more than photography.

Great photography is great emotion

To deliver a great emotional impact your hotel must have great photography. The rooms, the surroundings, the lobby and all must be shot by expert photographers that can communicate through those images the quality and experience that guests can expect.

Rooms and environment must be presented in a way that they elicit and emotional response. Just showing the environment the way the camera sees it will not elicit any response.

Emotional impact in good photography. A snapshot on the left and a photo with emotional impact on the right. Photo credit: photoserge.com

Size does matter

Showing a great photo on one quarter of the screen has almost no impact. The bigger the picture the bigger the impact. And if you’re worried that it’ll push off the text from your site, ask yourself when you last booked a hotel because there was great text on the home page.

If you want to see the difference in size and how it affects emotion compare the photo galleries of Google Plus with those of Flickr or other older photo sharing sites.

We started making full-screen hotel websites in 2008 and rapidly saw a huge difference in website conversion. Some of the pioneer hotels haven’t had their websites re-done since and they still work better than most other competing sites.

Hotel Petit Moulin to the left and Hotel Bellechasse to the right, both boutique hotels designed by Christian Lacroix and both extraordinary hotels. See the difference in emotional impact on photo size.

Speed impacts emotion

While this may not seem evident and may even seem contradictory to the prior, a slow site worsens emotional impact. Notice how waiting in line at the airport reduces the excitement of your vacations? At first you’ll probably feel annoyed at the end you’ll be apathetic of the line. The same goes for your website, though hopefully guests don’t have to wait that long. On the other hand remember how pleased you were when you arrived at a hotel and had immediate service?

Any time lost waiting lowers the emotional impact. So you must make those huge images load incredibly fast. It’s a challenge but it’s going to affect your bottom line.

Summary

If you want to raise your average price you need a great property with great interior design and service and if you want to increase direct bookings you need a great website that will show every penny worth of ADR with a great emotional impact.

Failing to deliver that emotional impact will relegate you to price competition only and that’s a hard battle to win.

There is a lot of information out there about search engine optimization. I’ll be quite honest with you, the vast majority doesn’t have a lot of value. Most of them try to position SEO as “free advertising” for hotels (or other verticals), which is actually a lie. Search engine optimization is in essence a matter of ensuring one’s website is configured correctly so that search engines can properly read the site and properly categorize the information within the site in their systems.

SEO has gotten a bad name in many circles because it is being done to trick the search engines rather than to help users. This makes for results on search engines which are less than useful and thus both users and search engines start avoiding them or classifying them as spam.

There is a very precise point when search engine becomes spam. The moment SEO is not done to help the end user navigate your website, it can be classified as spam. Practices like adding 500 words of text on your hotel’s home page for no other reason than to get good indexing in search engines is spam. If the end user isn’t going to read that text and if it isn’t going to help them decide if they are going to book a room then it just has no purpose and should be avoided.

Here are a few simple steps to know about search engine optimization for hotels:

1. A hotel should focus on the keywords that will generate bookings.

It’s a common misbelief that the more traffic one gets the more bookings one will get. The real datum is, more relevant visits the more bookings. Let me give you an example: someone proposes to get you listed on “Design hotel in London” while this is tempting because there is a high search volume for that keyword. Now factor in a few more points:

• (a) the competition for that keywords is going to be huge, as a hotel it’s going to cost you a fortune to get there,
• (b) the guest who is searching for design hotels in london is quite early on the buying cycle and unless you’re the most amazing design hotel in London meeting all of the guests criteria (location, price, comfort) you’re not going to get a booking since the guest is still shopping and
• (c) people searching such broad terms are more interested in finding a selection of design hotels to compare rather than a single hotel.

This doesn’t mean it wont get you any bookings but if you compare the cost it will take to get and stay at such a keywords versus the actual bookings made you will see it’s a low yield opportunity.

2. Your hotel’s site doesn’t need to be loaded with text to have good SEO.

What these “experts” are probably telling you is that your site needs to have much more text which is written with a 2% to 5% keyword repetition. Thus in many cases convincing you to fill the home page with text so it looks something like this.

Example of a badly optimized hotel website, optimized with lots of text to please search engines.

Now ask yourself how many times you read that text as a user to decide which hotel you are going to book in. Well guests don’t either. Hotels are visual, users want to see where they are going to. Either the decoration fits their needs or it doesn’t, no amount of sales copy can make a bad decoration look good.

While this may be a “strategy” that will capture more traffic from search engine results the fact remains that if it isn’t there for the end user then it is an attempt to trick search engines into seeing something that isn’t there and let’s face it, that is spam.

What your site does need is to properly represent what is there. List the amenities in the rooms. Make a short description of the room decoration if it deserves some description and list your services, but limit it to information that will help your guests choose your hotel. For example hair-dryers in rooms, free or paid wifi, Hermes room amenities etc all contribute to the end user’s understanding of the room and hotel.

A hotel marketer asked me about this recently pointing out search terms like “Luxury wedding package hotel”, if your hotel offers such service and is set up to make a great user experience for luxury weddings then by all means create a page that gives all the details about that.

An additional point you should verify as a hotelier is that all the pictures are properly tagged and each have alternative descriptions. While this could seem like a way to “trick” search engines it shouldn’t be. It helps the visually impaired understand what is on the image and if the person can’t load the images for some reason they actually have additional information about what should be there.

3. “You need more back-links to your site.”

At the outset of search engines back-links was the dominating factor that determined if you would be well ranked with search engines. While that remains a very important factor today realize that buying link packages is considered a very bad practice and should be avoided. If someone proposes something like this to you, steer clear of that marketing agency.

Yes you need links back to your site but chances are you already have quite a few and most of them are probably very good.

There are some basics you should do such as ensure your site is listed in Google Places, Yelp, Local phone directories etc and those should be done. These links are good for the user and of course will help your site. If you want to receive more incoming links then work with local or international travel news sites etc to inform them about events, changes, upgrades, renovations or other elements of your hotel that they would want to write about.

4. Email alerts that your site is badly optimized.

There are some companies that have automatic systems which they send out to non-clients alerting them that the website isn’t properly optimized and should be improved. These are automatic emails and you can treat them like you treat all the other spam. If it’s not your marketing agency or webmaster telling you this (and chances are it isn’t) then it’s unsolicited mail and probably useless. If they alert you of something useful like there are no headers on your site then you can forward it to your webmaster and ask them to remedy it.

5. Blog on your site.

A great way to add content to your site is to have a blog, because you can update it as a hotelier and you don’t need to ask your webmaster to do it for you, thus save you lots of money. However when you have a blog there are a few points to take into account.

You need to have the manpower to keep it updated. Count at least 5 hours a week. A stale blog is worse than no blog so either you do it right or don’t do it at all.

Content you put on the blog needs to be relevant to your hotel. We’ve noticed two types of hotels and the content to put in there.

• (a) A city hotel is often found after the person has decided to go to the city. Chances are the guest knows about the museums, monuments and main events in the city. There’s no point telling them about these on the blog. However putting more information about the hotel would help them. If you’ve just renovated a few rooms, if you’re doing an easter party (or just did one and want to post pics) etc. In general talk about the hotel for city hotels.
• (b) Resorts and hotels outside the city are often found before the guest explores the area. For those types of hotels it would add value to talk about monuments, excursions, treks and trips that can be done around the hotel.

But don’t use the blog as a tool to capture traffic, use it as a tool to inform guests and answer guest questions. If it’s well written, if you’ve tagged the photos correctly people will share them, search engines will like them and you’ll get relevant traffic.

Summary

To make a real-world analogy on SEO we could say SEO is like the signage outside your hotel. No SEO would mean nobody knows you even exist and there is no sign outside the hotel telling people where to go, so people that are interested in your hotel never find you and go elsewhere and people that are looking for a hotel in your street also don’t find you.

Good SEO would be a proper sign that reflects the quality of the hotel and guests that expect to find out about you easily do. If you’re a luxury boutique hotel you wouldn’t want a flashy neon sign flashing “Open”. It would be relevant with your hotel’s quality.

Bad SEO would be a billboard in the middle of the street stopping all traffic and forcing the pedestrians and cars to go through your hotel in order to move further down the street. You’ll get lots of traffic, if your hotel is great you’ll probably get some more bookings, but 98% of the people being forced through your hotel would be upset by the experience. The traffic from that billboard would soon destroy your reputation and classify you as a “spammer”.

If you’re going to work on your hotel’s marketing and SEO chose a partner that specializes in hotel marketing with a track record in efficient hotel websites and who can show you stats of bookings not just visits.

We are very proud to announce Convert. it has set the new standard for hotel websites. Where the booking engine and hotel site are integrated into a single unit, where images are as large as you can get them making the experience fully immersive where speed is of the essence and most importantly where hotel websites are designed to sell.

CONVERT Redefines the Way Hotel Websites Sell Rooms

Hotel marketing agency WIHP, releases Convert and reinvents the way hotels sell their rooms on the Internet.

PARIS 12 March 2012: Hotel marketing agency WIHP has just released Convert, the first hotel website building platform that integrates the SynXis booking engine, which reduces booking time for consumers by over 40%.

Since the 1990s when hotels started selling rooms via the Internet, hotel websites have been laid out utilizing the same confusing structure. Websites have attempted to simply install a booking engine on top of slow and unwieldy e-commerce portals.

At ITB last week in Berlin, WIHP released Convert, the first hotel website builder to completely integrate the SynXis booking engine flawlessly within the website, thereby reducing booking time by 44% and creating a unique sales tool for independent hotels.

The immersive experience offered by Convert gives independent hotels a state-of-the-art hotel website based on full-screen imagery and galleries otherwise only available to multi-million dollar websites. The sites work on all supported media, including desktops and all portable devices (iPhone, iPad, smartphones). Drawing from over a decade of experience, and having created more than 4000 hotel websites, WIHP offers these unique tools via a monthly contractual agreement.

“We wanted to give every hotel in the world the most advanced hotel website ever created. From all our experience we have a unique view of what elements generate direct bookings, Convert was created as a booking machine for hotels. It has the smoothest booking process ever made for hotels,” explained Vincent Ramelli, WIHP President.

Ramelli and his team spent a great deal of time working out how to make Convert extremely fast, and not for the home page, but all images and galleries as well. Recent studies by Google and Microsoft indicated a direct relationship between site speed and conversion rates. As a result of adhering to these studies findings, Convert loads faster than any other hotel website on the market today.

Simplicity is evident throughout the site, large buttons, simple menus, and very large photos make the sites easily navigable, fun to use, and aesthetically beautiful. The effect is a minimalist design combined with lightning click-ability.

WIHP’s own independent study indicates that travelers return to hotel sites as many as 4 times before proceeding with their booking. Vincent Ramelli noted during his presentation at ITB Berlin; “So many returning visitors indicate that the hotel sites are just not answering all their questions.” He then proceeded to show a comprehensive integration of Google Maps into Convert where guests can see nearby restaurants, museums or get directions.

Convert is the ideal fusion of booking engine and website in one easy to use, quick, and informative package. Where guests used to spend 11 minutes on the booking engine and 14 minutes on the website before, on Convert guests can reduce that to much less than 14 minutes.

Hotels that integrate the booking engine within their websites are common, but a hotel site that delivers as fast as Convert, is where WIHP’s hard work has paid off. The developers strived to make selecting a room on the site and the booking engine, essentially the same thing. The end result is remarkable.

Convert is available from WIHP as a subscription plan of 750 EUR a month and is purchased online at www.wihphotel.com/convert building the website is essentially done online with a support team available to answer questions and help hoteliers through the process.

For more information:

http://www.wihphotel.com/convert

Presentation video:

Online demo:

http://www.convertdemo.com

WIHP (World Independent Hotel Promotion)

77 rue du Faubourg Saint Antoine
75011 Paris, France
TEL +33 01 53 46 10 60
FAX +33 01 44 87 90 35

Vincent Ramelli, Founder and CEO of WIHP

There isn’t a magazine or blog in the hotel marketing industry today that doesn’t mention social media as the future of hotel marketing. Yet no hotel has reported incredible direct revenues from social media. So that’s the dilemma, should hoteliers be investing in social media because it is the thing to do or should they wait until it’s tried and tested?

Our company manages complete marketing solutions for hotels since 1999. Around mid 2000s we put a dedicated social media team working to manage complete campaigns for our clients. We rapidly realized that we needed extremely precise tracking to see exactly what this new “beast” called social media was all about.

We accumulated years of experience in running campaigns for hotels of all types (from cheap to hip via classic luxury and boutique) and we got to learn the hard way what works and what doesn’t.

Social media for hotels elevator pitch

How it works. In a few words, social media are sites that are driven by a constantly updated and fresh content and fed by users as opposed to organized publishers. This definition is by no means complete but it serves the purpose of our article.

Following this idea to start a social media strategy realize that it will only work if you have something to say. It means constantly updating the information. If you’re going to open a Youtube account like many advise then you had better have a lot of interesting videos to share regularly or you will rapidly become irrelevant. If you plan to open a blog then figure out what you’re going to write about before you open it and if you want some success with Facebook plan out how to keep followers interested and interacting with you.

Social media means you have something interesting to say, regularly. And let me guarantee you “we have nice rooms” isn’t something to say.

Social media isn’t for everyone

Several of the hotels we managed had great success and a few of them made absolutely no difference. What we’ve learned is that the hotels that get most direct return on investment on social media are hotels that stand out of the crowd as something special. High tech hotels seem to have the fastest growth and interaction level, but boutique and luxury hotels enjoy a great follower-ship as well. What doesn’t work are classic hotels that have no emotional value. What seems to happen is that people want to follow places that show great visuals, interesting out-of-the-ordinary imagery is one of the prime factors for social media.

We’ve not seen much success with cheap hotels unless it is to communicate a “special offer” but that doesn’t build a long lasting relationship.

Word of mouth is your best advertising

Since time immemorial, word of mouth has always been the “cheapest” and most effective marketing tool for hotels. I say “cheapest” because keeping great word-of-mouth means excellent service and super satisfied guests and that isn’t free. Social media is the vehicle to turbo-charge your word of mouth (if you have some going for you). Someone sharing a great stay on their Facebook wall, Twitter account, Google+ stream plus any of the other location based systems will reach on average 150 friends and family. With some gentle nudging from your side you could rapidly be reaching millions with great experiences.

But you’ll have to live with the fact that it’s a double-edged sword and there’s no avoiding that. If your guest leaves unhappy even if it’s not your fault you will get the backlash of a negative review. However the vast majority will be positive. The average review on TripAdvisor is 3.8 out of 5. Thus approximately 76% are positive.

What we’ve noticed the most efficient way to use social media in order to increase sales, is by getting guests to share their stay and a link to the hotel’s page. This has a direct impact on revenue.

How much work does it take?

Don’t think you can just have a page and you’ll spend a few minutes a week managing it. Realize it’s an investment and you’ll need to put time into it. And there are more and more social media platforms to keep up to date and manage. From keeping followers up-to-date with great stories, anecdotes, images to replying to comments and reviews from others you’ll soon notice this is going to take more and more of your time.

You’ll need to have someone dedicated either full time or part time to the task and that someone needs carte blanche to to talk about the hotel. Don’t try to approve everything before they post it, rather let them post freely and watch the stream, if you don’t like something have it removed (if there’s a reason).

Nothing will kill the creativity faster than trying to put a filter on the channel and your social media staff will become boring if you try over-control their efforts. Set the guidelines of what’s OK and what’s not and let them roll with it. Let them step on the boundary but not beyond it.

What should you be writing about?

Only writing about your hotel can be wrong, only writing about your surroundings can be wrong too. So what do you need to do? Well every hotel is different so you need to test various ideas and see what your followers respond to.

But as a general rule you need to keep your page interesting, informal and coherent. Take the viewpoint of a guest. If you’re a city hotel they probably have a guidebook already of what they want to see in the city and they’ll most likely want to know more about what the hotel is really like, get some real info. If you’re a resort maybe they’ve already read all about the resort but would rather know about things to do around the place.

Ask you guests when they’re at the front desk what information they felt was missing when they booked and that should give you a good yardstick.

How to measure ROI?

The touchy question that nobody knows how to answer… yet. The facts are that direct revenue generated from social media isn’t very high currently even for the best campaigns. Which is due to the intent of the user, a person searching is intending to go visit something while someone on social media sites is intending to receive information which stumbles in randomly on their stream.

However the value of social media is in number of interactions, number of views and number of followers, it’s value is in branding rather than direct revenue. And yet this isn’t the case for every hotel, some of our campaigns have increased direct revenue rapidly and made hotels popular with bloggers, media and guests.

So while you measure the direct revenue, keep in mind that you’re also creating future guests on the long term as you create loyalty amongst your followers.

Starting now or wait to later?

When the internet started becoming a sales platform in the 1990s most hotels, didn’t believe it would be a big deal or that it would work. A few companies (currently known as OTAs) saw the future or internet sales, they took the entire market and left hotels years behind. When hotel’s woke up and noticed they suddenly were paying 25% commissions on most of their revenue, it was already too late. Now they were fighting an uphill battle to recover those sales.

While it takes time and hard work to be present on social media do it now while it’s still in it’s infancy.

So is social media the future of hotel marketing?

Yes it is the future, but not as a replacement of existing marketing, as a channel to increase word-of-mouth. The best advertising money can buy is word-of-mouth, if it’s good. Social media is the first tool that has ever existed to exponentially increase the efficiency of word-of-mouth.

This is the future of word-of-mouth. It predicts a good future for good quality hotels and hotels that take care of their guests. It predicts a dim and painful future for those who don’t care for their guests.

But social media isn’t the new search marketing or the new banner. It complements those channels. Just like internet didn’t replace TV or TV didn’t replace print advertising. They’ve increased the marketers toolbox.

While hotels and marketers must get onto the social media boat before they miss it, they’ve got to do this while keeping their existing marketing efforts going just as strong as before. It’s an increased budget for the moment.

Once you’ve seen what works and what doesn’t (and after a little more than only a few month) you can readjust your marketing budget to invest in the parts that work best for you.

This article was written for Hotelexecutive.com by Vincent Ramelli.

There is a common misconception about the return on investment (ROI) via social media. For reasons most of us do not understand, Social Media has been classified primarily as a marketing tool by many. Because of this misconception at the foundation of a social media strategy, calculating actual ROI can be a circuitous and inexact exercise at best. Luckily, examining social media in its “completeness” as a communicative business tool, strategies in its correct use can better be employed.

In the 1990s businesses and the vast majority of people though all that was needed for success on the Web was a website – then magically money and/or fame in buckets simply had to flood in. Well, the proper use of social media as a tool today is at about in the same juncture. So, the questions arise; “how should businesses be approaching social media as a business to consumer tool?” What should be employed to measure social media efficiency?

Focus On the Problem

Let’s use the analogy that “everything online has it’s real-world counter-part.” In such a scenario, social media’s real world counterpart might be a lounge bar with a non-stop crowd circulating from table to table, pausing to chat here and there, telling life stories, socializing, in general mimicking real world social behavior. Onto this casual stage, our hard selling marketer walks, dressed in a sandwich board, coming to talk about his/her latest toothpaste, soap powder, or hotel deal. Just how welcome is such an interruption in your circles?

This real world metaphor is a case of reality for today’s social media marketers. So, justifiably the corresponding ROI logically resembles that of bulk email marketing, or SPAM, maybe worse. Factor in a brand’s reputation, and this “would be” social marketing effort takes on an almost ominous tone. Let’s call the situation a “Negative ROI Noose” the marketer has stuck his or her neck in. To further galvanize this idea of misuses of the social sphere as a marketing tool, let’s hear what Rick Rudman, Founder and CEO of Vocus, a company at the pinnacle of understanding PR and marketing channels, told us:

“The hard part about having a discussion like this is that a lot of people don’t even agree on how they define PR, social media and marketing today. With that caveat, I think social media is clearly about all three. I thinks its easiest implemented as a PR tool, but that it can be just as effectively used as a marketing tool, although fewer people know how to do this effectively. There are real leads and revenue being generated on social networks and more sophisticated software is on the way to help companies track “buying signals” on social networks and turn those signals into business.”

Alternate Marketing Reality

Take what Rudman suggests here, and picture several of the people in our real lounge bar having just returned from a hotel in New York, after having a super experience there (probably without hard sell marketers about). At our bar they discuss their experiences, share snapshots, mull over every detail with friends and associates, all amid this easy going atmosphere. Now, wouldn’t those planning a trip to New York be keenly interested to hear? To learn? Discover?

Next, steps in a knowledgeable hotel representative talking about great attractions, deals, meals, and other important tidbits about New York. Yes, this is our super hero, marketing gurus keep envisioning. The rep goes on to brief our group of travelers about an upcoming event in April being a better choice than one in June, simply because of crowds and heat. You get the picture, subtlety applied at exactly the right moment, is 1000 times more powerful. The hotel rep does not even have to push his hotel deals, someone in the group will ask him, you can bet on it.

What’s the lesson? Clarifying Rudman’s point on “know how,” the sandwich peddler is oblivious to not only his surroundings, but even knowledge of good salesmanship. The hotel rep, on the other hand, has the easiest job in the world, giving people exactly what they want or need. Social media is a fantastic communication tool of course, but would any sane marketing or sales professional use a bull horn in a chic restaurant to offer car parts at wholesale? Ironically, some actually do via social media.

Go With the Flow Branding – Long Term ROI

What of social and digital media as branding tools? Think of social media as a channel of communication between businesses and current or potential customers. Continuing our analogy of the lounge or club we can group the social networks as a single entity (when in fact it is several entities – Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc) and compare it to a global lounge or club. You may not think of Facebook or Twitter this way, but most people really working amid these networks are actually marketers or PR types. Let’s call the environment “passive” for lack of a better term.

People give and take, but no one is really searching for products on Twitter or Facebook even, they’re having fun or relaxing, even executing on an habitual habit etc. The only business being conducted by customers is initiating interaction with “their brands” or expressing opinions about potential ones, that’s the gist of social interaction. Such a landscape is ideal for brand awareness, management, even monitoring reputations, but marginally adaptable for marketing – only under well-defined sets of circumstances.

Brands are strengthened or weakened on social media depending on the conversations and the realities surrounding them, situational, in real time. Ideally, brands can learn and react to customers at light speed, the advantage of which alludes to Rick Rudeman’s ideas on “leads and revenue generation.” Yes, revenue is generated in and around social media, but seldom as effectively as is possible. We spoke with a giant of PR on this subject, Ronn Torossian of 5WPRstarted in a dinky, obscure office in Manhattan, and is now one of the Big Apple’s power broker PR gurus. Here’s how Ronn sees social media at its best:

“Social and digital media is still in its infancy – it’s a lot like the transistor radio compared to today’s24 hour news cycle and everything on demand. Social media – whether on twitter, Facebook, orother “social” mechanisms, are brand builders rather than revenue generators. I’d tell a client looking for quicker revenue generation to invest in Search engine optimization over ‘social’ media.”

Clearly Defined Campaigns – The Only Vector to Success

Going back to Rudmans take on the definitions of PR, social media and marketing – public relations is “the managing of communications between an organization and it’s public with the purpose of improved public opinion for the organization.” In the same vein let’s define marketing as; “the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service.” This makes more clear just how social media fits where these definitions are applied to correct use of the channels.

So, social media channels are best suited as a PR tool for communicating with the public, for informing, and for interacting directly to help shape a favorable opinion for the organization. Conversely, social media should be a marketing tool used as a platform for advertising just like any other advertising medium, with banner ads and all the bells and whistles associated.

Social media is a network that permits the organizations and public to interact. Unlike the old PR tools such as full page ads or talks to groups, social media is connected to individuals, and it is imminently direct. It is really too direct to be employed for marketing in many cases, better served to allow for customer input, than for broadcasting to the potential client during a game of Angry Birds or Farmville. While creatively placed marketing campaigns via games, polls, contests, and other events can be highly successful, these are essentially short term, cyclical events, the ROI from which ends abruptly when a contest ends, or a better one begins. The key here being, creating ultra-focused campaigns that make use of these facts.

So, going back to the point we made on the outset of this article, how do you measure the ROI of Social media? The answer to that question lies in how we use social media. For PR uses, social media is measured same way as a PR campaign. For advertising a brand/product, examining things like cost per click or click trough rates, just like a banner ad can be measured otherwise. Looking at all this, clearly social media isn’t a category apart, but rather a platform that can be used by PR and marketing people to communicate. Attempting some measures of ROI can be like trying to measure that of “emails” or of “the internet” as a whole.

Examples of our theories here are illustrated in the more recent successes of political campaigns using social media, these campaigns are not selling more than an idea (PR). Similarly, twitter accounts of musicians, celebrities, and artists followed by consumers (fans) help those consumers understand their artists better, feel connected to them, even speak to them. Again, like the hotel rep in the lounge they are communicating directly and not selling. This PR aspect (or passive marketing one) creates a positive perception and reception with the public, one where advertising may work far better.

Summary

The return of social media is based on the campaign being done. Purely as an advertising platform it has more use as a branding tool. Branding has never been a high short term ROI but is a long term strategy to build awareness of one’s name. The ROI of such an activity can and should be measured in the increase of searches for the brand name.

As a PR tool the ROI of social media is similarly not short term. Building a good PR for one’s brand takes time and one is often targeting a very broad public, many of which may never become customers for the brand. However there is an ROI and it can probably best be measured in how many people are sharing one’s brand information which would indicate the real value of the information (word of mouth).

This article was a collaborative effort by Phil Butler and Martin Soler

Phil Butler is editor-in-chief of Everything PR and senior partner at Pamil Visions PR. He’s a widely cited authority on beta startups, search engines and public relations issues, and he has covered tech news since 2004. Phil wrote in the past for ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, Profy, SitePoint, Search Engine Journal, AltSearchEngines. Follow Phil on Twitter, g+, or send him an email at phil [at] pamil-visions [dot] com.

How to know what you should be doing for your next website, what are the hotel marketing elements that must be taken into account in the design and which ones should be avoided?

The design, architecture and development of a hotel’s website is paramount in it’s success for obvious reasons. Not the least of which is direct revenue. Every hotel knows that their direct revenue is their largest measure of financial health. If they can make the website generate 60% or more of their revenues it means all the difference for the hotel.

We’ve compiled a list of the key elements and tools that hotel website designers should be taking into account when re-designing a hotel website.

Navigation

Navigation menu on a hotel website (fusion hotel prague)

The navigation on the site needs to be self-explanatory and easy to understand. In a prior article about The First Moment of Truth in hotel marketing we  showed how guests navigate on hotel websites and covered some of the key factors on navigation. The navigation needs to answer the questions your lookers are thinking of, the main three questions are: a. What does it look like? (the rooms please, get to the point quick), b. Where is it? and c. How much does it cost.

To get the exact list of questions that guests answer find out from the front-desk what calls they get from guests trying to book on the site. Actually get the front-desk staff to note all these questions and tabulate them to see which ones need to be present on the site (and easily accessible).

Hotel Website menu on Gallery Hotel Singapore

What to avoid:

Menus that drop down on multiple levels which in turn bloat the site and make for a complex navigation. Anything that will slow down the booking should be avoided.

Speed of loading

The load time of your site needs to be lightening fast. Per our studies a hotel website has between 3 to 7 seconds to sell the hotel. Now we’re not talking about loading the page, but selling the hotel. There’s a huge difference. That means the user will click away from your page if you aren’t able to present all the key elements within that time frame. Again per a study we conducted a user will make a short-list of 10 hotels they are interested in (based on searches on OTAs, TripAdvisor, Trivago, Kayak etc).

A load time shouldn't be more than 2-3 seconds. Use tools such as loads.in to measure your site's load time.

Thus the site that has the best impact has the best chance of capturing the sale.

Use online tools such as loads.in to verify the load speed of your site.

What to avoid:

Slow loading of images, as one of the most important elements on the hotel’s website is the images, the slow loading of images will make your site a bad user experience.

Emotional impact

“People don’t ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather have one good, soul-satisfying emotion than a dozen facts.” - Robert Keith Leavitt

Your site needs to create an instant emotional impact and that is best done with great photography (providing you have a great product to sell). What will sell your rooms more than anything else is great photography well presented. We’ve seen a lot of hotels present large photos on their site and they are right, but designers need to think about the large screen sizes that are used today. The majority of computers browsing for hotels have screen resolutions of 1280×800 and above. So ensure your site shows large images well (and fast).

Emotional impact is key in hotel websites. Pictures are the most efficient way to do that.

While including large amounts of text on every page may seem like a great strategy for search engine optimization, it isn’t going to do much for the emotional impact.

When designing the site, remember that the biggest priority is the user and not the search engine. The user is the one who will be sleeping in the hotel, search engines rarely do.

What to avoid:

Too much text, pixelated images, images that can’t be expanded.

Social Integration

Great use of Social Intergration on Hotel Websites by Four Seasons

Social media has become the default method of sharing experiences. Integrating social media sharing options on your site is a must for any new hotel website. The question remains how to do it right. Designers need to make sure it is integrated at the right moment on the booking process and without distracting from the booking itself. Additionally you need to ensure you have a proper designer/developer to integrate the sharing options as they can slow down you site’s load time quite dramatically.

What to avoid:

Too many sharing buttons, ugly sharing buttons.

Creativity

Creative webdesign must focus on results, not just on "being creative"

“Things which are different in order simply to be different are seldom better, but that which is made to be better is almost always different.” - Dieter Rams

If you hire a superbly creative agency to make your site you’ll be delighted by the innovative approach they will take to the hotels website design. While that can work great on a branding website that’s designed to intrigue it may not be right for a hotel website which has a mission to accomplish in a very limited time.

While you want the site to be creative and differentiate itself from your competitors, keep those differences in terms of improvements and not just differences. Remember that your website needs to reassure the user that your hotel is a safe place for him to stay, having bizarre videos, odd photos etc wont do any of that.

What to avoid:

Creativity that doesn’t improve sales. Bizarre photography, useless staged photos that omit to show the place.

Mobile website and responsive webdesign

Mobile website created for The Five hotel, keeps the emotional impact of decor high.

In 2011 mobile traffic to hotel websites increased by 345%, it accounted for 6% of the overall traffic. The year before it only had 2% of the “market share” and that is only the beginning. There is no question that every hotel needs a mobile website. Even if the number of bookings from mobile devices is rather low users are visiting the hotel’s site and “shopping” on their mobile devices and then book using desktops.

There are two options to mobile websites that you can choose, a responsive website or an adapted website. Both can do the job and what is most important as a hotelier is to have a mobile website that still delivers an emotional impact no matter the device.

What to avoid:

Too many animations, many mobile devices still can’t render the animation galleries smoothly therefore putting too many animations will slow down the use of the site and it wont deliver a good user experience.

While there are many more details that go into making a successful hotel website these are some key ones to pay attention to when getting your site redesigned. How these elements are integrated into the design, details on how smooth the site is, how good the user-experience is and more play a very important role. All the above can be done well in one easy to use package or thrown together into something less than perfect. The cost of the website will depend on the quality of the implementation.

When choosing a designer for your hotel website it can make all the difference if you choose a designer that has experience in creating websites for hotels, because they will have experience with menu structures and booking process and can help determine what is important and what is not.

Good design makes a product useful
A product is bought to be used.
It has to satisfy certain criteria,
not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic.
Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product
whilst disregarding anything
that could possibly detract from it.
- Dieter Rams

Biggest increases from referring sites

Top

The top 3 referring sites that improved the traffic to hotel websites in 2011 compared to 2010 are:

1. 15% increase by review sites, and that coming mainly from TripAdvisor but not exclusively.
2. 2% increase Online Travel Guides (the ones that contain links to official hotel sites).
3. 2% increase by Flash sales and Group purchasing  sites such as Groupon but with the huge increase in number of these sites this category has literally “arrived” from nowhere.

Flop

Offline marketing and what guests say

Aside from many analytics tools to track visits, there’s the off-line tracking as well. Asking guests (that booked on the hotel’s website) how they heard about the hotel gives some similar but more embracive data.

1. 23% said they heard about it from Friends and Family (word of mouth).
2. 19% said they saw the hotel on an OTA (the billboard effect).
3. 15% said they found the hotel on TripAdvisor or other review sites.
4. 13% are repeat guests.

A mobile revolution has happened

If anything, 2011 was the year of mobile with mobile visits to hotel websites increasing by 345% compared to 2010 and which now accounts for 6% of all hotel website traffic, versus only 2% in 2010. By device the breakdown of percentage in 2011 is very much in favor of iOS and despite the large increase from iPads it still only comes second to the iPhone.

1. 47% iPhone
2. 37% iPad
3. 10% Android
4. 3% iPod
5. 2% Blackberry

Browser compatibility is an issue

While internet browsers are changing and new technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3 are the future web designers need to stay compatible with the older browsers which still dominate the market. Browser use in 2011 to hotel websites looked like this:

1. Internet Explorer accounted for 45% of traffic to hotel websites. Which is down 9% from 2010
2. Firefox accounted for 22%
3. Safari accounted for 18%
4. Chrome for 12%

Other facts about hotel marketing in 2011

Wishing you a great 2012.

When going in a meeting with your marketing department or marketing agency question the following points to find out what is being done on each and create a cohesive marketing strategy for your hotel.

Each of the above steps can and should be improved step by step to increase your overall revenue and most importantly your direct revenue.

In this post we’ll rapidly cover each point to give you, the hotelier, more information on what each means.

Popularity

The popularity of the hotel is how much search there is for your hotel. It’s a simple factor and can be measured through basic tools like Google Analytics or other site analytics tools. The searches for your brand are the most qualified leads you can get and the most important long term strategy is to increase those searches. There are a multitude of channels that should be used to do that and one of the fastest and most immediate is the billboard effect. Other tools are:  social media, advertising on search engines and much more. As a hotelier one of your most important tools is word-of-mouth and that means incredible service, what you can do today is make sure your guests leave with more than they expected. They’ll post great reviews on TripAdvisor and other review sites, they’ll talk to their friends and family and they’ll share stories on Facebook and Twitter.

And then find out from your Marketing staff what they’re doing to improve that. If they don’t have a plan have them work one out. If it’s going to cost you a fortune, then get them to re-work it. Increasing the hotel’s popularity is something that can take a bit of time, but on the long-term it’s the health of your hotel that depends on it.

Rates / Availability

It goes without saying that your rates and availability are the number one factor that will get you bookings (or not). In fact per Google’s research (Travel Hotel Consumers of Nov 2010) 34% of the people who booked, chose a specific site based on the price.

If you’re managing your own rates you have plenty of experience with this. What you can do to improve this? ensure you’ve named the correct competition to compare to it’s not necessarily the hotel’s near you. There are hotels we manage that only compare their rates to hotels which are better located than them, because their service, decor quality and reviews are so much better than any hotel in their surroundings they’re also much more expensive than those hotels. By comparing to the right competition they’ve increased their average price dramatically.

On the other hand, some hotels have a fixed idea that their average price must be at a certain level. Don’t let you ego dictate your price, it’s not a great news but while your hotel may be well located however the reviews, service and decor may not be up to the level guest require. Don’t hesitate to cut your rate while you work on improving those. I’ve never seen a hotel cut a price and not be able to raise it again later. What I have seen is a hotel not being able to raise a price because of bad reputation and bad decor.

Brand Protection

No matter the popularity of your hotel (small or large) you need to protect your brand. Remember these are your most valuable visitors. Find out how many third parties are advertising on your name and make sure you’re always before them. Additionally, there are ways you can limit others to advertise on your name and you should demand you marketing department/agency to take action on these.

It isn’t a minor point, this is how you will make sure that the actions you have done above (Popularity) will generate direct bookings instead of generating more commission based bookings.

As a hotelier find out if your marketing people have a plan to protect your brand and verify that it’s being done. Some actions that should be done are purchasing the direct link to your website on TripAdvisor and other rate comparison sites, ensuring your hotel comes first with your website on all these sites. But that’s not all and you should get your marketing people to tell you what they are doing exactly.

Design

There are two extremes in design and one middle ground. The first extreme is going totally creative and making the most amazing website. While this is tempting and great for one’s ego, it isn’t necessarily the most efficient. Then there’s the other extreme which is doing a site that’s only there to generate bookings and doesn’t help the hotel’s image. The middle-ground is always the hardest it requires extremely good knowledge of the elements that make a website sell while having a keen eye for design.

To do this a hotel needs to get web design made by designers that have lots of experience in the hotel industry. Getting a website made by any designer often leads to incorrect priorities that doesn’t generate bookings. In a hotel website there are certain factors that create bookings. We’ve covered them quite extensively in a series of articles entitled Moments of Truth in Hotel Marketing, we recommend that you read them to get a grasp of what should and what shouldn’t be there. A hotel’s website has between 3 and 7 seconds to interest the user and convince him to look further and book. Realize that the user visiting your website is also visiting on average 9 other hotel websites, thus design of the site is a key element to convert into guests.

Now the website isn’t everything, you’ve got to select a booking engine that converts well. Realize that the average traveler spends almost as much time on the site as they do on the booking engine (14 minutes on the website versus 11 minutes on the booking engine). We published an article with the key elements of a good booking engine which you should read here. In choosing a booking engine, cost is not all and if the booking engine does not forward the quality of the hotel’s website and image you will lose guests to third parties since their booking process is extremely streamlined.

Summary

Hoteliers shouldn’t be left in the dark about their marketing, while it is a highly technical subject and requires professionals request information and make sure there is a strategy to align the elements that will make your direct bookings and website the main part of your hotel’s revenue.

Google+

Social Media isn’t just a bunch of hype, it’s the evolution of word of mouth which has always been the number one advertising and PR medium for any product, even more so for hotels. Here’s how hotels can take advantage of it to it’s fullest.

Travel is social, Hotels are not

What should hoteliers do with social media
Travelling is social, hotels are personal. One socializes when one travels but stays personal at the hotel. The hotel experience is about intimacy and not about sharing. So how do hoteliers insert themselves in the social conversation?

Firstly understand that guests share very good experiences and very bad experiences. The mediocre or “just-asgood-as-expected” experienced don’t get shared.

Then you need to understand the 90-9-1 principle which is that 1% of the “community” create content (post on social media and reviews), 9% will act as editors (sometimes modifying or adding to an existing post and 90% are readers or just an audience.

To insert your hotel in the conversations on social media (and they are happening by the millions every day) you’ll need to deliver a better-than-expected experience and use your existing guests as ambassadors for you.

So while a hotel experience is all but a social experience during the guest’s stay it will rapidly become social once they leave. Per a study we conducted of over 13,000 hotel guests 25% of them booked at the hotel because a friend or family told them about the hotel.

By delivering a great experience, having social media presence (a Facebook page, Twitter account, Foursquare profile etc) and encouraging guests to tell their friends about it and “tag” the hotel’s page you begin to use those guests as ambassadors who will become the 1% and their friends become the 9% which in turn goes out to the 90%.

At best your actions should sometimes be 1% (creative) actions but focus on the 9% (editing and commenting) on the creations of happy guests.

Vincent Ramelli is the CEO and Founder of WIHP a leading hotel marketing agency specialized in complete marketing solutions for independent hotels that manages dozens of high profile social media campaigns.

In summary, a hotel guest isn’t being social in the hotel, they’re being social when they leave the hotel. The conversation is happening already, the proof is that it’s the biggest source of reservations for hotels. Hoteliers need to control it by delivering a great experience and using social media as a tool to add to the word of mouth that is already happening and thus reaching hundreds of thousands of potential future guests rather than the typical 50 friends and family of the existing guests.

 
Vincent Ramelli on Google+

Every hotel needs to discover what is unique about them and promote that in their marketing and advertising efforts. It’s true to independent hotels, for hotel chains, for individual hotels within a chain and all the way to an inn or bed and breakfast.

Before taking on a hotel for which we will do the marketing and before starting any campaign we do a thorough study of the hotel to determine its unique selling point(s). Several factors get studied for this, however to the amazement of many of our customers we’re often looking outside the hotel.

Typically one thinks of USPs by comparing oneself against the competition or hotels around one’s own. If there is a more modern decoration the hotelier will tend to think of that as the USP. If the interior design was done by a famous designer many a hotelier will choose that as the USP. But there is something that is often omitted when working out a USP and that’s customer perception. [This article was published on Tnooz 7 Nov 2011]

Customer Perception

All your marketing and advertising needs to appeal to end users and not all end users – it needs to appeal to the people who would like to come to your hotel. What you need to take into account when you are working out your USP is what do your guests see and feel?

Trying to figure out your USP by just walking around the hotel and looking is better than trying to do it from behind your desk and thinking. But working out a successful USP means talking to people and finding out how they experienced the hotel.

Customer perception means going out to hear what the customers experienced and understanding what their views are on the subject. It’s not something one thinks up, it is understood by listening to guests and letting them speak.

A benefit to whom?

If one can understand properly who is to benefit from the USP one will have understood everything.

A USP needs to be something that will personally affect the life of the end-user. Not esoterically, not in some far-fetched way but right here and now. It’s got to do something for the future guest personally to improve his life now.

Common Mistakes

The biggest mistake we’ve seen in working out the USP is to forget that it has to be something that the guest will benefit from.

Some examples:

• Using a historical fact as a USP. That Oscar Wilde lived in this hotel is not much of a USP because it doesn’t show much benefit to the person.
• Focusing on interior design elements. Mentioning LED lighting or other fancy technology features as a USP doesn’t help understand the comfort.
• Using the decoration theme as USP. That the hotel is decorated based on Marilyn Monroe or after the theme of cars is nice but the guest isn’t staying there to watch the theme.

Key elements of a USP

There are three factors that determine a hotel’s USP and only three.

• 1.Location
• 2.Comfort
• 3.Value

A good USP integrates all three elements to form a clear concept of the hotel. If you are unique (and positively so) on all three points your USP is perfect. But that’s rare, you’ll often find one of these points is totally unique and the other two are passable. It can happen that only one is great and the other two are not good at all, then put all your focus on what’s great as that could be enough to drive people to your hotel.

A bit more about Location, Comfort and Value.

Location

With your location you are telling the future guest that your hotel is going to save them time if you are not in the city center then show them how easy it is to reach the city center from your hotel. If there’s a direct subway line to the city center or other point of interest then use it to your advantage. If you’re just too far from anything of interest then you can still use it to your advantage but we’ll cover that in the other points.

Comfort

The decoration and interior design fits in there. But remember you need to tell your future guest how they will personally benefit from it. Essentially you need to tell them how it will make their life better. Ultra comfortable beds in a luxury setting, 24 hour service, voted the friendliest staff in the city are all great ways to take advantage of comfort. However pictures say a lot about comfort and large images of the rooms and the comfort will do more than many words.

Value

This doesn’t need too much explanation. Is your hotel going to save them money? That doesn’t mean you’re going to only be cheap, it means that you could be the best value money can buy – while still having a high average daily rate. Remember that it’s about customer perception and that’s not necessarily objective. Here’s where a bad location can be an advantage, your hotel may not be in the city center but because it’s a bit further away it’s cheaper for a much better quality. Just like the classic ad campaign by Avis “We’re only number two but we try harder.” A hotel can use its negative position as an advantage in comfort and value.

Summary and hotel USPs

Everybody needs a USP – because guests aren’t interested in staying somewhere that isn’t the best nor the cheapest. As hoteliers and marketers it’s your job to find out where you are the best and how you are the cheapest in a particular sector.

But don’t sit and think! Go out and look, talk to people and read their comments. Once you’ve figured out your USP the rest of your marketing campaign will be a lot easier to execute.