Analyzing the digital marketing activities of hotels, Martin Soler of Soler & Associates concludes that 98% goes toward performance-type marketing that is designed to capture clicks and convert those clicks into on-the-books revenue.

ReviewPro’s RJ Friedlander asks one of the key questions in marketing: In a time when it seems like.

Generating a proper understanding of data with the aim of orienting the future of the business is paramount for gaining competitive advantage and superior customer value, write Alessandro Inversini and Meng-Mei Chen of the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne.

A hotel’s revenue optimization team and its digital marketing team my not always see eye to eye, writes Tammy Farley, President & Co-Founder of The Rainmaker Group. But they each play an indispensible – though complementary – role in successfully marketing the hotel.

The brand experience starts long before a guest sets foot in a hotel and likewise, it outlasts the checkout by a long time, too. As brand strategist Matthias Huettebraeuker explains, the reward for t.

Most social media campaigns designed to engage with customers are unsuccessful, write Alessandro Inversini and Hilary Catherine Murphy, both of the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne, failing to generate brand awareness and, in most of the cases, any financial return on the investment.

Looking back to some examples from his pre-digital career, David Turnbull notes that the successful hotel brands of today are those that have gone back to grass roots – ones that differentiate themselves by delivering customer-focused campaigns and branded experiences that give their target audience a compelling reason to become and then remain, brand advocates.

This Hotel Yearbook's guest editor Martin Soler sat down for a chat with Robin Chadha, Chief Marketing Officer at citizenM, about maintaining brand integrity – especially in the digital world. Interview

Hotel marketers have acquired an unhealthy dependence on performance marketing, writes Reknown’s Daniel E. Craig. They pay to generate clicks and conversions, but as he explains, this occurs when travelers have already decided on their destination and are making their ultimate choice of hotel.

Independent hoteliers must understand that digital marketing consists of three distinct, but interconnected and interdependent categories, writes HEBS Digital founder Max Starkov, focusing respectively on guest engagement, guest acquisition, and guest retention.

Cindy Estis Green is CEO and Co-founder of Kalibri Labs, a technology firm using the industry’s largest and most robust database tracking guest stays and cost of customer acquisition. Kalibri Labs assists hotels in evaluating and predicting revenue performance with data science and next-generation benchmarking.

One of the biggest factors that drive the adoption of any technology is whether it reduces friction, i.e. does it make things easier for a customer to do business with a company? As Peter O’Connor of Essec explains, communicating with our computers and devices using our own voices will do just that.

The state of the art in hospitality digital marketing involves engaging guests more proactively — sometimes before they even think about connecting with you. That’s a major takeaway from two of the big winners in HSMAI’s 2018 Adrian Awards competition, which recently honored creativity and innovation in hospitality advertising, digital marketing, and public relations.

The evolution of revenue management and success for the next generation of hotel managers are intertwined, not to say inextricably linked, writes Dr. Ravi Mehrotra, founder and president of IDeaS. Ba.

Future winners and losers in hospitality will be determined based on how much they embrace digital to transform every aspect of their brand to create new, personalized, carefully curated and meaningfully differentiated emotional experiences for guests, write Landor’s Lulu Raghavan and Cornell’s Chekitan S.

Hotel distribution is going through a transformation of how hotels distribute inventory. This change, known as “attribute-based selling”, or ABS, has been years in the making, but is only beginning to gain traction.

Mixed martial arts is a sport that’s all about full-contact combat, and takes place in a modified boxing ring (or a cage, for goodness’ sake). Forecasting is a planning tool that’s all about coping with future uncertainty – and takes place at your desk.

When it comes to creating brand awareness in 2019, hotels have a problem, says Clay Bassford, of Bespoke Sound. That’s because possibly the largest marketing challenge of the decade is media-oversaturation.

Rate leakage is a serious problem for hoteliers. Triptease’s Charlie Osmond raises the alarm about .

All hotels should have a brand story and central idea in place, writes Michael Pardo of IcePortal. .

Technology has dramatically shifted the way hotels engage with customers, says Cendyn’s Casey Munck. Continuous optimization based on unified data is the key to success in the future.

With AI technology becoming broadly available across multiple platforms, many digital marketing approaches are, or soon will be, out of date, writes Avvio’s Frank Reeves. He prescribes five key persp.