Dealing With Conflicting Hotel Marketing Advice

If you are frustrated by an onslaught of conflicting hotel marketing advice, you are not alone.  Every hotelier faces this constant barrage of salesmen and marketers trying to pitch their services by any means necessary.  Differentiating between the poor marketing advice and the advice that is is spot on can be the difference between having a successful hospitality property or a failed one.

Often times, understanding the person who is providing the advice and their motives for doing so can go a long way in helping a hotelier determine if the advice they are receiving is correct.

In general, there are five types of marketers/salesmen who you will receive advice from:

The Crooks

These are the people who are just trying to rip you off.  They know what they are doing is wrong but they don’t care; they are just trying to a make a buck.  They are easy to spot because they will most often contact you by email or, if it is in person, they will be rushed and not spend much time with you.  Anything that involves their business will generally appear unprofessional.  That’s because it takes an investment of time and money to create a business that provides value to its customers.  Crooks just want a quick buck.

Crooks generally make exaggerated claims such as having  automated software that will have your hotel ranking number 1 in Google immediately, that they have personal connections with the search engines to get your hotel ranked number 1, or that they have the hidden secret to making millions of dollars and they will let you on the secret… for $77.

The Outdated

The outdated are people who mean well and believe what they say, but their information is outdated.  Internet marketing is an extremely rapidly evolving industry.   The speed at which the Internet is growing and evolving causes almost daily shifts in which marketing tactics are effective and which ones will get your web site banned from the search results.   Given this rapidly evolving environment, it is easy to see how anyone could be outdated.  Just keeping up with the changes in Internet marketing alone can be a full time job for anyone.

The problem with The Outdated comes about most often from other industries who are trying to multi-task.  For example, web site designers and computer programmers.  When Internet and search technology was brand new it was easy for people to dabble in both worlds.  Today, all of these niches are growing so complicated it is difficult to be an expert in all of them.   A web programmer who also says they are an Internet marketer must keep up with the changes in programming as well as Internet marketing, as well as hospitality marketing (phew!).  Today, that is nearly impossible.  Although The Outdated mean well, the end result is the same as with the crooks, the user customer gets little to no return on their investment.

People who tout things like keyword density, meta keyword tags (different from meta descriptions tags), placing hidden text on your hotel’s web site, and building link farms are all working off of outdated information.

The Survivalist

It is much easier to sell a client on something they think they already know rather than to tell the client that they are wrong and to reeducate them.  The rapidly changing atmosphere of the Internet it makes it difficult to sell Internet marketing services because clients that did know a thing or two about Internet marketing a few years ago now have outdated information.  The problem is the client does not know their information is outdated nor would they believe a salesman who told them so.   For example, it was popular a few years ago to create “links” pages on a web site and then exchange links with as many people as possible in an effort to build page rank (the authority of a site in the eyes of Google).  This is no longer effective and may now violate Google’s terms of service; however, many hoteliers believe it is a good technique because it was effective a few years ago.

So, The Survivalist comes to the realization that the only way he can survive is by selling the customer on what the customer already knows.  It is easier and much faster to make a sale that way than by trying to reeducate someone.   The Survivalist justifies it to himself because he says he is only providing the services that his customers want; regardless as to whether or not the services are effective.  And to some degree, he is correct.  There are plenty of hoteliers who think they are right no matter what and don’t want to hire someone who tells them otherwise.

You can spot The Survivalist because they either always agree with you (also known as a “yes” man) or they tout many of the same techniques as The Outdated.

The Inexperienced

The inexperienced are also people who mean well but offer bad advice because they simply have no practical experience implementing the techniques they have only read about.  For the hotel industry, the inexperience can either revolve around a lack of experience in marketing or with good marketers who are not experienced in the hospitality industry.

• Inexperienced In Marketing

These are people who would like to make a living with marketing and have read a lot about it but just don’t have any actual experience implementing marketing in real world situations.  Street smarts are far different from book smarts and you don’t want someone learning how to market on your dime.

You can spot these folks by having a general understanding of marketing yourself and asking them a few tough questions, in person or on the phone, not via e-mail.  By gauging how easily they respond to your questions, you can get an idea of their true comprehension of the subject matter.  If you do this by e-mail though, you give them time to research the topic and craft a good response which defeats the point.

Another very common example of the inexperienced marketer is cold callers and account representatives for services like directories, online advertisers, pay-per-click managers, and large search engine optimization companies.  These people usually have no marketing experience what so ever.  They were merely given a short presentation about the product they are selling, a sales script, and a telephone list.  They generally make pointless statements to you like their web site being #1 nationally or their web site winning a certain award or any other “fact” that has nothing to do with sending you bookings.  Our Interactive Training Center cover’s dealing with cold callers more in depth.  For know, understand that cold callers are only interested in sales, not in providing customers with value.  Unless you know how to identify if a service is quality before you buy, it is best not to conduct businesses with them.

• Inexperienced In Hospitality

There are many smart and well intentioned marketers out there who gear their services to lodging properties like hotels, bed and breakfast’s, and inns but they don’t have any relevant experience in the hospitality industry.  This causes conflicting information with experienced hospitality marketers because the inexperienced will recommend techniques that are either not appropriate for a hotel (for example, blogging to build a readership base) or are just impractical given the time constraints an innkeeper experiences every day.  Someone who has worked with hotels has a completely different perspective than someone who actually ran a hotel.

You can spot marketers who are inexperienced in the hospitality industry by either asking them directly what their experience is or by learning Internet marketing yourself, or at the least learning the basics, so you can tell if the techniques they recommend are relevant to the hospitality industry.

Experienced Hospitality Marketers With Differing Opinions

Of those people who are truly experienced in the field of hospitality marketing, you are always going to have some differences of opinion.  This is common in any industry.  One experienced marketer may tell you that a specific lodging directory is important and another experienced marketer may tell you that a different directory is more important.  Chances are they both know what they are talking about and they will both get you to the same  end goal, just by taking different paths.  The important thing is to pick one person or company and allow them to implement your marketing plan through to completion.  Marketing is more of an art than it is a science and therefore it is important that you find someone you like and stick with them for a while.  Otherwise, if you keep jumping around on different paths, you will never get to your end goal…maximum occupancy.

Avoiding a Market for Lemons

I believe that no one can market a lodging property better than the owner or on-site staff can market it.  No one will be more frugal with money, spend more time getting things right, or be more realistic in their marketing approach than those who have the most to gain by the hotel’s success and the most to lose by its failure.  That is why I founded Occupancy Builders, to teach hoteliers and innkeepers how to manage their own properties.

This approach, however, is not right for everyone, especially larger properties.  If you must hire an outside third party to manage your hotel’s marketing, it is important that the person doing the hiring has some understanding of modern hospitality marketing techniques, including a good understanding of Internet marketing.   Failing to do so places a hotel in a market for lemons scenario, that is, a market where the only services they can buy are inferior services because they don’t know how to identify quality marketing service providers from the bad ones.