In this episode of the Suite Spot, we take a look at what it will take for hotels to accelerate their speed of recovery in 2021. Host Ryan Embree is joined by Travel Media Group’s Marketing Coordinator, Marissa Kinzel, to discuss and share ideas.

Ryan and Marissa start the episode by talking about how hoteliers can utilize social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin to gain an edge over local competition. Next, they explain the role a hotel’s online reputation plays in recovery speed and how a strong online reputation impacts traveler booking decisions. They wrap up by discussing direct bookings and how TMG’s OneView™ can help manage and organize all guest content online.

To learn more about boosting your hotel’s pace of revenue recovery or to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455.

Episode Transcript
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Ryan Embree:
Welcome to Suite Spot where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, this is Ryan Embree, host of the Suite Spot. Welcome to another episode and thank you for listening today. We have a excellent episode for you, themed all around boosting your hotel’s speed to recovery. So right now, as we’ve turned the page to 2021, we are all looking for those little ways to gain advantage over our competitors and ways that we can really pick up the pace and accelerate our pace towards recovery. Now, there are a lot of factors out there, obviously, that are going to be presented as unknown to us: COVID vaccinations, COVID variants, but we are going to go ahead and make some positive assumptions today that we are on the right track to recovery. So I want to bring in our guest with me today to kind of talk through some of this stuff, Marissa Kinzel, Marketing Coordinator. You’ve been with us before on the Suite Spot, but I’m going to welcome you again to the Suite Spot.

Marissa Kinzel:
Thank you very much, Ryan. I’m glad to be back.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, and we’ve got a great episode for you today. Obviously, at Travel Media Group, our expertise is in the hotel digital marketing space, that is the only vertical that we work with is hotels. So I thought what we do today, Marissa is really take it step-by-step and talk about a hotel’s digital marketing strategy, and maybe ways that they can gain that competitive edge and again, boost speed to recovery. So let’s go ahead and get started with social media. And I think the first thing that we really need to do as a hotelier is set some SMART social media goals for 2021. So obviously at the end of the day, social media, we have learned during this past year has been a great channel for us to communicate and connect with guests. The end goal, we always want to obviously see that revenue come from platforms and streams, like social media, but I think what hoteliers tend to forget is kind of that in between space there. So you’ve got social media and then you’ve got generating revenue. What do you need to do in between there? And I think in order to kind of boost that speed to recovery, the first thing you need to do is really set some SMART social media goals, because there’s actually quite a number of things that you can set out to accomplish on your Facebook, your Instagram, your LinkedIn. One of those is follower count, maybe getting people to start following you and expanding that reach and audience. Another one is engagement, growth, we’ve all seen those posts on our feeds that say, “like and share this post” and see how many likes we can get, see how many shares that we can get, so there’s different social media goals.

Marissa Kinzel:
Yeah, and I think that it’s important for hoteliers to also understand that if your profile is new, especially, you should give yourself around a month to see what your performance is like with your posts online and just adjust your goals regularly to match your changing expectations for how your hotel’s posts are performing. Because at first, unless you get lucky, you won’t be having posts that like go incredibly viral right away. You still have to focus on building up your initial following. You have to build up those initial amounts of engagement. So it’s also important when you’re setting up your SMART goals to keep your expectations manageable and reachable at first, and then try to steadily dream bigger as you go.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, absolutely. It makes sense. It’s a snowball effect, right? The other thing that we have to keep in mind too, is if you haven’t been active on social media, you might start getting those month over month follower count, really start to jump because you’ve just been active for this first time, but you might start hitting a plateau, what you need to kind of do next, and we really, really help our hoteliers with this, is plan a hotel social calendar. Plan out the rest of 2021, but also you need to leave room to adapt in case some outside factors, like we talked at the beginning of this episode change, but you’ll start to see and get into a rhythm with the change in seasons. You know, obviously winter is a great time to build up some momentum so that in the spring and summer, maybe we can put some more call to action posts out there to start to fill our rooms. Social listening is also something that we’ve talked about on this podcast before, something that you’ll read on our blogs at Travel Media Group, and we’re actually going to have an educational webinar on this as well, because it’s so important to make meaningful connections with our travelers. Can you talk a little bit about kind of social listening, Marissa?

Marissa Kinzel:
Oh, for sure. Yeah, we also have an educational white paper coming out about social listening as well, that you should keep an eye out for. And I think that social listening is super important to hoteliers because it’s basically, if you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s just the concept of kind of tuning your ear into the conversation online. What are people saying about you without like directly mentioning you? So this is a really, really good tool for hoteliers to use, to keep an eye on what’s going on in the industry, in your area. And what’s also going on with your competitors, because if you’re able to kind of wrap your head around what guests are saying, you can kind of keep an eye on trends, you can keep an eye on what hotel tech or safety measures guests are expecting when they’re searching for hotels, and you can make sure that your hotel is meeting their expectations before they even find you. That way whenever they do find you, it makes them more eager to book with you. And so I think that social listening – we help our hoteliers with that at Travel Media Group, as well. We have other ways to help you really keep a close eye on what guests are saying to you on social media, with alerts within OneView™ for direct messaging and @ mentions, when somebody puts like the @ symbol and then they mention your profile’s name directly. We have alerts that can be set up in OneView™ that helps our hoteliers to get those messages right away, so that way they never miss anything that any guest is asking about their hotel either.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, absolutely and when we talk about that in relation to speed of recovery, these are the type of edges that we’re looking for, the competitive edges that we’re looking for. If you can keep a closer ear to the ground of what your guests are saying, and communicating, and even experiencing at your property in real time, that’s going to give you a major, major advantage. Also talking about speed of recovery, individual travelers and leisure travelers have really been the fuel to start the beginning of this recovery, but I think eventually what’s going to happen is we’re going to start to see that group business come back. And one of the ways on social media that we can take advantage of this is through LinkedIn. And we’ve talked about LinkedIn quite a bit, it’s a great outlet and opportunity to speed up your hotel’s recovery by targeting and capturing group business, by connecting with the right decision makers that might just be able to influence a group of bookings versus an individual.

Marissa Kinzel:
Yeah, I completely agree. I think that LinkedIn is a really powerful tool and a really fast growing sort of social media platform, especially over the course of the pandemic. A lot of people have turned to LinkedIn, not just as a place to post or find a job, but also as a place to like connect with those decision makers. And I think that hotels and hoteliers have a really keen advantage when it comes to using and utilizing LinkedIn as a place to connect with those decision makers, because a lot of people on LinkedIn who are in their businesses are those higher up managers and decision makers at their company. And so, if there is going to be group business, they are going to be a part of that decision making process. They’re going to say, “Oh yeah, I think that it would be good to send so-and-so out to this state to try to help build up our business a little bit. Let’s make some plans.” And they’re going to be the ones who are doing the research, so connecting with them establishes a relationship that you can then build upon. And I think that the further along that we get to more and more business people are going to be seeking that sort of business-leisure travel, where they just want to get away for a little bit, you know, pop out to a more local location – which is also helpful because LinkedIn allows you to search for people who are within your area. And I think that LinkedIn is going to turn into one of the best tools in a hoteliers toolbox as the industry recovery continues, because you could also connect with other industry leaders within hospitality. And what comes out of building a strong community is absolutely irreplaceable in my opinion.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, we’ve learned that throughout 2020, that is definitely the case. And as you were speaking to, with even sending a decision maker to a property that influences group bookings, you know, that might also be done virtually now, through tools on LinkedIn, like LinkedIn Live or videos that you can post on your LinkedIn. And that leads me to our next topic, which is just getting creative. You know, if you’ve been working on social media, and hopefully you have, if you’ve taken some steps, like for example, seeking a podcast out like the Suite Spot to learn a little bit more about your digital marketing. You know, a lot of our listeners are very active on their social media. One thing I would explore a little bit that, again goes back to speeding up the recovery, is maybe utilizing some ad spend for the first time. So if you’ve been doing your posting, you’ve got some consistent growth, maybe a way to kind of exponentially speed that up and maybe gain that competitive edge, like we’re talking about today. Maybe explore and investigate doing some ad spend for the first time. As I’ve said before, and I will continue to say, you know, if you are going to be using this ad spend, make sure it’s a very targeted and calculated strategy and approach, because you don’t want to just kind of cast a wide net. You really want to figure out who your target market is and make sure that your ad dollars are going to the right place. So let’s go ahead and transition to reputation management, a huge, huge part that is going to be talking about speed of recovery in 2021. And I really like this idea of exploring something called creating demand versus taking market share. Our online reputation for our hotel is so powerful now, that it can literally instill confidence in travelers to get them out of their house, that they’ve been, you know, maybe hunkered down in, and to our properties. If we put out the right reputation out there, whether it be through review response that we’re going to talk about a little later, you can actually instill confidence in those travelers that are wanting and willing to take these trips right now. We’ve seen so many studies and percentages out there of travelers that are just biting at the bit to get back out and what’s going to get them out of their houses, aside from things like vaccinations and data out there, is creating an online reputation that they trust and they feel confident about. And then when we look at taking market share, after 2020 your entire market share has completely shifted. And right now hotels are grabbing at that bucket and trying to get as much market share as they can, because it might have completely shifted from where it was before 2020. And the way that you can get market share from competitors is by having a really great and clean online reputation. One of the things that that’s going to include is increased review flow. When we’re doing research on a hotel’s online health review flow is one of the biggest factors we see impacted by the pandemic. So increasing the number and recency of your reviews is going to give you a major advantage over competitors, because right now travelers are looking for relevant information and so many things can change in just the span of two weeks that that review might seem outdated.

Marissa Kinzel:
Yeah, I completely agree. I think that recency is going to be huge when it comes to recovery from COVID-19, because travelers are not going to be able to trust what your hotel experience was like in 2020, let alone, even something as close as like a month ago, everything has changed since then and everything will continue to change, especially as we continue to roll out vaccinations across the States. So travelers are going to keep a really keen eye out for how every little change affects the experience of staying at your hotel. And all of that is going to influence how they feel, how they’re perceiving your hotel. It kind of goes along with the metric that we use to measure your hotel’s 1st Impression Score™. And you’re going to want to keep that as high as you possibly can through trying to generate more recent reviews.

Ryan Embree:
Absolutely, and we’ve talked about it before, you know, if you’re a hotel out there and you know, you’ve hung your hat on a 4 or 4.5 star reputation on TripAdvisor, those are historical numbers. Travelers are going to look at that now with a little bit more of wary eye and they’re going to start looking at your recent reviews. So even though you might have that 4 star reputation on TripAdvisor, might be in the top 25% of your market, if you’re not getting positive reviews right now, today within the last couple of weeks, travelers are going to be hesitant and they might not have as much confidence as they did prior to the pandemic. So it’s about improving our score rating, you know, and using a strategy like Travel Media Group’s reputation influence program, it helps with not only the number of reviews and those recency of reviews, but it also helps with the quality of reviews and helping get more positive experiences onto a public forum. You might be hearing all these great stories from behind the front desk as they’re checking out or even in your brand surveys, but getting them out to public forums like Google and TripAdvisor is going to be key in accelerating that recovery for your hotel. And lastly, before we move on to responding to reviews, I want to take a quick moment to talk about competitor tracking. Now we’ve said this before on the Suite Spot and on our educational webinars, in order outpace your local competition, you have to know what you’re up against. And competitor tracking in the reputation space is extremely important when boosting your speed to recovery, because you could think that 5 positive reviews a month is good, but if your competition is generating 10, then you’re falling behind, they’re getting double the amount of positive reviews and expanding their lead every single month. So we can’t just pigeonhole ourselves and put the blinders on and look right at only our reputation for our hotel. We need to expand our site and look at the other hotels in the market, because those are the people that you’re competing against for a nightly basis, especially now in a more competitive light than ever. And the same is true with these negative reviews, right? If you’re receiving 5 negative reviews a month and your competition is only receiving 2 negative reviews, well over time, they’re going to be getting the jump on you, they’re going to have that advantage over you. So competitor tracking, just as important as minding your own online reputation, anything else Marissa about online reputation before we move to responding to reviews?

Marissa Kinzel:
I just want to iterate again, I do agree completely that competitor tracking is very, very important, especially because not even just in terms of number of reviews of positive or negative, but just like sheer number of actual competition around you in your area. Like it’s pretty much blatant that if you are a hotel in a larger city, you are going to be up against a whole lot more than someone else who is trying to attract travelers to their more rural location. You’re going to be facing a lot of different COVID restrictions that are going to influence how you should leverage your hotel against your competitors and how you should be phrasing things online to try to get more travelers to come visit you.

Ryan Embree:
You’re totally right. And this road to recovery is not a straight line. It is not going to be a drag race against you and your competition, it’s going to be a windy road and it’s going to be hotels that are adapting quickly on the fly and seeing what other hotels are doing in their market that are really going to be able to pick up the pace and speed of their recovery. So as we talk about that, I want to shift gears to responding to reviews. With review flow we’ve talked about, it really just slowed to a crawl in 2020 and with travelers having less relevant information to base their booking decisions off of they’re going to be spending more time than ever scrutinizing not only the reviews, but also your responses. So the days of “thank you for your feedback” those are long gone, to compare it in parallel to the social media world, it’s not good enough now just to be on Facebook or just to have a Facebook for your hotel, you’ve got to be active. And that’s the same thing that we talk about when we talk to hoteliers about the strategy for responding to reviews. Communicating changes at the property – Marissa mentioned things moving so quickly – you could implemented a lot of new regulations and rules at the property, the quickest way to communicate those changes and set the proper expectations for future guests is by talking to real time guests using review response.

Marissa Kinzel:
Absolutely, I think that review response is super important. And thinking about what you were saying for hoteliers focusing on what they’re saying in their responses, I think that a couple of important things kind of come out about this. First is, that what you could be saying to the guest who’s left a review to you online, they could then take your response and cross-post it to other social media platforms and that is something that you wouldn’t even notice is happening without something like social listening, which we talked about earlier. The other thing that I think is important is making sure that you are communicating those changes at your property and setting up proper expectations for future guests. Our team of response analysts at Travel Media Group is very, very dedicated to making sure that we write every response in your hotel’s specific voice. However you want to sound, to come across, all the way down to certain words that you prefer to have included in your responses over others. That’s something that we at Travel Media Group work with you to achieve. So we have a notes feature where hoteliers include any policy changes or specialized information about your specific property, so that we are also setting up your guest expectations perfectly. And I think that working together like that can help make that process so, so, so much easier and we’re always willing to call and communicate with you about what’s going on in your property in the moment, because we understand just as much as you guys, that things are always going to be changing and shifting – like right now, everything is just wobbling back and forth – like you said, recovery is not going to be a straight line and we want to help make that process as easy and as fast as possible with better review response.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, hoteliers really need to know the importance of having a voice right now and being able to consistently utilize that voice in their review responses, every single business owner, GM, front desk manager, they have expectations of how they want to run their hotel and how they want that hotel perceived online. And that’s all we have. Your first impression is now done over a computer screen instead of at the lobby, at the front door, talking to someone. So if you’re not communicating the right voice at the property and the right way that you’re running your hotel through these online reviews, then you’re not setting proper expectations and you could lose out on missed revenue. I do want to transition next to something that at Travel Media Group, we do work with, and that’s vanity websites, but really just talking about in a broader sense, direct bookings. Now vanity websites are a great way to provide extra exposure for hotels in a space that is competitive free. So whether you’re a branded hotel out there or an independent property, having a vanity website in 2020 was absolutely critical and crucial for our hotel partners that were looking to communicate to their guests right away and signal changes at the property. They’re a great way to obviously drive direct, commission-free bookings, but this pandemic has really presented hoteliers with a unique opportunity to sell travelers, the benefits of booking direct. Before this, hoteliers we’re always looking for a way to become less dependent on OTAs. And I think people traveling right now might not feel comfortable getting their information from a third-party OTA booking site. So building a vanity website gives travelers the chance to go straight to the source and research the business directly rather than relying on third-party information. So I know before COVID-19 happened, that was one of the biggest struggles that we were seeing, is dependence on OTAs – this might just be a silver lining here of showing the advantages of booking direct versus going through a third-party OTA.

Marissa Kinzel:
Yeah, I think that – I agree that it’s a silver lining because guests are definitely going to be relying on the information that you are presenting them as directly as possible. And there are a lot of situations where OTA’s kind of, I guess, became comfortable for a lot of guests and a lot of travelers because their website layout is the same across all hotels. You know, no matter what you’re looking at, whether it’s like a boutique property or some branded hotel, somewhere, the layout of everything is mostly the same and you work with them to fill in the information. But with all of the different changes that COVID-19 has sort of brought to the table, hoteliers need a more immediate way to communicate those changes instead of going through like a bunch of different sort of approval channels and being able to just quickly turn around and talk to our website team at TMG and say, “Hey, I just had a huge change happen at my property and I really need to alert my guests that this has happened. Can we put up some kind of pop-up banner on my vanity website so that they know right away, as soon as they land on the page,” – it’s almost like a pinned tweet on Twitter. It’s the first thing they’ll see when they log into your specific vanity website and they’ll be able to say, “Oh, okay, this is their new COVID policy. I understand now.” And they can click out, continue to browse and then book directly with you. And there are certain special offerings and rates and other advantages that you can have that kind of pull more people in and keep them booking directly with you. Because I just feel like there’s that direct “guest to hotelier” relationship that you have whenever they book directly with you, that helps you as a hotelier, kind of be able to smooth everything over really easily. There’s no third-party involvement and I think that that’s really what is going to make things a lot faster as well, and feel a lot faster to guests, if they’re trying to like resolve any issues that they have or if they have to cancel or if they have to change dates, you know, that’s the kind of stuff that they’ll be able to do a lot easier.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, it’s going to be fascinating to see as we start to recover, how many travelers go back to the third-party OTAs versus the hotels that were able to create a space like a vanity website or a website where travelers can get their own information. And you’re right, you know, with so much flexibility now, given the outside factors, travelers might be a little bit more comfortable dealing with the property directly. So this is a great time for hotels to take advantage of that. So we’ve talked about a lot today, right? Social media, reputation management, responding to reviews, and websites and direct bookings. If there were only a way to kind of bring this all together in one simple, easy to navigate feed, and that’s where TMG OneView™` comes in, right? This is a feed that makes your workflows at the property more efficient because it combines everything that we talked about in a really easy to utilize stream.

Marissa Kinzel:
Yeah, I think that TMG OneView™ makes everything so much more efficient. I mean, only in terms of social media, we’re already removing the necessity to have to log into like four or five independent platforms, cause you just log in once to TMG OneView™. It’s the same with review response, you don’t have to log into each individual website. You can just log into OneView™ and there are so many different sort and filter options for you to really easily find whatever tile type you need within the OneView™ platform. And like I mentioned earlier, we have alerts that you can set up for your mentions and your DMs on social media, so you never miss a notification and you don’t have to continually sign back in or have all these apps kind of clogging up your phone to have access to those various platforms to view and respond to anything. And also included in that is all of your analytics too, so you can just, you know, once you’re done assigning out review responses or assigning social media stuff to take a look at, you can then pop on over to one of the many, many reports that OneView™ offers – and we’re always making more – that you can just take a look at and have a more comprehensive report downloaded, and you can take a look at everything that’s like affecting your hotel’s reputation. you can see post performances, it’s all there.

Ryan Embree:
It is. And if you’re a hotelier listening to this and you kind of had a little bit of a panic moment when all of a sudden everything was taken away back in March and April, and you were looking for ways to communicate, you might’ve had a Facebook back in the day, but you’re not sure cause you have logins, but that DOS has left, and I’m not sure if I have their contact. OneView™ literally keeps all of your credentials secure and you can add and remove team members as time goes by. We know COVID-19 has a huge impact on reorganizations for properties for employees. It’s going to be important to delegate tasks. As we start to recover, your hotel is going to get busier and busier, so if you don’t have a solid strategy now to take care of this stuff and a platform like OneView™ to make sure its managed and organized, then it could become a little bit of a nightmare. And you don’t want these things falling by the wayside because this was the foundation that really might’ve sped up that recovery for the property. And as we see business pickup for the spring and even more into the summer, you’re going to need a way to streamline these processes because it can become overwhelming. I mean, think about this episode today, we’ve almost talked half an hour about all of the things that you can do on your online digital marketing. So as we wrap up this episode, I think this pandemic has really highlighted the importance of communication and connecting with guests. Now COVID-19 took away the ability to do this face to face like hoteliers have done for decades – that’s all we’ve known. Hospitality equals customer service, and usually that customer service was done over the front desk. Fortunately in 2021, there are outlets like social media and reputation sites that become our digital lobbies and those connections can still take place. And it’s going to be the hotels that take advantage of these platforms that will have the easiest and quickest way to recovery.

Marissa Kinzel:
Yeah, I completely agree. And I agree as well that COVID did really force a quick transition to all of the guest communication and interaction being done entirely in an online space. And just because doing everything digitally and digital marketing – just because it’s like more accessible to us, maybe a little bit easier to access, because it’s just all on one computer, it’s all on one device. It doesn’t mean that it’s just one person’s job, but we talked about a lot today and all of it is absolutely imperative to your hotel’s overall reputation. You have to keep on top of every social platform, social listening, every review, and keeping a third eye on analytics, just to see how your hotel is performing in all of those area, so you can also make sure that nothing slipped through the cracks. And I think that’s why it’s so important to have a partnership with someone like us at Travel Media Group. And that’s why we are so dedicated to our craft here because we want to help hoteliers succeed on every level of managing your reputation. It’s not one person’s job to do all of this and it should never be one person’s job to manage every single aspect of your hotel’s reputation. And that’s why I think it’s just super important to have somebody at your back to say, “`Hey, we’ve got this, we’ll do this together.”

Ryan Embree:
Absolutely, well said, Marissa. Thank you so much for joining me again and talking through some of this stuff – really could talk for hours on all of the little, intricate details of a hotel’s digital marketing strategy – but thank you for joining me on the Suite Spot.

Marissa Kinzel:
Yeah, we really could talk for hours, but thank you for having me.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, absolutely and if you are interested in Travel Media Group really partnering with your property, like Marissa said, to kind of be an extension of you at the property and really have a group of experts take the reins on some of this as we go into 2021 and we start to see travelers emerge again from their houses and start to finally travel again. We would love to talk to you for a consultation, for a partnership. You can reach out to us at (407) 984-7455 or you can find us at travelmediagroup.com. We have tons of educational resources out there, Marissa does an absolutely wonderful job of posting blogs, white papers, and other educational content for all of our hotel partners and hoteliers out there. We wish all of you listening a quick, speedy road to recovery in 2021, and we will be here all along the way to help on the Suite Spot, so thank you all for listening and we will talk to you next time. To join our loyalty program be sure to subscribe and give us a five star rating on iTunes. Suite Spot is produced by Travel Media Group, our editor is Anne Sandoval, with cover art by Bary Gordon. I’m your host, Ryan Embree, and we hope you enjoyed your stay.