In today’s ever-evolving hospitality industry, what makes a great marketing strategy? One thing remains certain. In the hospitality industry, succeeding in marketing requires knowing your guests. And the best way to know your guests is via actionable, data-based insights geared towards guest engagement and satisfaction.
NB: This is an article by Terri Miller, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, Concilio Labs
So the question evolves. How do you best map out and utilize the information gathered about guests to maximize ROI?
Single vs. Holistic Guest View
A single guest view represents an aggregated, consistent and holistic representation of the data known by a hotel about its guests that can be viewed in one place. This is the result of gathering, matching, and effectively breaking down data you’ve collected to gain a more accurate understanding of their motivators to better target your marketing efforts.
A holistic guest view is a guest-centric marketing model that is derived from a comprehensive, holistic view of your guest. While these concepts are similar in nature, the holistic approach, as one might assume from the name, is the preferred method. It leverages all internal and external sources of data to clearly identify each individual guest, as well as their corresponding wants and needs. If implemented properly, a holistic guest view represents a 360-degree approach to all interactions.
This information should be pulled from social channels, surveys, guest history, feedback forms, online reviews, and more. Using the holistic guest view, you won’t just be able to increase your level of service and satisfaction; you’ll also be able to prevent potential issues, drive engagement, and identify relevant social influencers.
Maximizing a Holistic Approach
To effectively utilize and maximize ROI from a holistic guest view, it is important to aggregate and access to all of this guest-specific information in one place (the Concilio Insights Engine is ideal). This will enable you to navigate through dashboards and views to extract guest personas, trends, timely campaign suggestions, and more. With access to this intelligence readily available, you should be able to answer the following questions with ease:
- Who are your guests (scores/personas)?
- How did they become your guests?
- What are they saying about your hotel online?
- What is their booking and buying behavior, and has it evolved over time?
- How do you keep your best guests loyal?
- What channels do your guests and potential guests prefer?
- What opportunities are there to maximize guest value through upsell or cross-sell offers?
- What are your most common guest complaints, if any? How could those be remedied?
- How much should I invest to acquire and retain loyal guests?
- What is each guest’s value to your hotel?
Social Listening — Are You Plugged In?
Social listening – taking advantage of outside sources of information where your guests share robust and distinct personal opinions and preferences – is critical to succeeding in a holistic view approach.
Whether your guests are active on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Vero, or TripAdvisor, their online persona offers a wealth of information.
Tapping into this data, one can identify, address, and find solutions to complaints that guests have about their experience with your hotel, while also becoming aware of (and responsive to) positive feedback. You can also identify potential travelers who would be interested in your property’s offerings, as well as those guests who could act as positive social influencers for your brand.
In fact, this is where a ‘guest scoring system’ can come into play. In a scoring system, guests’ value are ranked based on their social engagement, booking tendencies, purchasing behaviors, and other criteria.
The holistic guest view offers key competitive and business advantages, giving you access to everything you need to make more profitable marketing decisions.
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words — Or, A Lot of Data
Further to the penchant for social media exhibited by the modern guest, we also must remember the importance of visual data. Leisure trips are often defined by their ongoing documentation through means of photos, videos, and more. This visual content, when posted to social platforms, can help you to better understand how your guest feels about your hotel and the experience that it offers.
With a solution that is built around the holistic guest view, the ongoing analysis of public, visual content as it relates to your guests can reveal potential issues or complaints to your team in real time. Additionally, positive images shared by guests can (with proper permissions) be utilized to promote your hotel while further establishing a unique, personalized relationship with that guest.
Location-Based Intelligence
It’s not enough to just know what your guests are saying; it’s equally important to understand where that feedback is coming from. For larger hotel chains with various locations across different sectors, it’s important to understand your guests’ experience at every location. Using this location-based data, you can readily identify any gaps in your brand consistency as it relates to your hotel’s offerings and guest feedback/approval ratings.
For heightened guest satisfaction, engagement, and ROI within your marketing campaigns, look no further than the holistic guest view.
Author Bio
As CEO of Concilio Labs, Terri is responsible for driving the strategic and tactical growth of the company, while ensuring innovation is at the forefront when delivering solutions hoteliers truly need. Her wealth of experience in business, management, and technology guides all facets of the company’s success. Prior to Concilio Labs, Terri was the Vice President of MICROS eCommerce leading the creative, delivery, and technical departments. With a passion for delivering results, Terri continues to grow Concilio Labs with a focus on becoming the leader in developing and delivering smart hotel products and services
