As digital marketers, we can ramble off best practices for your hotel’s social media accounts, websites, and search engine optimization until we lose our voices. While our team members are all experts in their fields, we know that we do not know everything. It is important to gather outside insight and gain a fresh perspective when it comes to digital marketing. Understanding the wants and needs of your hotel’s target audience helps our Blue Magnet team of experts develop best practices, optimize our strategy accordingly, and attract the right people.
In order to help your property’s sales team thrive, the purpose of this interview was to learn the (digital) wants and needs of a professional meeting planner. Read our interview with Ricci McDonald, a Director of Meetings and Education at Illinois Podiatric Medical Association, to learn how your hotel can improve its own digital marketing efforts and strategy when it comes to locking down group business – an excellent source of recurring revenue.
Where do you go to look for hotels to host meetings/ conferences?
I rely heavily on CVB’s and hotel national sales reps to figure out what spaces would be the ideal fit for the size and type of conferences we are planning. Once I have it down to a few options, it is all about research. I seek out reviews for the hotels we are looking at. When you do a site visit, hotels are very careful to give you the best experience possible, so it is important to pay attention to what other guests have experienced in order to get the full picture of the hotel and their service quality.
If I do a search on Facebook, for example, and the majority of reviews reflect negative experiences and the hotel has not been responsive, it is a big red flag. A few years ago, when brands were starting to use social media to add a level to their customer service, I was discussing the power of these exchanges with colleagues. We decided to test the hotel we were staying at by tweeting that we were out of something in our minibar. The hotel never responded, which none of us were upset at, but if they had responded or better, just had the missing item delivered, it would have been a story we all told for years on outstanding customer service.
