Hotel Marketing Podcast

Filling occupancy during the off-season remains one of the hotelier’s biggest challenges and can require a lot of creativity for your digital marketing strategy. Hoteliers should be using every platform, including email, social, paid search, and website content, to promote sales during the off-season. As challenging as it may sound, there are several tactics and ideas that you can implement into these platforms for your off-season marketing strategy. Today, we’re going to discuss 8 ways that you can use to push for more bookings in the off-season. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-125-8-ways-hotels-can-promote-sales-during-the-off-season/

Independent hotels can learn a lot from branded hotels. Once you understand their strategies and limitations in the digital space, you can compete with them. For this episode of the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast, we enlisted the expertise of Stephanie Smith from Cogwheel Marketing to tell us about what the brands are up to and how we can outperform them. SHOW NOTES:

In this episode, we get back to basics with the latest in our hotel marketing 101 series. This time, we discuss social media and identify the platforms and the strategies that make the most sense for your property. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-123-hotel-marketing-101-the-top-3-things-you-should-be-doing-on-social-media/

Finding content out of date, or not ready to be posted, is one of the most common issues we come across in terms of hoteliers being ready for what is to come. This is not unexpected, many hotel operators are busy dealing with guests, property issues, and a myriad of other urgent issues. Unfortunately, this means the important things that are not urgent, get pushed to the side. If you don’t already know about the Eisenhower’s Decision Matrix by name, you surely have seen it in books like “Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People.” More or less, the point of the matrix is we spend way too much time in Quadrant #1 or Quadrant #3, and not nearly enough time in Quadrant #2. Today’s podcast is all about setting up your website’s content to be ready to go in advance and completely live in Quadrant #2, important but not urgent. We are going to cover five content areas that can be planned in advance, created, and then executed when the time comes… no urgency needed. We could do an entire podcast on the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, and probably will, but for now, let’s talk content. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-122-hotel-marketing-101-proactive-website-content-updates-that-make-sense/

If you’re a hotel marketer, chances are that you spend some of your budget on advertising. Typically, those efforts are deployed in an attempt to drive demand for your property or to harvest the intend that already exists from a person who is looking to take a trip. Most hotel marketers do the basics right. They set up different campaigns and target a defined audience with a specific message. Most people, however, aren’t taking advantage of all of the potential target segments that exist in today’s marketing toolkit. In this episode, we dig into 15 different ways to target your audience and discuss the fact that layering these segments into more granular groups of people is the best way to maximize your ROI. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-121-15-simple-ways-to-refine-your-hotel-ad-targeting/

What's all the fuss about Millennials and Generation Z? Are they really going to cause the death of life as we know it? Should we be spending our time developing a marketing strategy that specifically targets these increasingly influential enigmas? We tackle all of these tough topics and more in this week's episode fo the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-120-should-your-hotel-be-marketing-to-generation-z-and-millennials/

Effective communication is one of the keys to building a strong relationship with your guests. If you do it correctly, you can build customer loyalty, improve the guest experience, and drive more revenue. In this episode, the Fueligans break down a recent blog article that discusses 15 triggered messages that you should be sending to your guests Based on this original blog post: 15 Triggered Messages Your Hotel Should Be Sending To Your Guests https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/15-triggered-messages-your-hotel-should-be-sending-to-your-guests/ SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-119-dominate-the-competition-with-these-15-triggered-messages/

This episode is based on a vertical trends report produced by Google as well as Revinate’s latest email marketing trends study. Also see our notes on last year’s study: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-98-takeaways-revinates-2018-global-hotel-email-marketing-report/

If you tuned in to last week’s episode where we reviewed the 2019 Leisure Travel Study you’ll know we talked a lot about the ever-changing habits of our guests. However, not everything a guest does is constantly changing. In this episode we look at a famous quote from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and discuss what it means for hotel marketers. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-117-what-hotel-marketers-can-learn-from-amazons-secret-to-success/

Each year, Fuel publishes a comprehensive leisure travel study that takes a look into why people travel and how they make their purchase decisions. The data revealed by the study offers incredible value to the hospitality industry as it provides a clear picture of what people are looking for when they are performing their travel research. In this episode of the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast, the Fueligans breakdown the most surprising and the most important stats from the 2019 study and discuss the biggest opportunities that exist for hoteliers who want to take advantage of this information. DOWNLOAD THE STUDY: https://www.fueltravel.com/2019-leisure-travel-trends-study/ SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-116-youll-be-shocked-by-these-insights-from-the-2019-leisure-travel-study/

We recently published an article on HotelExecutive.com where we made the argument that over-reliance on OTAs could become an existential problem for hotels if the economy were to take a downturn. Not that OTAs are bad, but many have become comfortable letting the OTAs drive a significant percentage of their demand. In this episode, we dive into the article and discuss its wider implications. READ THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE: 10 ways to drive direct bookings in 2019 - https://www.hotelexecutive.com/business_review/6165/top-10-ways-to-drive-direct-bookings-in-2019 SHOW NOTES:

This week’s episode is a breakdown of an article from Adobe that was recently published on CMO.com. The article takes a look at several travel-related trends that have been aggregated from numerous sources. The fueligans discuss the merits of each stat and provide insight into the impact they may have on hotel marketers. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-114-15-mind-blowing-stats-about-digital-trends-in-travel/

This is the second episode in our hotel marketing 101 series. In this show, we dig into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and give practical advice about how hotels can drive more direct revenue from organic search. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-113-hotel-marketing-101-a-beginners-guide-to-seo/

For many, they think of the annual HITEC Expo and Conference as the “Super Bowl” of hotel technology events. For us, the Super Bowl is the “HITEC” of football games. HITEC is simply that darn great. If you’re in the market for new technology or if you just want to see what cutting-edge trends are going to be the next big thing, you should plan on attending HITEC. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-112-shocking-predictions-for-hitec-2019/

In this episode of the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast, the Fueligans give 10 simple rules that every hotel marketer should follow. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-111-the-10-commandments-of-hotel-marketing/

Still trying to figure out this whole “influencer” phenomena that’s getting more than its fair share of coverage in hospitality blogs? In this episode of the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast, we solicit the help of our friends at Navis and Flip.to to discuss the difference between macro and micro influencers, and we look at a case study that illustrates the potential that exists from tapping into the influence of your existing guest. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-110-the-real-value-of-hotel-micro-influencers-with-flip-to-and-navis/

We’re kicking off an awesome new series in 2019 to introduce our audience, clients, and colleagues to the core best-practices in hotel marketing. The idea being if you have just been thrown in to the hotel marketing business, or you’re looking to brush up on what you should have already been doing, you’ll be able to listen to each episode in the Hotel 101 series to make your marketing rock.

This episode was inspired by our own older podcast episodes that helps you diagnose anomalies in your analytics data. We get questions from our clients on a regular basis when something in their data doesn’t feel right, has had a sudden change, or just doesn’t make sense. Here are some common issues SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-108-these-6-analytics-anomalies-give-hotels-agita/

In this episode, we have a special guest, Niel Howe, and we discuss ways in which a hotel GM or Owner can leverage their authority to drive more bookings. Neil is a best selling author and entrepreneur, known as ‘The Authority Architect’ and he helps professionals leverage their knowledge to drive more business.

Assuming that you’ve been implementing all of the tips we’ve provided on the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast thus far, your property is immaculate and your staff are super-friendly. That means that you don’t have a problem retaining guests. Your repeat visitor numbers are through the roof. However, you still have some soft spots throughout the year that you need to fill up, so you’re going to have to go find new people to stay in those rooms. In this episode, we look at some of the ways that you can spread the word about your property and earn the opportunity to win some new business. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-106-top-10-ways-to-reach-new-hotel-guests/

Each year, we get inundated by articles containing the top 10 list of something. We thought we’d save you some time by combining 5 of our favorite top 10 lists for hotel marketing and summarize them in this handy-dandy episode. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-105-top-list-of-top-10-lists-for-hotels-in-2019/

Guess what? It’s no longer the “Year of Mobile”. While it seems as if mobile has been the “trend for the past 5 years, I think it's time to acknowledge the fact that mobile is the minimum ante to play these days. If you don’t have your mobile strategy figured out by now, you’re so far behind in terms of consumer expectations that you may be beyond help. Assuming you’re still with us, let’s discuss some of the real trends that you should be paying attention to in 2019. SHOW NOTES:

Today on the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast we are going to cover how to make the most of your marketing efforts by setting up a schedule of continual proofing to guarantee your hotel’s site is ready to convert guests to its fullest. How you ask? Simple, by ensuring your systems actually work as designed, track as they should, and trigger followups as expected. SHOW NOTES:

In this episode, we take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly in terms of how hotels are responding to their online reviews. We discuss best practices and give advice on how to avoid the pitfalls by leaving emotion out of it and by considering that you’re not just responding to the single individual, but to every potential future guest. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-102-how-to-respond-to-bad-hotel-reviews/

Conversion rate is yet another metric that is most useful to look at in the context of other dimensions. Today we are specifically talking about it in terms of landing pages. Since conversion rate is relative to your market, instead of giving specific ranges for each entry point, we’ll rank these pages in terms of likeliness to convert vs. not, based on the likely source of traffic. SHOW NOTES:

In the 100th episode of the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast, the Fueligans throw the gauntlet to our faithful listeners and pose the challenge, "Ask Me Anything". Tune in to find out whether the inevitable curve-balls were tackled with the typical brilliance that can only come from this podcast.

In a recent blog article, Fuel’s own Pete DiMaio outlined 6 changes that Google has made over the past year that should scare the Dickens out of hotel marketers. The good news is that your Fueligan friends are here with another episode of the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast to break down these changes, tell you what they mean, and give you a game plan on how to adjust your marketing strategy and not get stuck in the ‘Upside Down’. SHOW NOTES:

Email marketing is still the most effective way to drive direct booking business (if done correctly). The trouble is that a lot of hoteliers resort to spamming their list with nothing but discounts. The key to a successful email strategy is to play the long game. Don’t sacrifice long-term success for instant gratification. In this episode, we look at some recently released data from our friends at Revinate and give you the Fueligan spin on their findings. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-98-takeaways-revinates-2018-global-hotel-email-marketing-report

Should your hotel website have a section dedicated to area information, or is it even worth competing with other sites who may already have that content? In this episode of the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast, the Fueligans discuss their best practices for having destination content on your hotel website and how it can help drive more direct bookings. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-97-8-great-ways-gain-bookings-destination-information/

Influencer marketing is all the rage these days but what is it exactly and is it something that your hotel should be doing? In this episode of the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast, we take a look at this growing trend and give you our in-depth analysis so that you can decide whether or not it’s right for your property. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-96-influencer-marketing-right-hotel/

You may have heard about the 6 P’s of being prepared, “Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.” From a hoteliers perspective, the 6 P’s mean creating a plan for how your organization will react in times of trouble. In a disaster, you will not have time to think creatively and properly address the situation. You must create a comprehensive plan before disaster strikes. Your property likely already has a well-crafted operational disaster plan detailing exactly how and when the staff goes into action to prepare your hotel. You already have redundancies for power, security, and so on. Therefore we will not go into detail on any operational level disaster planning. Instead we will look at what you need to do from a marketing and communications perspective. SHOW NOTES:

Today we are talking about our takeaways from part two of a three-part study performed by EyeforTravel in the Behavioral Analytics Report Series. This report is all about driving consumers through the purchase funnel and ways to improve conversion rate. SHOW NOTES: http://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-94-shocking-revelations-converting-customer-eyefortravel-report-takeaways/

Following up on the last episode, where the Fueligans took a deep dive into the results of the 2018 Hospitality technology study, this week's episode focuses on the feedback and insight that has been gathered from other technology vendors. DOWNLOAD THE 2018 HOSPITALITY TECHNOLOGY STUDY http://www.fueltravel.com/2018-hotel-tech-study/

As technology leaders in the hospitality industry, your friends at Fuel Travel, Flip.to, and StayNTouch joined forces to conduct an extensive study of hundreds of hoteliers and suppliers with a goal to learn where the industry can improve from a technology perspective. The results are compiled from 358 respondents, all of whom are involved in the process of purchasing or selling technology within the hospitality industry. DOWNLOAD THE STUDY: http://www.fueltravel.com/2018-hotel-tech-study/

Google My Business is a free and often overlooked opportunity for hotels to gain more search engine visibility. In this episode, we look at 8 thinks that you can Do Right Now to Optimize Your Google My Business Listing SHOTE NOTES: http://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-91-8-ways-hotels-can-optimize-google-business/

Each year, hoteliers and suppliers from around the world gather for the annual HFTP HITEC conference and tradeshow, which is accompanied by HSMAI’s ROC event. Your Fueligan friends were in attendance and we break down what we learned at this year’s event. SHOW NOTES: http://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-90-secrets-hitec-2018-revealed/

Your hotel’s marketing programs have big problems! And odds are, you don’t even know it. Today we are going to go through the 10 most common issues any hotel will find with their marketing efforts and how to fix each one. SHOW NOTES: http://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-89-10-simple-fixes-hotel-marketing/

In this week's episode of the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast, we dig into the gaps that exist between marketers and revenue managers courtesy of Marco Benvenuti from Duetto SHOW NOTES: http://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-88-revenue-strategy-secrets-revealed-courtesy-duetto/

Increasingly, travelers are turning to voice search on their smartphone or voice assistant for the answers to their queries. In this week’s episode of the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast, we break down these changes, what it means for your hotel, and give you some proactive tips to ensure that you’re prepared for the SEO-volution. With all of the changes that Google has made over the past 5 years, SEO has been dead more times than Kenny from South Park but it’s still driving significant traffic and revenue to our hotels. With that said, the latest calls for the demise of SEO may have a little more credence because this time, it’s not about SERP changes, it’s about a definite shift in consumer behavior. SHOW NOTES:

These are in no particular order of importance, but they are some of the most important things you should be doing to optimize your AdWords account. We take over a lot of PPC accounts that clearly aren’t following these best practices. Here are 10 things you should be doing to run a successful PPC account. SHOW NOTES:

Is your hotel website accessible by everyone? If not, it should be and we’re going to tell you why and precisely what you need to do in this week’s Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast. SHOW NOTES: http://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-85-ada-wcag-2-0-hotel-websites-need-know/

Welcome to the TripAdvisor conspiracy theory episode where we’re going to cover all the strange and unusual things we are seeing from the world’s largest review and hotel shopping platform. Since the beginning of 2018, we have been noticing some very odd behavior from the TripAdvisor results, customer service response time, sales rep strategies, and overall communication. What is most odd is that we have found communication from TripAdvisor to us, our clients, and industry partners has seriously degraded. This leads us to start asking some pretty conspiratorial questions like, “Is TripAdvisor being bought out?” ORIGINAL BLOG POST: http://www.fueltravel.com/blog/tripadvisor-what-is-happening/ SHOW NOTES:

On today’s episode, find out all of the mistakes that are holding your email marketing campaign back as we run through Marketo’s list of the most common email marketing mishaps. SHOW NOTES: http://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-83-8-email-marketing-mistakes-hotels-avoid-marketo/

In this episode, we dig into all things GDPR and try to lay out exactly what you need to know and do prior to the May 25th deadline. There’s a lot of information and misinformation floating around about GDPR and we try to cut through the noise and break it all down Fueligan style. SHOW NOTES: http://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-82-hotels-need-know-gdpr-late/

How should hotels be spending their marketing dollars? We Break down our top 10 lists of hotel marketing investments in this week’s Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast. Digital marketing has made marketing so much more effective, but at the same time, it’s made it more complex. There are no right or wrong answers, but we try our best to use our knowledge and experience and debate the pros and cons of everything from brand PPC to email marketing. SHOW NOTES: http://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-81-top-10-ways-drive-direct-bookings-2018/

There are so many sources talking about mobile data, but do the numbers all add up? What exactly does the data mean and how can hoteliers take action? In this episode, we dig into Fuel’s own data and compare it to data published by other folks in the industry to see if we can help you make sense of it all. Find out what we learned. SHOW NOTES: http://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-80-hotel-booking-data-reveals-surprising-consumer-mobile-behavior/ SHOW NOTE

Google is not known for keeping the status quo and if all indications are correct 2018 is going to really shake up the hotel space. For years we have seen Google continues to make efforts to keep users on their platform for longer and longer. In 2016/17 Google even became a full-funnel system with the roll out of Google Hotel Ads. Well, they’re not stopping there. Here’s just a glimpse of what Google has in store for hotel searchers in 2018. SHOW NOTES: http://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-79-these-google-changes-will-rock-your-hotels-world-in-2018/

Has the world not realized yet? Mobile is a big deal and you need to be doing everything you can to cater to the consumer’s desire to book on mobile. In this episode, we look at a recent white paper from Criteo and also dig into some of our own data to show just how close we are to becoming a mobile-first industry. SHOW NOTES: http://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-78-hotel-isnt-ready-second-mobile-tipping-point/

There are a lot of buzz-worthy two-letter acronyms thrown around these days. None more so than Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Artificial Intelligence (AI), But, what do these things mean to you as a hotelier and how can they impact your hotel marketing? Tune in to this episode of the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast to find out. SHOW NOTES: http://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-77-hotels-paying-attention-ar-vr-ai/

There is a lot of buzz in the hotel industry about both blockchain and voice search. While both are undoubtedly going to have a major impact on society, the Fueligans have a lively discussion about both of these 'megatrends' and analyze the likely impact that they will have on the average hotelier in the next twelve months. Do you need to drop everything you're doing and jump on board the hype train? We think not. SHOW NOTES: http://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-76-dont-believe-hype-blockchain-voice-search-yet/