Editor’s note: This is the third of a three-part series examining pre-stay, on-property and post-stay marketing trends.
NEW YORK CITY—You’ve spent the money, gotten customers to book your hotel and delivered relevant deals to them during their stay.
Now what?
Keeping your hotel brand top of guests’ minds after they’ve checked out requires more than just sending the standard post-stay survey, said marketers at the recent Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International Digital Marketing Strategy Conference. Post-stay marketing strategies now build on everything hotel marketers do in the pre-stay and on-property phases while paying attention to some specific challenges.
This is part three in Hotel News Now’s series on digital marketing trends. Read the first part in this series, “Digital marketing: Pre-stay about engagement.” Read the second part, “On-property messaging tips for hoteliers.”
Social listening and responding
As with pre-stay and on-property messaging, post-stay marketing activities focus a lot on social listening.
“We do a lot of tuning in and listening on our social networks,” said Heather Richer, VP of revenue management and distribution for Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants. “Social is especially important for post-stay engagement.” She said Kimpton maintains corporate and property-level Twitter handles, which guests use to share feedback, often after they’ve checked out.
Dustin Bomar, VP of digital acquisition and brand marketing at Hilton Worldwide Holdings, agreed with Richer. One particular challenge a larger company has is knowing whether individual properties should do the post-stay social engagement or if that should be left up to corporate, he added.
“You have to strike a balance,” he said. “The property should stay on top of what’s relevant at that property.”
Richer agreed that it’s definitely a debate, although very property-specific responses should be handled by the property rather than corporate.
Bomar said the conversation at Hilton now is about how to best align this kind of social messaging.
“We have a lot of hotels that have Twitter handles, as well as corporate,” he said. “We’re trying to align all that because customers have so much coming at them. Some individual hotels should have their own Twitter, like the Waldorf-Astoria New York, but maybe not the airport Hilton in Cincinnati.”
Most effective messages
Speakers said some of the most effective ways to respond to guests after they’ve left the hotel is by offering highly targeted follow-up offers as well as soft messaging techniques.
For Barry Brown, regional director of sales and marketing at the Hotel Del Coronado, post-stay messaging is a better fit for the hotel’s clientele.
“Our customers have a real sense of ownership and connection to the property, so instead of doing hard offer-based marketing, we do more soft messaging to get them to engage post-stay.”
Some examples he gave include sending a webcam shot or a recipe from one of the Hotel Del Coronado’s restaurants, or even a spa ritual guests can do at home.
“It’s about engaging our guests to those experiences,” he said. “We want them to be able to share these things with friends and family.”
Richer and Bomar said part of the post-stay marketing strategies at Kimpton and Hilton involve gathering what they learn by listening to guest chatter on social and other platforms, then turning that data into the next relevant offer for that guest.
“We listen a lot, which helps us improve our product continuously, but then we try to cut that data in ways to make the follow-up message as relevant as possible,” Bomar said. “It’s not about changing segmentation, but more about identifying cues to see people’s behaviors.”
Determining whether to send a guest a follow-up offer for a golf round or a business dinner, for example, might have a lot to do with those social cues.
“We listen to try to understand how one customer’s behavior on their business trip might be different from their leisure trip so we can figure out how to target a leisure offer, for example,” Richer said.
Future of post-stay marketing
Speakers agreed that much more integration—both within property departments, at the corporate level and within the overall travel landscape—can happen to make post-stay marketing even more targeted.
Aligning with a brand or property’s loyalty program is a specific example. Richer said it would be valuable to have more data that links loyalty member guests’ social behavior to their booking behavior.
One piece of loyalty marketing Richer said is particularly effective for Kimpton is leveraging the company’s restaurant portfolio.
“Our restaurant component gives us that opportunity to engage with guests who might stay in one hotel, then go home and eat at one of our restaurants in their home town,” she said. The brand’s newest iteration of its loyalty program, Kimpton Karma, includes many food-and-beverage-related member perks for that reason, she said.
Bomar said personalization on sites and apps will influence the next wave of post-stay marketing. “Just think about what’s possible here,” he said. “If I go to the Conrad in Beijing and have a great bottle of wine, then I come to the Conrad in New York City and the hotel knows I had that wine in Beijing and loved it, and offers it to me.”
Brown agreed that customization will have the biggest impact on all levels of digital marketing in the future. “Customized booking engines will happen,” he said. “Let’s say you always stay in a suite—that booking engine should be able to show you just suite offers.”
All three agreed that relevance is the key, because unless guests stay engaged with the property or brand, they’ll leave.
“Look at Uber,” Bomar said. “You rate that driver the second you step out of the car. What do hotels do? We send you a survey two weeks after you checked out. There must be a more streamlined way.”