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It’s Not About You: Why Hotel Marketing Needs to Change

Is your marketing all about you? About how beautiful your rooms are, how delicious is the restaurant’s menu, how soothing are the spa services? All this may be true, but let’s be realistic: Your potential guests are hearing the same thing from every hotel.

In addition, a 2012 comScore study found that average ad effectiveness increases with age, meaning, traditional marketing is less effective with each new generation that comes along. Millennials (the youngest generation in the study) are more difficult to persuade via advertising when compared to older viewers. In just a few years, the majority of hotel guests will be Millennials, and traditional marketing will be useless.

So what should hoteliers do? Hotels need to switch from all-about-me marketing to targeted, guest-centric marketing.

Revinate marketing experts Daniel Mason and Betty Mok show you:

  • why marketing needs to change.
  • what hypertargeting is and how to do it.
  • how hoteliers can leverage customer data to deliver effective marketing, enhance the guest experience, and drive greater revenue.
Betty Mok, Director of Product Marketing

As the Director of Product Marketing at Revinate, Betty is responsible for new product and feature launches including pricing, packaging and messaging. Prior to Revinate, Betty has over 10 years of marketing experience at a range of businesses from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies including Intuit and American Express, with a focus on online marketing and launching new technology products. Betty has a BA from NYU, Stern School of Business and an MBA from Columbia Business School.

Danny Mason, Head of Demand Generation
As the Head of Demand Generation at Revinate, Danny is responsible for creating and managing programs that drive interest in Revinate, quantifying the success of those programs, and refining/optimizing performance. Prior to joining the Revinate team, Danny earned his BS in Hospitality Management from UNLV (sorry Cornell team!).

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Marketing Strategies: Driving Demand and Connecting With Today’s Buyer

Are you failing to make a real connection with customers? Are you dragging down your sales team by delivering low-quality leads?

In a recent B2B study, ANNUITAS found that only 2.8% of organizations rate themselves as effective in demand generation. That’s abysmal, but insightful at the same time. The study revealed that too many marketers are overly focused on tactics in lieu of a cohesive strategy.

Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of ANNUITAS, discusses:

  • The fundamentals of strategic demand generation.
  • How to build a demand-generation strategy that will guide your tactical game plan.
  • How to align your inbound and content marketing efforts around buyers’ needs.
  • How to measure ROI and optimize your marketing efforts for the greatest success.
  • The skills required to become a successful marketing strategist.

 

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Proactive Customer Experience: A High-Profit Strategy

With so much customer data and powerful technology at our fingertips, we have the opportunity to delight and dazzle customers like never before. But obsessing over the client experience isn’t just an exercise in integrity; it’s a proven strategy for revenue generation and business growth.

John Goodman, Vice Chairman of Customer Care Measurement and Consulting and author of Customer Experience 3.0 shows you:

  • How to be proactive about customer satisfaction with “Psychic Pizza”—that is, delivering the pizza just before the customer orders it.
  • How to set priorities and make decisions around the right customer data, which will drive more business.
  • The technology, staffing and process requirements for proactive customer experience.
  • How to demonstrate the ROI of customer experience, in a way that the CFO, the CMO, and the CEO will accept.
  • How to identify quick wins for measurable impact.
  • How to train yourself and your team for next-level business performance.

Customers expect more than ever before from business. It’s time to deliver on your company’s brand promise.

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HR Technology In the Era of Drones, Robots, and Infinite Data

Amazon.com delivery drones, robotic co-workers, Google’s self-driving cars… How will these new technologies impact workforce and HR functions over the next few years?

Recently, we’ve seen quick adoption of mobile technologies, real-time performance analytics, and automated recruitment/retention platforms that we couldn’t have predicted just a few years ago. So it’s safe to assume we’ll see even bigger advancements in HR tech in the months and years to come.

While it’s tough to predict exactly where we’re headed, failure to embrace new workplace technologies could leave not only you, but your entire organization underperforming and lagging behind your competitors. In this one-hour webinar, Steve Boese (HR Technology Conference Co-Chair, host of the The HR Happy Hour Podcast):

  • reviews and recommends technologies that simplify and automate HR workflows and functions.
  • highlights business technologies that are fundamentally changing the way people work.
  • provides info and resources to help you stay ahead of the curve and at the forefront of modern HR practice.

 

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Still Selling Like It’s 1999? Meet the Modern Buyer

Face it: Nobody wants to be sold to. 
Today’s modern buyer is mobile, digitally driven, and socially connected — able to make informed purchasing decisions without the influence of a salesperson. In fact, 57% of buying decisions are made before a salesperson is engaged. The modern buyer rarely buys anything without researching it thoroughly. 

Forget “selling.” The role of the modern seller is to educate and empower the buyer with information. Potential customers must trust you before they trust your brand. If you’ve helped them make the right buying decision, you’ll have a customer for life — better yet, a digital evangelist who will effectively do the selling for you. 

In this webinar, Jill shows you how to: 

  • Create and curate content that empowers and enables prospects.
  • Feed your sales pipeline with people who will contact you when they’re ready to buy.
  • Leverage social networks to your advantage.
  • Stop using LinkedIn as your online resume.

Jill Rowley is a social-selling advocate, a speaker, and a trainer. Companies like Eloqua, Salesforce.com, and Oracle have enlisted Jill to help transform their lead-management processes.

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What We Follow Fridays

Welcome to What We Follow Friday! The internet is teeming with new data, interesting stories, breaking news and so much more every single day and it’s easy for the important information to get lost in the noise. That’s why we’re sharing some of our favorites from around the web with you every Friday.

This week features stories about how our mornings look across the globe, companies that changed the world (the list may surprise you!), why being charitable is good for your business’s bottom line and more. Check them out:

The Making of a Great Logo
“Your company’s logo is the foundation of your business branding. It is probably the first interaction that you will have with your customers. An effective logo can establish the right tone and set the proper ethos. After years of crafting logos for different projects, I’ve come up with a set of questions that I always ask myself before delivering a new logo.”

Why Giving Back is Good for Business [Infographic]
“Companies that have increased their corporate giving in recent years are seeing a return on their investment in the form of higher revenues.  Among other causes, support for community and economic development programs has grown the most since 2010.”

27 Companies that Changed the World
“Business is the instrument that mankind has settled on to propagate change. Take a long step back and what do you see? A world of invention and unintended consequences.”

Ikea Knows How You Wake Up
“What do people on the other side of the globe eat, drink, do for fun?  In its latest Life at Home report, Ikea decided to look at how people wake up in eight different cities: Berlin, London, Moscow, Mumbai, Paris, Shanghai, Stockholm, and New York. New Yorkers, for instance, along with Stockholmers, are more likely than residents of any other surveyed city to work on the toilet. Who knew?”

Millennials Check Their Phones 43 Times a Day. Here’s What They Are Looking For. [Infographic]
“Millennials are a marketer’s dream: they are always plugged in. They are also a marketer’s nightmare: they have seen it all and have no patience. Across the globe, people between the ages of 18 and 36 check their phone 43 times a day on average, according to a survey of 1,800 millennials conducted by web analytics company SDL.”

If you come across an article you think we should be reading, tweet it to us, post it to our Facebook page, or leave us a comment at the bottom of the page!

 

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What We Follow Fridays

Welcome to What We Follow Friday! The internet is teeming with new data, interesting stories, breaking news and so much more every single day and it’s easy for the important information to get lost in the noise. That’s why we’re sharing some of our favorites from around the web with you every Friday.

Here’s what we’ve picked this week:

The Innovation Strategies That Lead to Success (Infographic)
“Most companies acknowledge that innovation is vital to achieving success, yet more than half of businesses don’t have any innovation strategies in place. The reality is that there are some true roadblocks–like resource and budget constraints–which get in the way of focused innovation efforts. However there are other factors, such as strong and visionary leadership, that can foster innovation within a business.”

Is For-Profit the Future of Non-Profit?
“Charity is for patsies. If you really care about making the world a better place, buy a trendy bag. That was the logic Lauren Bush Lauren articulated in a 2013 interview about FEED, a for-profit entity she founded that creates simple, eco-friendly tote bags whose price covers the cost of donating school meals to children in Rwanda via the UN World Food Program.”

Take a Tip from Bezos: Customers Always Need a Seat at the Table
“When starting a new business, it’s understandable that the main focus is to develop an innovative product or service that will cause the market to stand up and pay attention. It’s also clear that entrepreneurs need passion and endless supply of energy to create a new business from that innovation.”

Does Samsung’s New Stress Monitoring App Really Work?
“With little fanfare, Samsung this week added a curious new feature to the health-monitoring app that comes with its Galaxy S5 smartphone and Gear smartwatches. On top of the existing pedometer, heart-rate monitor and various other means of self-diagnosis, the “S Health” app now also offers a “stress monitor,” which promises to keep a log of how anxious you get during the day.”

Physicists Prove Surprising Rule of Threes
“More than 40 years after a Soviet nuclear physicist proposed an outlandish theory that trios of particles can arrange themselves in an infinite nesting-doll configuration, experimentalists have reported strong evidence that this bizarre state of matter is real.”

If you come across an article you think we should be reading, tweet it to us, post it to our Facebook page, or leave us a comment at the bottom of the page!

 

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The New Rules for Customer Engagement

Consumer behaviors have changed drastically in the last several years. You should know; you’re likely an online consumer yourself. So you know that reaching the modern buyer can be a daunting, seemingly impossible, proposition. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Mathew Sweezey, Marketing Evangelist for Salesforce.com and author of Marketing Automation for Dummies, provides an overview of modern customer engagement and shows you how to execute on an engagement strategy that drives lasting results.

During this webinar, you’ll learn:

  • How the modern consumer makes buying decisions
  • Lead nurturing best practices to increase lead flow
  • Social media tactics and strategies that get results
  • How to value and get buy-in for your efforts

Mathew is the head of thought leadership for B2B marketing at Salesforce.com. A consummate writer, he authors a column for Clickz.com on marketing automation, has been featured in publications such as Marketing Automation Times, DemandGen Report, Marketing Sherpa, ZDNet, and is the author of Marketing Automation for Dummies. Mathew speaks more than 50 times per year around the world at events such as Conversion Conference, Dreamforce, SugarCon, and to companies including Microsoft, Investec, NetJets, and Restaurants.com, to name a few.

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What We Follow Fridays

Welcome to What We Follow Friday! The internet is teeming with new data, interesting stories, breaking news and so much more every single day and it’s easy for the important information to get lost in the noise. That’s why we’re sharing some of our favorites from around the web with you every Friday.

Here’s what we’ve picked this week:

5 Free Apps for the Best Summer Vacation Ever
“This weekend marks the unofficial start of summer vacation season. Lucky for you, this week’s edition of Free App Friday can help you plan your summer trip.”

The Most Common Productivity Killers in Workplace (Infographic)
“On average, professionals spend up to 37 percent of their workweek checking emails–many of them unnecessary ones. Unfortunately, much of the other two-thirds of their time is filled with other time wasters, such as sitting in meetings and surfing the Web.”

Science Graphic of the Week: Monitoring Ocean Waves From Space
“The radar instruments on some satellites can be used to gather all sorts of interesting information. The animation above illustrates wave heights in the North Sea that were derived from satellite radar measurements.”

4 Things Every Entrepreneur Should Do Before Meeting an Investor
“Almost all startups – whether they are in major hubs like Silicon Valley, Boston or New York or less metropolitan areas like Kansas City, Mo. – face the same problem. ‘We need funding,” they say. “We’re really looking to raise more capital from investors, angels or anywhere.'”

The Five Letters that Will Change the Data World: BYOBI
“BYOBI is an acronym I first heard on a telephone call with a VP of Technology at a large corporation. The word is almost unknown today, but I think that it will be one of the largest trends to impact data in the next five years. BYOBI means Bring Your Own Business Intelligence.”

If you come across an article you think we should be reading, tweet it to us, post it to our Facebook page, or leave us a comment at the bottom of the page!

 

 

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Avoid Disaster With These 6 HR Must-Do’s for Social Media

In today’s hyper-competitive environment, organizations are striving to put in place social media strategies to help them attract and retain employees of all ages. No longer confined to twenty-somethings, an effective social media program is a “must have” for any organization who wishes to stay connected with its global employee base.

However, in their rush to adopt the latest and coolest program, organizations often fail to fully think through the best way to deal with social media’s double-edged sword of access and liability.

Steve Miranda is Managing Director of Cornell University’s Center for Advanced HR Studies. Prof. Miranda as he walks you through six “must do” social media initiatives aimed at mitigating your organization’s strategic, reputational and financial risk.

During this webinar, you’ll learn to:

  • Destroy your policies…before you reissue them
  • Get the troublemakers involved
  • Think inside the box
  • Not everyone gets to play short-stop
  • Be culturally inclusive versus exclusive
  • Avoid “channel fatigue”

UPDATE: Here’s the archived version of the May 14 webinar. You can check out the video and download Prof. Miranda’s slide deck here on Slideshare.