Marketing lead hotel strategies and the 5 stages of travel

In my previous post, I was talking about how I believe marketing should lead the sales and marketing efforts in hospitality; how I believe that if you look at your actual revenue, you will see that marketing is a driving force.

In the discussions around the post on LinkedIn, I was refereeing to the 5 stages of travel and how marketing has a hand on all of them. These five stages of travel should be the base of any sales and marketing strategic discussion in a hotel. Any traveler going to a hotel goes through these 5 stages and a good strategy has to ensure you reach out to your potential guests at each of them. These 5 stages are: Dream — Plan — Book — Live — Share.

Often described as the “Google 5 stages of travel”, they were actually used before Google popularized them in advertising and marketing, and I remember a time where we only used 3 stages Dream — Book — Live, in my case on formulating a strategy for Brussels Airlines.
More than a simple sales funnel, the 5 stages remind us that the process is a cycle, it does not stop when the sales is made, it goes on and repeats itself.

So, what’s happening at each stage and where do your sales and marketing teams have an influence.

Dream: when the guest is thinking about is next trip: where should I go for my holidays? Where should we have that next incentive trip? The dream phase is not reserved the leisure traveler, business travelers often incorporate a part of leisure in the trip, we’ve seen the concept of “Bleisure” emerge in trends over the last few years.
This is of course a heavily marketing lead phase where your web site photography, your social media, and your PR efforts will play an essential role. The content you push out here is not transactional, this is the awareness, the inspiration phase.

Plan: in the planning phase the guest has an idea about where he will go and he will start to look for information about your hotel if you made a great job, but probably still more about the destination and you will still have to stand out in the crowd. Both your sales and marketing will have to be considered here.
On the sales side, you want to make sure your wholesalers and your travel agents have all the material they need, and that you have convinced them to suggest your hotel, you’ll be in trade shows around the world achieving this.
Your MICE team will be on the road to meet with potential event organizers, and your corporate team will get those contracts signed so business travelers pick your hotel in the destination.
On the marketing side, you want to make sure your web site will appear in the search results with a solid SEO, your web site content is appealing and answers questions, that it is easy to navigate. You also want to make sure you have up to date content on OTA and partners web sites. Your advertising enters the dance here, and email marketing for instance will be important at this stage: you rarely book a hotel room directly from an email you receive but it will keep your property top of mind for the trip planning.
This is a phase where you have to stand out from the competition: be easy to find/contact, provide accurate information, answer the questions, bring your guest to the tipping point towards the next phase. This is the drive footfall phase.

Book: this is the phase where you seal the deal, the drive booking phase, but remember you’re only half way through the 5 phases! Both sales and marketing are of course involved here.
On the sales side, it’s the crucial part for your MICE team: getting that contract signed; it is the time when you work on getting those contracted nights through the door; and it’s the time to deploy your tactical promotions with wholesalers and travel agents.
On the marketing side you put your digital arsenal into action. You need to get these call to action in front of the guest and get them to book. It is the time for Pay Per Click, for Search Engine Marketing and Advertising, for retargeting campaigns, for promoted social media posts and stories, affiliate marketing … Getting direct booking on your owned channels is the priority, but OTAs are not the enemy, they do help you and drive a significant part of your business. There is a cost to working with OTAs, but remember your owned channels have a cost too, even diluted in many fees all over your budget. So work with Expedia TravelAds, get that preferred status with booking.com, or launch a display campaign on some OTA, whatever works for your hotel!
Remember more than 50% of your room revenue is coming from your digital channels, and as such it does deserve a significant part of your attention.

Live: your guest is in the hotel and it would be a mistake to think you’re now passing the bucket to the operation team and there is not much you can do.
The sales team will mainly remain active with the MICE guests, making sure the event goes smoothly and every participant has a flawless experience, meeting with key stakeholders and arranging all the little “surprise and delight”.
On the marketing side this is the time to deliver on your promises and it requires constant coordination with the operational team. You must deliver on your brand promise, the guest must be in touch with your core values, with your programming, with your identity. That involves making sure the hotel is perfectly on brand, on collaterals, signages, giveaways …, that your programming is active on F&B, Spa, Gym and sort all of activities on and off property.
Your loyal guests, members of your loyalty program will have even more expectations for all these areas and more, as they rightfully deserve more of your attention. Not delivering here would be a critical mistake: the higher the loyalty level, the higher the spend in the company. In a presentation about loyalty in hospitality, one number had impressed me: the highest tier of your loyalty program (Diamond, Platinum or whatever you call them) can be generating as much revenue as all the other combined! Not delivering on your brand promise with these guests is suicidal.

Share: this phase will regroup social media in a broad way and reputation management. It is off course predominantly a marketing activity, requiring a lot of attention.
That is where we find the classic sharing of photos and posts while traveling and after, showing off a little bit or just genuinely being happy to travel; then the review posting on TripAdvisor, or on the OTA they used for booking. More and more your social channels will be used by guests to ask questions while they sit on property, they will ask you a question on Facebook instead of call the operator. If your operation involves restaurants and bars you will also receive quite a few inquiries about these from guests not staying with you.
I could write for hours just on the opportunities offered to marketers on this phase, and I probably will in later post. For now, let’s just take from this phase that it is a phase of conversation with the guest on and off property, keeping the relationship alive or repairing it if needed, so your hotel stays top of mind when the guest gets back to the Dream phase and start the whole circle again, and serves as an inspiration for other travelers, which means you will need to stimulate that sharing action from the guest.

There is actually a 6th phase to this cycle, the Loyalty Bypass. When you do your job correctly with your loyalty program, or you manage to generate such an incredible experience on property that you generate that individua loyalty, you can get the guest to bypass the Plan phase and get directly from Dream to Book. This as well probably deserves a post of its own, and I would always integrate it in a strategic thinking process.

Whatever the actual goals your hotel is trying to reach any giving year you will have to reach out to your guests at all of these phases. The strategies you will develop will help you reach your hotel goals, that is where your measured goals will integrate the plan. To take an example, your hard goal is to increase bookings on your brand.com by 4 percent point year on year. You will develop strategies and their SMART tactics such as: develop an calendar of inspirational content for your social media linking to your web site in the Dream phase, a strong SEO strategy so potential guests will come to your web site for information gathering instead of third party web site for the Plan phase, and a strong SEM strategy to capture the guest when he’s ready to book on the Book phase, enroll the guest in the loyalty program on property so he books direct next time in the Live phase, etc. Each of these will support your yearly goal, at every step of the traveler journey.

More often than not, we’re trying to build strategies starting from the hard-numbered goals we have to achieve by the end of the year, we’re starting with the budget, and doing so we’re strategizing in silos. We’re thinking about the tactical actions to reach out to an event organizer and forgetting his inspiration might come from a social media post actually talking about your gorgeous pool.

If we want to be truly strategic, we need to reach out to our guests at every stage of their travel cycle, personal or professional, breaking these silos. As one of my managers in agency was saying a few years ago already: we need to build strategies that are “365”. We need to talk to our guests the whole year long, we need to be present at each of the different stages of their thoughts process; and doing so, truly integrating sales and marketing in one combined strategic plan and reaching our yearly goals.