NB: This is a viewpoint by Parag Vohra, general manager for hotels at Sojern.
Hotel marketers may come to look over the previous century as a time of simplicity and certainty.
Their job was, and still is, to create a brand that resonated, but unlike today, they did not have to worry about getting their hands dirty with tiresome issues like attribution and conversion metrics.
I was overcome by this bout of nostalgia as I watched the season premier of Mad Men, where Don Draper and the Sheraton executives discussed the appropriate imagery for the resort in Hawaii.
Dilemma
Nowadays, the conversation would probably shift to spreadsheets instead of sketches, and clicks and impressions rather than philosophical discussions around creative.
Naturally, the question arises on whether this shift occurred holistically, and more importantly, whether the adoption of digital channels has lead to an improvement in marketing effectiveness.
The first question is perhaps the easier to answer based on an analysis of current marketing behavior. There is an interesting parallel between the perception of the digital world as a utility and with hotel marketers who view their hotels as providers of a utility as well.
When it comes to tactical messaging, be it about value, convenience or promotions, digital marketing is the channel of choice. The advent of search enabled the intersection of providers with intent, and digital outreach evolved towards demand fulfillment rather than demand generation.
An interesting aside is that even as hotel advertisers look to digital outreach as a pure performance play, a substantial percentage ends up holding the channel to the worst of both worlds.
They expect the attribution and ROI of a cost of sale model but with the budget limitations of a traditional marketing model. However, that is a discussion for another time.
Even as search has become saturated with advertisers, and the lower CPCs of the long tail have gone the way of the dinosaurs, developments in the display advertising world — such as programmatic buying and access to intent data — have advertisers and hotel marketers taking another look at a medium they have long ignored.
Expectations
There is now a renewed focus on measuring lift based on views as well as clicks, with a frenetic focus on the best attribution model. For a change, digital marketers for hotel suppliers are just as much on the cutting edge of experimentation as their cousins on the online travel agency side of the fence.
Even as all of this intellectual ferment is welcome, the second question of utilizing the most effective channels for marketing comes in to play. Digital outreach is still considered more appropriate for demand fulfillment than brand building.
A conversation with some senior members of an Indian luxury hotel chain was revelatory; 100% of their brand marketing budget was devoted to print, with absolutely no tracking mechanism to help determine success or failure.
Lest those in North America be self-congratulatory, anecdotal insights from those in brand marketing departments reveal that contextual print advertising is still the single largest recipient of brand marketing dollars.
Why is this so?
To a large extent, preconceived notions about digital advertising from the infant days of the net create a binary of either text based ads or the ubiquitous 300x250 display unit.
There is a definite shift towards media consumption being more digital than print oriented and that shift becomes much more pronounced in a generational sense.
The shift in content consumption is accompanied by a shift in advertising content and creative as well, be it aesthetically pleasing, interactive flash advertising or other forms of rich media or digital video.
This evolution in digital content, when matched with the appropriate audience, can reduce dependence on indirect contextual placement and enable communication with your target audience.
A world where hotel marketers can do away with segments and tell their story to individuals based on interest and aptitude is at hand. After all, individualized outreach includes the benefit of more granular measurement models to track advertising impact and effectiveness beyond the simple act of conversions.
Airlines have traditionally been seen to do a better job than hotels at hard skills such as revenue management and reducing distribution costs.
However, hotels have done a far superior job on the soft marketing skills of brand building and selling experiential rather than commoditized value.
Hotel marketers should ensure that they continue to build and market that mystique across all channels, and not take comfort in the familiar cloak of channels that provide anonymity from the metrics of success and failure.
NB: This is a viewpoint by Parag Vohra, general manager for hotels at Sojern.
NB2: Device graph image via Shutterstock.