STARTUP STAGE: Swayy helps hotels manage influencer campaigns at scale

Swayy

Swayy is a tool for hotels to find, book and maintain relationships with social media influencers. It matches hotels with pre-vetted, relevant influencers, and Swayy’s closed-loop system allows both venues and influencers to evaluate working with each other.

Founded in March 2017, Swayy says more than 400 independent properties and global hotel chains have expressed interest in the platform, which it claims costs a fraction of traditional influencer advertising methods.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup. 

Swayy is the leading influencer booking, campaign and relationship management tool within the hospitality industry. It helps hotels find, book and maintain relationships with relevant digital influencers in a simple, transparent, closed-loop process.

It’s very different to a database, which only addresses the “finding influencers” part. It is crucial for businesses to harness digital word-of-mouth to help them grow organically, increase brand awareness and ultimately direct bookings and profitability.

Swayy is an online platform that can be used by small independent properties (previously priced out of the market), global chains or even their PR/marketing agencies of all sizes to easily promote their business with Instagram influencers in the industry. No integrations are needed.

With one in five mobile minutes now spent on Instagram and Facebook worldwide, and 40% of online travel bookings due to come from mobile by 2020, Swayy is perfectly positioned to help hotels adapt to evolving consumer purchasing behavior over the next decade.

Invaluable input both from small independent properties as well as the largest hotel group in the world have helped ensure that the whole process has been carefully thought through to streamline the entire process.

Interest from over 400 hotels worldwide, who started following us on social media in the development stage, set the momentum going from the start.

What inspired you to create this company?

There were three fundamental reasons:

1. The overarching goal of Swayy is to democratize the digital PR market for independent venues who were previously priced out of the market. I felt it was simply wrong that the little guy couldn’t compete with the chain hotels simply because they couldn’t afford expensive agencies.
   
   One day a hotel asked me for a friendly favor. The hotel had newly furnished rooms, and they didn’t know how to attract new customers quickly. I knew of someone who had built up a restaurant off the back of word-of-mouth marketing using influencers and thought the hotel could also adopt this strategy given they had limited resources.
   
   However, I soon realized how hugely frustrating it was for independent hotels to get their name seen by large audiences. I could not understand that the only available options to work with influencers for independent hospitality businesses were either laboriously trying to find influencers and manage the collaboration process internally without any tangible data, or employ a marketing/PR agency at X thousand dollars per month to do the same thing.
   
   And so, I decided to do something about it and build a software solution with some world-class engineers to do all the hard work for the venue. The market opportunity is enormous given the millions of hotels, restaurants and other hospitality venues around the world who will benefit.
2. The booking journey has changed, with over two-thirds of the time spent on any hotel booking now being in the dreaming and planning phases. That presents an enormous opportunity for venues to gain competitive advantage and capture customers at the top of the funnel before they even realize they want to go somewhere.
   
   The results of our first campaigns proved that with huge brand awareness at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising methods, direct bookings increased by over 17% and ROI rocketed to over 840% in just six months.
3. Any half-decent four- or five-star hotel nowadays is bombarded with “collab requests” from bloggers looking to work with them and promote them in return for complimentary accommodation.
   
   This has posed multiple issues in terms of the time and hassle involved in evaluating the influencers and negotiating terms. There’s also a significant lack of data to find those of real value. Again, so we decided to build the one-stop shop for any hospitality business to manage and control the entire influencer engagement process.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company. 

Strengths:

• A deep understanding of the hospitality industry: Swayy has an understanding of travel planning behavior, the influencer collaboration process and key issues for hotels.
  

  You just have to read some of the recent press coverage about bloggers bombarding hotels to know there is a big problem in the industry, so we decided to solve it.

  Swayy

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• Early player: Timing advantage.
• Team: Experienced hotel and sales professionals, including senior advisors to the management:

- Global director of digital, Mövenpick Hotels

- Former CEO of Novotel France

- Global head of sales at Samsung, Head of Hotels

• Technology: A complex algorithm that can evaluate influencers on various key metrics.
• Win-win-win-win for hospitality businesses, their PR agencies, influencers and potential customers.
• Quality control and assurance: A pre-vetting process for influencers; a feedback and communication process.
• An end-to-end solution, closed-loop process to manage and engage with influencers.
• A transparent process for everyone involved including hotels, restaurants and influencers.
• Affordability: A fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time influencer marketing manager or PR agency.

Weaknesses:

• Hotels are traditionally slow adopters of new technology.
• Chicken-and-egg issue.
• Dependent on geographic locations where the digital marketing for hotels is trending.
• Data obtained from social media sites, so there is some dependence on their continued success.

Opportunities:

• Influencer marketing is a $10 billion-plus industry already and growing.
• Consumer behavior, increasing use of mobile and social media are major trends in favor of Swayy.
• Targeting early adopter segments based on behavior (i.e., they use Instagram and influencers already), and geography (based on regions with highest adoption rate of social media).
• Influencer marketing is new to a lot of markets; we have the opportunity to inform and educate the industry.

Threats:

• New entrants, who are already established companies in other sectors, may compete.
• Copycat competitors who might try to also provide end-to-end solutions.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

Swayy takes away the hassle of running influencer campaigns at scale. Venues can now find, evaluate, book, manage and review collaborations in an Airbnb-style platform. No more fraudulent influencers.

It empowers anyone on social media who posts high-quality, leisure-specific content to book hotels or restaurants and get paid to leverage their influence in a simple, yet powerful, platform. Venues, on the other hand, can now easily book, review and pay influencers for purely organic content and reach without the big costs.

Hotels that use influencers effectively can eliminate the competition at the booking stage, since potential guests will have already emotionally invested with the hotel brand.

Potential guests are able to find and get in touch with hotels and holiday venues directly, instead of having to look at thousands of options which they aren’t sure are a good fit for them.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

An essential part of our marketing plan is being active on Instagram and being highly visible in the hospitality industry. Posting clear and engaging content on social media on a regular basis intrigues influencers to know more and get involved with the company.

At the same time, a way to introduce ourselves to hotels and venues is through email marketing. We send personalized emails to our potential customers with relevant information on how to take advantage of our services.

We also believe in the power of word-of-mouth, so we regularly speak at hospitality conferences such as the Boutique Hotel Summit, IBM Travel Startup Summit, Hotelympia and the Annual Hotel Conference. In 2018, our CEO David Gabriele is returning for the second year to the AHC where he has been invited to run a master class.

Building upon this, we have an active content marketing team with the ultimate goal of Swayy being viewed as key thought leaders in the hospitality industry who provide relevant and informative content for both hotels and influencers on a regular basis.

Of course, working with bloggers and influencers ourselves will also help us enhance our existing growth, especially in new markets.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

The need for a company that does what we do already existed before we started, and nobody was doing anything about it. You just have to read some of the recent press coverage about bloggers bombarding hotels to know there is a big problem in the industry, so we decided to solve it.

The value of quality bloggers is unquestionable, but the manual process many venues have been forced to create for themselves and the lack of data they have presents an enormous opportunity for us.

How and when will you make money?

We’re already generating revenue and have been from day one. Why? Primarily because Swayy was designed by and in close collaboration with both small independent hotels and large chains.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team, and why do you have what it takes to succeed with this business?

David Gabriele, Swayy’s CEO, is a former city lawyer where he focused on venture capital and technology matters. He has extensive experience advising both investors and startups.

Swayy takes away the hassle of running influencer campaigns at scale.

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Other subsequent team members to join include Steve Cox, who has 21 years of experience selling technology and software solutions. Prior to joining Swayy, he was the first sales professional at a Fintech startup where he set up the sales process. They recently raised $36 million.

We have what it takes because we are relentlessly focused on creating the best solution and experience available for hospitality businesses looking to work with influencers at scale to increase their brand awareness and revenue.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Estimating the time to build a major multi-sided platform as big as ours. It’s commonly known that you overestimate what can be achieved in 12 months and underestimate what can be achieved in five years.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

Swayy is unique in the industry with the solution it provides. It’s the only solution in the space that is not a database and that offers this end-to-end solution. Instead, we have a closed-loop system that allows the venue and the influencer to evaluate each other after working together, just like Uber does.

It is a simple platform to use, and it is cost-efficient for all the parties. So much so, that even PR agencies that were initially loose competitors trying to do what we do manually have joined us.