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7901 Kingspointe Parkway Unit 17, Orlando, FL 32919 407-909-9036 www.quantumagency.com - [email protected]

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Promoting Group Business Through Inbound Marketing

If you are trying to increase your group bookings, creating an inbound digital marketing strategy that complements your traditional sales and marketing efforts will drive new business revenue and website traffic. We know that meeting planners like you…

• Use a variety of channels to book destinations including search, social, industry forums,

trade shows, etc.

• Primarily use the Internet to do research in all phases of the buying cycle

• Tend to be inspired by researching destinations online, and also talk to colleagues and hotel and destination sales reps

• Are typically most inspired by facilities with online credibility

You can build your web presence and influence meeting planners by creating an inbound marketing program. First, evaluate your resources. Creating an inbound marketing program is an ongoing effort – you must have a defined strategy that can be executed on a timely basis in order to be successful. If you do not have the resources, consider outsourcing your inbound marketing campaign. This white paper will give you the basic information for creating an inbound marketing strategy to drive group business. For additional information on developing an inbound marketing campaign, please contract Gordon Liametz at 407-963-4766 or email [email protected].


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Table of Contents

What Is Inbound Marketing?...................................................................................................... 3 What Are Your Goals with Inbound Marketing? ....................................................................

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Channels for Inbound Marketing Content..................................................................................

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Types of Inbound Marketing Content........................................................................................

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Develop Your Influencers to Assist with Inbound Marketing.....................................................

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Make Your Inbound Marketing Campaign Keyword Friendly....................................................

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Key Elements in Your Content..................................................................................................

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Where to Post and What to Post Monthly..................................................................................

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How to Measure Inbound Marketing Success...........................................................................

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Examples of Inbound Marketing................................................................................................

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What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is based on making your hotel easily findable by people who are seeking information on where to plan their next meeting. It is about being discovered online by providing valuable information, rather than pushing your hotel and services to people who may not have a need for your destination.

• Inbound marketing takes a non-interruption marketing approach, as opposed to interruption marketing like print ads, trade shows, display ads, cold calls, etc.

• Inbound marketing allows meeting planners to find your hotel through informative or educational videos, blog posts, white papers and more.

• All of your content with inbound marketing should be optimized for keywords that your audience would search online.

• Meeting planners will use your content as a resource during the buying cycle.

• Content should be developed for all phases of the buying cycle to enable lead nurturing.

• Inbound marketing helps every channel have (a):

o Higher conversion rate o Higher organic search rankings o More direct and bookmarking traffic o Bigger fan base and community o More referring links o Stronger social following o More brand visibility o More long-tail SEO

• Typically, you use tracking analytics and marketing software to adjust and optimize your

content strategy.

Inbound Marketing Outbound Marketing • Pulls qualified leads to your website by

being found online

• Pushes a message toward a large, unqualified audience

• Enables customers to come to you for information

• Customers are sought out

• Marketers provide added value through resources

• Marketers provide little to no added value

• Creates interactive and two-way communication

• Communication is one-way

• Allows the consumer to be in control

• The marketer is in control

• Is cost effective

• Is time-consuming and expensive

• Provides analytics and real-time tracking

• Is difficult to measure


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What Are Your Goals with Inbound Marketing? Before starting any campaign, it is vital to know your goals. Based on your goals, be realistic with your resources and budget. What expectations do you have for your inbound marketing campaign? You also need to understand your objectives to develop a successful campaign. The key is to find what will work best for your hotel in order to meet your customers’ needs.

1. Do you want to drive new marketing channels for group revenue? 2. Are you trying to increase customers’ awareness of your hotel for meetings? 3. Do you want to fill the pipeline with more leads? 4. Do you need assistance in the buying funnel? 5. Do you want to drive more meeting traffic to your website? 6. Do you want to create additional website content and be seen as a thought leader in the

meeting industry?


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Channels for Inbound Marketing Content

There are many channels you can use for inbound marketing. Below are some examples you can consider based on your audience and resources. We recommend starting with two or three channels to begin your inbound marketing campaign.


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Types of Inbound Marketing Content Develop an inbound marketing strategy to create rich content – white papers, videos, infographics, articles and more – based on client personas. Include unique content for the multiple stages of the buying cycle. Here are some examples:

Meeting Planner Inbound Marketing Ideas • Shopping and unique dining top the list of

activities meeting planners most want or expect

• Takeaway: Create a things-to-do list and include activities like white papers, videos, blog posts, etc. for your destination

• Meeting planners seek facilities that are convenient

• Takeaway: Create a list of what meeting planners should look for in a destination and include helpful website links in your white paper

• Meeting planners seek inspiration for new

destinations

• Takeaway: Create a video or white paper that creates inspiration for your destination

• Meeting planners want to be educated on how to use social media for their meetings

• Takeaway: Create a webinar on how meeting planners can use social media for their meetings. You can also create other educational webinars on how to negotiate with hotels, determine low cost incentive programs, etc.

• Meeting planners are interested in informative blogs

• Takeaway: Create a blog post interviewing meeting planners with pre-defined questions

• Meeting planners seek educational resources, such as how to conduct a hotel site inspection

• Takeaway: Create a series, such as how-to videos or blog posts, on conducting site inspections or a site inspection checklist

• Meeting planners are interested in how smart phone apps can help their meetings

• Takeaway: Create a two- or three-series infographic with information such as how to budget for apps, types of meeting apps, or how apps can build strong professional connections during conferences and meetings that benefit attendees


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Develop Promoters for Your Hotel

Embed a Net Promoter Score survey on your website, social platforms or in email campaigns. The Net Promoter Score, or NPS, is based on the fundamental perspective that customers can be divided into three categories: promoters, passives and detractors. You can track these groups and get a clear measure of your hotel’s performance through your customers’ eyes. Customers respond on a zero-to-10-point rating scale and are placed into one of the following categories: • Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and referring others to

your hotel, fueling growth. Mobilize your promoters, and show your appreciation of those customers through:

o Offering discounts o Thanking them o Social sharing o Inviting them into reference or referral programs o Sharing valuable inbound marketing content

• Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to

competitive offerings.

• Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.

Typically, you would ask only one NPS question. However, you may want to dig deeper by asking these three questions:

1. How likely is it that you’d recommend our hotel’s meeting facilities to a friend or colleague? (This is asked utilizing a 10-point rating scale).

2. What is the primary reason for the rating you provided? 3. What is one thing we could do differently to increase the value of our hotel services to

you? You can post the results on your website and social channels. Keep in mind the NPS used on its own may not be 100 percent accurate, but in the right framework and with the additional questioning, it can be a useful metric.

Make Your Inbound Marketing Campaign Keyword Friendly Keywords targeted to meeting planning, conference centers, destinations, etc. are the ones you should be using to drive group business. Use various keyword tools to do your research.

• Based on your destination and inbound marketing theme you will need to create targeted keywords in order to attract search-based organic traffic.

• Create a targeted keyword list using one to two keywords for each campaign. • Consider long-term keywords, which consist of four or more keywords. • Use your pre-determined keywords with your inbound marketing effort to drive new traffic

and increase your search engine rankings.


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Key Elements in Your Content Your headline is crucial to grabbing your audience’s attention (Tip: Write ten headlines and send them to your five best customers for feedback). Be creative in exploring new ideas and re-purposing existing content in innovative ways, such as turning emails into blog posts, creating customer testimonial videos, repurposing articles into infographics and more. Offering inbound marketing that is useful and free is the easiest way to leverage creative SEO strategy with targeted keywords. In order to generate leads, use this content to trade visitors for their contact information.

Keep in mind three base guidelines for all inbound marketing campaigns:

1. Write for your targeted audience 2. Solve their problems 3. Educate them

Your content should not be promotional. Rather, it should be relevant to your buyers, educate them and help them to see how they can overcome their problems. Remember, the content should vary in form, so use a mixture of white papers, videos, articles and other unique content. With properly executed inbound marketing, people will find you!

Where to Post and What to Post Monthly When posting your inbound marketing campaigns, keep in mind that you’re waiting for the buyers to take action. Make sure you have valuable content and a strong call-to-action. Consider the websites where your target audience is online, and select two or three channels where you’ll begin your inbound marketing campaign.

• Your website • LinkedIn

• Online press release • Google+

• Hotel or industry blog • Slideshare

• Email campaign • Pinterest

• Facebook

• Meeting planning forums or communities

As with any sales effort, the more you put into your inbound marketing campaign, the more you’ll get out of it. A baseline monthly activity for your hotel is listed below.

1. Call a few clients and brainstorm content ideas. (Tip: Schedule a lunch with three to four clients and ask them).

2. Pick a theme for each month and focus on a key customer issue. 3. Produce content to support your theme, like white papers, videos, blog posts, etc. 4. Create two or three pieces of content around your theme, like infographics, checklists,

webinars, PowerPoints, etc. 5. Write additional small articles around your theme and post to your blog. These could be

pieces of your white paper. 6. When posting on social media, do not use the exact same content. Instead, customize it

so there is a slight variation that makes it unique to each social network. 7. Test and analyze your efforts.


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How to Measure Inbound Marketing Success Ultimately, our goal should be revenue. However, in order to get to your goal, you need to measure other metrics as well. If you make your overall efforts measurable, you can become more effective and provide more value to your target audience.

• According to a MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B study, 73 percent of the B2B leads are not sales-ready when they first come in. Therefore, you need to develop a variety of content during the buying funnel to nurture these leads.

• In a 2013 MarketingSherpa case study, a consulting firm increased sales leads 388 percent using an inbound marketing strategy.

• 80 percent of business decision makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles versus through an advertisement.

• 54 percent more leads are generated by inbound marketing than by outbound marketing.

• There is a 61 percent lower cost per lead when using inbound marketing.

• 32 percent of brands are decreasing spending on outbound marketing to spend more on content marketing.

When you analyze metrics like revenue, Facebook fans, LinkedIn followers, engagement, click-throughs, comments, conversion rates, page traffic and email unsubscribe rates, you can determine what works and what needs to be changed based on your marketing channels. Be sure to also review overall growth in organic traffic, set up goals or event tracking in analytics, and review traffic funnels.


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What You Should Measure with Your Inbound Marketing Efforts Revenue

• Determine the group revenue that was booked as a result of your inbound marketing campaign by channel.

Lead Generation and Conversion

• Measure conversion by channel so you know where to put additional recourses and how to budget for your next campaign.

• Your lead conversion rate will provide you the quality of the leads generated, so be sure to review analytics monthly.

Call-to-Action Landing Page to Download White Paper

• Set up a separate landing page asking three or four qualification questions, and include your email address with a call-to-action to download a white paper. Also include a “thank you” page.

• Note the analytics for the number of downloads compared to the number of clicks to determine your conversion rate, page traffic, bounce rate, etc.

Email Campaigns

• Take a look at the open rate, unsubscribe and bounce rates. More importantly, measure your click-through rate and completions to your landing page.

• In order to report on channel performance, create a tracking URL so conversions can be attributed to the email campaign.

Blog

• Create content around your primary keywords in order to attract additional search-based organic traffic.

• Measure the effectiveness of your blogging by looking at page views, blog subscribers and keyword rankings in organic search.

Social Media

• Use views, shares, comments and referral traffic from the social media websites to establish the engagement level. Send customers to a landing page and create a tracking URL so conversions can be attributed to the social channels.

• Each social media network has its own set of analytics, so review Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and the other platforms you use.

Don’t Forget Customer-Lifetime-Value

• Determine how much recurring or repeat revenue you have booked as a result of the lead.


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Examples of Inbound Marketing

Take a look at the following examples of inbound marketing. Note that the content can be simple, innovative and targeted to all types of audiences. Each of these examples solves a problem your audience has and gives them valuable information to convert them in the buying funnel. These examples deliver the three inbound marketing results:

1. Increased brand awareness 2. Better brand preference 3. More leads for less cost

Example Inbound marketing Comment

• http://hospitality.cvent.com/blog/hotel-online-marketing/page/2

• CVENT posts informative educational articles and white papers targeted to meeting planners and hotels.

• Takeaway: What type of informative educational topics can you create for your audience?

• http://www.yankeeinn.com/blog/our-

blog.htm

• Note how they use their blog to promote inspiration for the customers to book the hotel.

• Takeaway: Meeting planners look for inspiration. What content on your website inspires them to book your hotel?

• http://www.meetingsfocus.com/Webinars/tabid/68/Default.aspx

• Educational webinars focus on meeting planners.

• Takeaway: If you have in-house list or rent a list, this is a great opportunity to connect with current and new customers.

• http://vacationcarecenter.hilton.com/

• This is an interactive website featuring personal diagnoses of vacation needs and customized prescriptions. It urges people to take breaks, weekend getaways and longer vacations.

• Takeaway: Build a micro site and target meeting planners looking for incentive ideas, ways to increase conference attendees, etc.

• https://twitter.com/HiltonSuggests • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ux

Ght221Fg

• If someone wants to explore a new city and is looking for insider tips, Hilton will give them suggestions.

• Takeaway: Should you create a Twitter account for meeting planning suggestions?


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• http://www.corbinball.com/art/

• This website features educational articles on meeting planning.

• Takeaway: Do you have education articles or .xls calculators (for food and beverage services) that you can share with your audience?

• http://www.kraftrecipes.com/home.aspx

• This helps consumers find and organize new recipes.

• Takeaway: For resorts that have an emphasis on food and beverage services, offer content that your audience will love.

• http://www.coca-colacompany.com/

• Coca-Cola Journey is a digital magazine that focuses on important topics, social causes and news about The Coca-Cola Company.

• Takeaway: If you have historic hotel, this is a great way to tell your story.

• http://blog.yaleappliance.com/resource-center

• Take note of the in-depth buying guides.

• Takeaway: Could you create meeting planning guides by segment?

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3oZpaYkNXI

• Watch the video – even if you rarely cook, you’ll want to buy one of his knives by the end of his story!

• Takeaway: Content and story telling builds

brand trust, loyalty and inspiration. When you develop your content assets, how can you tell a story like this video?

About Quantum Agency Quantum Agency is a fast-growing marketing agency serving both the digital and traditional advertising and marketing needs of our clients. Our comprehensive offerings include strategy, branding, digital marketing, social media, paid search, website development, print, TV and radio, and all other aspects to maximize value for our clients.

We believe in educating our clients and sharing what we know and what we do openly, in order to be 100 percent transparent. To see how Quantum Agency can help you reach your online and offline marketing goals, call us today for a free assessment. Call us today! 407-963-4766 Gordon Liametz, Co-Founder/Partner

Quantum Agency 7901 Kingspointe Parkway - Unit 17 Orlando, FL 32819 www.quantumagency.com

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