Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast

All the way back in episode 47, we asked the question ”Is Google Becoming An OTA?”. Also, in episode 99, we discussed the fact that “Google Is Building A Hotel Marketing Demogorgon”. The scary thing is that this push by Google to get deeper into the value chain of hospitality doesn’t look like it’s slowing down anytime soon and it’s also happening in every major industry. In this episode, we look at some of the things that Google has been working on over the past 5 years and how joining the dots paints a potentially devastating picture for many businesses - starting with the OTAs. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-135-google-is-going-to-destroy-us-all-starting-with-the-otas/

Today's small hotelier has more to deal with than ever before.  OTAs are a must... but eat into the ever-shrinking margin. The flags are getting more aggressive in creating a unique experience. The technology is getting more complicated.  However the future is not bleak for the smaller innkeeper who is managing a property under 100 units, be it a hotel, B&B, campground, or quaint retreat. In this episode, we share five things that every hotelier can do right now to complete against the 800lb gorillas of the hospitality world. You can also enjoy the full article at fueltravel.com/blog/5-things-every-small-hotelier-needs-to-be-doing-to-compete-today/. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-134-how-can-small-hotels-compete-today/

This episode is part two of our look at user behavior and performance on your hotel website. In part 1, we covered the movement of a guest through your site and how they interact with the content. This episode looks at your conversion rate and your overall site performance. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-133-even-more-shocking-revelations-of-hotel-guest-behavior-part-2/

Alternative episode titles: You won’t believe what your guests are doing when you’re not looking What your guests are doing when they don’t think you’re watching Your guest just did what? Guest behavior gone wild. Here at Fuel, we constantly preach about reducing friction on your hotel’s website and booking engine to create a seamless user experience. We also often talk on this podcast about how user experience is becoming an increasingly important factor in SEO. A recent article on SEJ got us thinking that there are probably a lot of hotels that aren’t regularly evaluating the user experience and how users are interacting with their websites. We are going to dive into what user behavior you should be tracking, how you can track it and what you should be doing with the behavior data you collect. SHOW NOTES:

Let’s face it, your booking engine is one of the most important pieces of your marketing strategy. According to the Fuel 2019 Leisure Travel study, 87% of consumers will visit the hotel website prior to making a booking, meaning that if you have a great booking experience, you have a great chance to convert the guest to a direct booking. Why then is it that folks look at the booking engine as a commodity and rest their laurels on an antiquated or ineffective system? In this episode, we dive into a few things you should be considering when you think about whether or not it’s time to evaluate your current provider. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-131-is-it-time-to-re-evaluate-your-booking-engine/

Did you know that Gift Cards are the most requested gift for 13 straight years? Well, it’s true and your hotel can take advantage of this multi-billion dollar opportunity by offering gift cards towards future stays, on-property activities, or food and beverage. It’s great for improving cash flow, capitalizing on last-minute holiday shoppers, but most importantly, gift cards can help you drive more direct bookings and reduce reliance on the OTAs. In this episode of the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast, we discuss the reasons why this may be something you should consider and some of the best practices in deploying your own gift card program. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marke…ering-gift-cards/

Why aren’t people leveraging the power of SMS messaging to improve the guest experience and create tighter relationships? Perhaps hotels are scared off by the intimate nature of text messaging or perhaps marketers have finally found an ethical line they’re not willing to cross? We discuss all this and more in the latest episode of the award-winning Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-129-launching-and-managing-your-hotels-sms-text-messaging-campaign/

If you’ve ever taken a marketing course, you will probably be familiar with the concept of the 5 Ps of Marketing. The 5 Ps are the standard concepts used to come up with a marketing strategy for your business, and encompass: Product, Price, Place, People, and Promotion. Hotel Speak recently published a great article on a slightly different perspective, geared specifically for the hotel and lodging industry. Here’s the breakdown. SHOW NOTES:

By now you have probably heard the increasing chatter about CCPA. In this episode of the award winning Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast, we do an overview and try to unpack the new California privacy regulations and what they mean for your hotel. Keep in mind that CCPA is just the beginning and we fully expect to see more legislation coming from other states in the very near future. DISCLAIMER: We are not legal experts and this article and podcast episode are for entertainment purposes only and are not intended to be considered as legal advice. The information is based upon our limited understanding and some random Google searches and may contain errors or factual inaccuracies as well as the occasional dad joke. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-127-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-california-consumer-privacy-act-ccpa/

Bridging the gap between the operations staff and the marketing team is an age-old problem that has faced many hotels. In this episode of the award-winning Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast, we tap into the brain of a bonafide hotel operator, Wil Slickers, and discuss some ideas that may help you to get every team member into alignment and eliminate the silos so that you can better serve your guest. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-126-top-5-ways-hotel-operations-marketing-teams-can-work-better-together-w-wil-slickers/

Filling occupancy during the off-season remains one of the hotelier’s biggest challenges and can require a lot of creativity for your digital marketing strategy. Hoteliers should be using every platform, including email, social, paid search, and website content, to promote sales during the off-season. As challenging as it may sound, there are several tactics and ideas that you can implement into these platforms for your off-season marketing strategy. Today, we’re going to discuss 8 ways that you can use to push for more bookings in the off-season. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-125-8-ways-hotels-can-promote-sales-during-the-off-season/

Independent hotels can learn a lot from branded hotels. Once you understand their strategies and limitations in the digital space, you can compete with them. For this episode of the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast, we enlisted the expertise of Stephanie Smith from Cogwheel Marketing to tell us about what the brands are up to and how we can outperform them. SHOW NOTES:

In this episode, we get back to basics with the latest in our hotel marketing 101 series. This time, we discuss social media and identify the platforms and the strategies that make the most sense for your property. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-123-hotel-marketing-101-the-top-3-things-you-should-be-doing-on-social-media/

Finding content out of date, or not ready to be posted, is one of the most common issues we come across in terms of hoteliers being ready for what is to come. This is not unexpected, many hotel operators are busy dealing with guests, property issues, and a myriad of other urgent issues. Unfortunately, this means the important things that are not urgent, get pushed to the side. If you don’t already know about the Eisenhower’s Decision Matrix by name, you surely have seen it in books like “Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People.” More or less, the point of the matrix is we spend way too much time in Quadrant #1 or Quadrant #3, and not nearly enough time in Quadrant #2. Today’s podcast is all about setting up your website’s content to be ready to go in advance and completely live in Quadrant #2, important but not urgent. We are going to cover five content areas that can be planned in advance, created, and then executed when the time comes… no urgency needed. We could do an entire podcast on the Eisenh

If you’re a hotel marketer, chances are that you spend some of your budget on advertising. Typically, those efforts are deployed in an attempt to drive demand for your property or to harvest the intend that already exists from a person who is looking to take a trip. Most hotel marketers do the basics right. They set up different campaigns and target a defined audience with a specific message. Most people, however, aren’t taking advantage of all of the potential target segments that exist in today’s marketing toolkit. In this episode, we dig into 15 different ways to target your audience and discuss the fact that layering these segments into more granular groups of people is the best way to maximize your ROI. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-121-15-simple-ways-to-refine-your-hotel-ad-targeting/

What's all the fuss about Millennials and Generation Z? Are they really going to cause the death of life as we know it? Should we be spending our time developing a marketing strategy that specifically targets these increasingly influential enigmas? We tackle all of these tough topics and more in this week's episode fo the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-120-should-your-hotel-be-marketing-to-generation-z-and-millennials/

Effective communication is one of the keys to building a strong relationship with your guests. If you do it correctly, you can build customer loyalty, improve the guest experience, and drive more revenue. In this episode, the Fueligans break down a recent blog article that discusses 15 triggered messages that you should be sending to your guests Based on this original blog post: 15 Triggered Messages Your Hotel Should Be Sending To Your Guests https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/15-triggered-messages-your-hotel-should-be-sending-to-your-guests/ SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-119-dominate-the-competition-with-these-15-triggered-messages/

This episode is based on a vertical trends report produced by Google as well as Revinate’s latest email marketing trends study. Also see our notes on last year’s study: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-98-takeaways-revinates-2018-global-hotel-email-marketing-report/

If you tuned in to last week’s episode where we reviewed the 2019 Leisure Travel Study you’ll know we talked a lot about the ever-changing habits of our guests. However, not everything a guest does is constantly changing. In this episode we look at a famous quote from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and discuss what it means for hotel marketers. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-117-what-hotel-marketers-can-learn-from-amazons-secret-to-success/

Each year, Fuel publishes a comprehensive leisure travel study that takes a look into why people travel and how they make their purchase decisions. The data revealed by the study offers incredible value to the hospitality industry as it provides a clear picture of what people are looking for when they are performing their travel research. In this episode of the Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast, the Fueligans breakdown the most surprising and the most important stats from the 2019 study and discuss the biggest opportunities that exist for hoteliers who want to take advantage of this information. DOWNLOAD THE STUDY: https://www.fueltravel.com/2019-leisure-travel-trends-study/ SHOW NOTES: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/fuel-hotel-marketing-podcast-episode-116-youll-be-shocked-by-these-insights-from-the-2019-leisure-travel-study/