According to a leading digital research company, eMarketer, 52% of all USA travelers will make their bookings online and of these individuals 60% will be using their mobile devices to book their reservation.  As we begin 2017, the digital ecommerce era is alive and well and GROWING in the hospitality industry!

Truth is, the first impression with your future guests comes way before they walk through your front doors.  Your future guests are scouring search engines, visiting multiple Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) and social media pages to find the ‘right’ hotel, ‘best’ deal, and ‘ideal’ amenities at the ‘perfect’ location.  To address your future guest's buying ‘requirements’, today’s hotelier must be able to extend, manage, and optimize a digital footprint to ensure an easy, practical, and clear path to booking online.  If in hospitality ‘customer experience’ is KING, then ‘UI/UX’ is QUEEN with her loyal staff included (SEO, SEM, Social Media).

Now more than ever, hotels are relying upon digital marketing to ensure future bookings, increase  occupancy rate, and achieve overall growth in Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR).

Case in point, the Ramada Plaza & CoCo Key Resort reached out to us to help build an effective digital marketing strategy that would generate brand awareness, drive relevant website traffic, and ultimately increase bookings.

In brief, The Ramada Plaza & CoCo Key Resort is a well-known and popular property in Omaha, Nebraska for both families and business travelers.  The hotel has approximately 365 rooms, 75,000 square feet of conference space, and a world class indoor water park that serves ~100,000 guests per year.

Since starting our engagement in August 2015, we’ve produced a 244% ROI in just 15 months!

See how we did it in this infographic:

It’s my sincere belief that much of this success stems from the initial work we did in the first 4-weeks with the client.   Prior to developing our strategy, we spent significant time studying the demographic and psychographic behaviors of the Omaha market and hotel clientele.  

Based on research gathered, we identified six persona segments that represented the ideal customer mix for the client.    To make sure we understood these personas at a deep level, we researched many guest attributes, preferences, and tendencies.  This guest buyer persona exercise provided us the needed foundational elements for all the work we would do with rebranding, strategy development, messaging, and targeting tactics.

It might seem overly simplistic, but I am a firm believer that the biggest variable in having an effective digital marketing strategy is getting your guest buyer personas right.  If you can understand how your guests make decisions, what they value, and where they get their information, then you have a great chance at compelling that individual to stay at your hotel. 

With a firm understanding of the client’s guest buyer personas, we set forth on a journey that included rebranding, website refresh, HubSpot deployment, mobile app roll-out, and multiple targeted campaigns that utilized social media, email marketing, and advertising.   With increasing RevPAR being our primary objective, we made sure that we orchestrated our tactics to generate bookings and measurable return for our client.

Success like this is not possible without the complete buy-in and support of our client.  Their oversight, direction and input was critically important in keeping momentum and focus of this engagement.   If it were not for the client’s belief in the overall strategy and vision, I am confident this initiative would not have been successful at all.  Luckily, the client was on board with the vision and allowed us to navigate to 244% ROI after 15-months!

If you are interested in learning more about digital marketing journey with the Ramada Plaza & Coco Key Resort, be sure to get in touch with us.