CDPs Allow Hotels to Personalize Marketing to Target Individual Reasons to Visit

It’s always illuminating to speak one-on-one with brilliant hotel marketers like Jason Pirock, Head of Marketing for Springboard Hospitality, as I did during our recent Insider Conversation, “Mastering Conversions: Crafting an Omnichannel Booking Journey.”

Before getting into the crux of this article, an important point that Pirock made during the opening minutes of our discussion on mastering conversions within an omnichannel booking journey was to break down the phases within that booking journey as follows:

1. Inspiration: also called the dream phase which includes a hotel’s social media presence and how it uses third-party partners
2. Research: a hotel’s online presence, including its brand.com, how it appears on listings and its reputation or reviews
3. Planning: the hotel brand’s content, affiliations, experiences and reasons to visit or book, under the more scholarly banner of ‘value propositions’
4. Booking: a hotel website’s user experience for desktop or mobile and its payment rails as well as conversion tactics like retargeting or email campaigns

Now when it comes to the word ‘personalization’, this often implies bespoke service once the guest has arrived as now aided by integration technologies like a customer data platform (CDP) to deliver this true sense of hospitality at scale. But equally as important – if not more important! – is convincing guests to arrive in the first place, as in book or reserve a room.

Marketers are the key members of the commercial team charged with building the funnel and enticing conversions so that operation teams have a healthy occupant to execute this bespoke service for. Having an industry-specific CDP in place with strong connections to all the various systems that a hotel may be using to manage its core operations, ancillaries and digital marketing efforts allows hoteliers to scale booking journey revenue improvements in several key ways:

• Coalesce all the accumulated guest behavior data to make sense of the trends therein
• Incentivize direct bookings instead of through third parties to reduce commission expenses
• Personalize packages to induce higher conversion rates and more guest spend (TRevPAR)
• Design promotions for low-occupancy periods with greater confidence in their success
• Demonstrate great service by showing from the outset that the hotel knows who the guest is
• Inform what programs or events will be effective to smooth out seasonality challenges
• Deduce an individual guest’s reason to visit (R2V) to maximize their lifetime value (CLV)

It’s this last point I want to unpack a bit further because it’s perhaps the hardest to directly quantity and yet can represent the holy grail of business growth for a hotel. With others labeling this as a brand’s value proposition, a hotel’s reason to visit, heretofore abbreviated as R2V, is largely emotional, especially for leisure transients.

Unless you get all customers, past and prospective, to complete detailed, well-designed surveys and sick an NLP bot on all your online sentiment, you never really know the true motivation for why a guest chose your property instead of the competitor down the street (or even better, chose your property as a determining factor ahead of location or price). But R2V is nevertheless critical because it will form the basis for how new audiences discover your brand (outside of an OTA or location-based search), how likely past guests are to return (thus influencing CLV) and what your above-market premium on nightly rates can be.

Adding to this opaqueness, R2V is individualized. The primary emotional draw for one guest may be dissimilar from what cajoles another guest to book. Then for even more confusion, the context of each individual guest can change – for example, a father or mother of two who always stays with a certain hotel brand for midweek corporate stays but then reserves on behalf of the whole nuclear family for extended weekend vacations still with the same brand.

In this sense, a CDP first and foremost becomes instrumental in analyzing what your property or brand’s key attractions are as broken down by segment. This analysis by itself allows you to reaffirm your assumptions about your R2V or discover differential opinions and subtleties within your R2V that may influence how its expressed for different segments, onsite programming updates or even capex planning.

From there, the CDP allows marketers to leverage these insights at scale to design more personalized advertising and packaging based on an individual’s emotional drivers and what their R2V is depending on the context with which they are searching for or booking a property. Thirdly, the CDP can measure changes in guest spend over multiple stays to see how the context of a R2V is evolving to then make broader inferences about what will truly help turn a steady guest into a customer for life, as tabulated in CLV or LTV in aggregate.

Understanding this relationship between R2V, CLV and personalized marketing, you can then revisit Pirock’s four phases of the booking journal to see more granularly as to how a CDP will be vital for marketing efforts going forward.

The example that we touched upon near the end of our discussion was building a wine lover’s package or designing a wine-centric event to incentivize shoulder season occupancy. For the package, with the right POS data integrations, you can not only make a determination about whether someone prefers white or red, but drill down to the specific grape varietals or vintages, adding them as personalized welcome amenities to a package to spur bookings or by highlighting similar F&B vouchers in a package as a way to convince guests to try out another property with a brand’s portfolio. On the event side, if you know someone likes a particular type of wine, you might give them an exclusive ‘first look’, demonstrating that you value them as loyal patrons with a bespoke value-added offer and a time limitation before opening the event to the wider public.

Altogether, what deserves another mention is that not only must all these personalized efforts occur in order to differentiate your awareness campaigns and drive direct bookings, but that they must also occur at scale with automated segmentation and across every channel in order to get the right reach. That level of detail wasn’t possible prior to advent of a CDP while maintaining a lean team, but now that hotels are using smarter interfaces in this way to inform one-to-one marketing tactics, it’s becoming all the more important that hotels without a CDP get caught up. The future favors personalization, and this will only be possible if all the data gets to where it needs to be.