Guest Blog by Lisa Maria Stice
As meetings return, sales teams are looking for fresh and more effective ways to engage with meeting professionals personally and efficiently. By leveraging technology tools, such as a cloud-based Customer Data Platform (CDP), hotel and resort sales teams can streamline the process of brainstorming and navigating complex data, lists, and referrals to turn meeting planners into confirmed bookings. Hotels have been utilizing cloud-based CDP solutions for decades for leisure business, but have you considered building your meetings CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform?
Marketers can help enable their sales operations teams to engage with planners more personally and efficiently by considering developing their own branded customer data communications platform (CDP) to extend the reach and personalize online engagement with meeting professionals and corporate event planners. For hotels and resorts that rely on meetings as a critical revenue stream, establishing a CDP with their meeting customers and building a database of zero-party data opt-in meeting planners can be a powerful tool for sales enablement.
To build a meetings database communication plan for your hotel, follow these steps:
First, determine specific business goals for building a meeting customer database or loyalty program. These goals include increasing customer engagement and retention, generating referrals from existing customers, or increasing bookings and revenue. Next, research and choose a CDP platform provider that aligns with your business goals and is familiar with hospitality. Look for a platform that can collect, store, and analyze data from various integrated and uploaded sources, and consider whether they offer marketing tools to create engagement directly from the CDP.
Develop a data collection strategy that encourages meeting planners to provide their contact information for continued communications willingly. Obtain their consent and follow privacy regulations when collecting their information. Utilize the data to engage in a more personalized way and provide relevant information that meets their needs. Offer incentives such as meeting packages or exclusive offers, invitations to private customer events, and rewards for joining a brand's or hotel's meeting loyalty club. Start with your website meeting planner forms, such as RFP forms and website opt-ins tailored for meetings, and integrate the data into your advertising efforts to receive promotional materials directly from sales teams.
Work with a well-established hospitality marketing technology provider to help you deliver turn-key personalized communications and a targeted digital marketing strategy using the data collected, such as customer journey email campaigns or customized offers. Get creative and consider sharing a meetings blog with exciting industry trends and insights or entertaining educational videos. Most importantly, automate the process of delivering leads to critical sales team members from meeting planners that want to hear from you through your new communication platform.
Advice from the best:
Cory Falter with the Lure Agency is highly renowned for delivering turn-key meetings communications and meetings optimization technologies for resorts and hotels, notes that as important as tech is to sales and marketing, messaging and cadence are equally important. A highly personalized messaging strategy delivered at the right time can yield enhanced engagement with your meeting customers. When initiating your first communications, provide value through insights into the new customer relationship. Promotions that are too self-serving in the meetings world risk being unsubscribed or flagged as spam which can harm your domain's reputation.
In conclusion, regularly analyzing your meeting's CDP data is crucial in identifying planners' behaviors and interactions that signify high interest in your hotel, allowing you to plan fresh and effective strategies for targeted advertising, social media campaigns, and content marketing. Finally, use tracking and measurement tools such as Google Analytics or other software provided by your CDP platform provider to help you streamline the process.
Implementing a meetings CDP and zero-party data opt-in strategy can improve communication with contacts and meeting professionals, increase loyalty, and drive conference sales. If you need further assistance developing a customized meetings loyalty platform for your business, consider consulting with a marketing expert such as Lisa Maria Stice of Marketing EXPERTS International LLC. With years of experience in the hospitality industry, Lisa and her extended team of industry professionals can help you create a comprehensive plan that prioritizes data privacy and security while maximizing your meeting's customer communications. Contact her today at lisastice@marketingexpertsint.com to learn more.
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