Try new things often, fail and fail fast, manage your reputation carefully and don’t cut expenses just to achieve your goals. This is just some of the advice from out by Maureen Callahan, vice president of marketing at US-based Destination Hotels & Resorts, a firm with around 40 independent, luxury and upscale hotels, resorts and golf clubs.

The media landscape is very fragmented and today’s consumer has many choices. “Marketing and competing in the digital environment requires that every property has a well-defined and differentiated brand, in addition to creating value-add opportunities and compelling packages and promotions,” says Callahan. “They are also responsible for creating effective media plans that target relevant consumers.”

This is exactly what Destination aims to achieve. The company’s business model has always focused on building the individual property brand, while using Destination as a co-brand. It recognises, after all, that establishing a marketing strategy for a hotel company with multiple properties requires a multi-layered plan of attack.

The objective is to position each property for optimal performance in their marketplace. At the corporate level the team assesses, for example, whether to work on an umbrella branding strategy or not, how to promote the unique characteristics and location of each individual hotel and come up with compelling packages and promotions. Plus there is a customised strategic marketing plan for each property. Each property has to enhance the experience so that guests end up having a strong affiliation with the brand.

For Callahan transparency in today’s Internet dominated world requires that each of the group’s properties deliver superior customer satisfaction. Reputation management is essential and a major focus is ensuring positive online reviews. Destination is also implementing a cloud-based CRM solution this year. This, says Callahan, will enable the company to manage customer data and guest profiles. In addition it will be a step on the way to customising communications as well as developing profiles for customer acquisition efforts.

EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta put some questions to Callahan to find out how Destination approaches everything from marketing campaigns to budgets, media-mix modeling and attribution reports.

EFT: Your group’s properties are located in key metropolitan and resort markets. How do you aim to promote your properties?

MC: Our primary objective is to position each property for optimal performance in their marketplace. We have a customised strategic marketing plan for each property in order to ensure that their brand is relevant, compelling, authentic and engaging.

Each property allocates their sales and marketing budget into key initiatives that will drive customer acquisition and retention.

At the corporate level, Destination implements cooperative sales and marketing solutions that can benefit the entire portfolio. This includes consumer promotions, public relations, direct sales and social media programmes. In addition, the company’s co-branded initiatives promote ‘collection’ campaigns for the spa, golf, mountain, and culinary collection and serve to affiliate the property with destination as well as cross sell the various properties in the portfolio.

EFT: Tell me a bit about your recent ‘Board’em’ campaign?

MC: The ‘Summer Board’em!’ campaign was developed as an awareness campaign to represent the whole portfolio and things you can do a on a board (surfing, paddle boarding, games) and things the whole family can do on a summer vacation.

The primary objective was to gain significant press on the various properties in the collection and drive the consumer to the website to plan a vacation. There was also a discount associated with the promotion but most customers planned and booked a customised trip. Because our portfolio of properties is so diverse, these types of campaigns allow the media to showcase both Destination as a brand as well as individual properties. This particular campaign garnered significant national press in consumer publications, online blogs and city newspapers.

EFT: Getting into national press is always good but how should marketers optimise their budgets?

MC: In order to optimise marketing budgets, it is critical to have a clearly defined strategy:

•     Know what you are trying to achieve with each marketing or media initiative: (image, transactions, ‘fans’, clicks, impressions)

•     Know the profile of the customer you are trying to attract and ensure that your media strategy and creative is aligned with your brand and your objective

•     Ensure that you have a fluid and effective revenue management strategy and that your pricing is relevant and competitive in order to achieve goals and projected ROI.

•     Fail and fail fast (try new things and then if these are delivering or aligned with strategy – move on)

•     Spend your marketing budget effectively. Don’t cut expenses to achieve goals.

EFT: Media-mix modelling is a term sometimes used by marketing people. What does it mean? 

MC: Media-mix modeling is when you monitor the effectiveness of all your media placements to see what is working the best and then purchase media accordingly in the future. So if you are buying PPC, banner ads on certain sites or sending out email campaigns, determine which are performing the best and then continue to optimise your spend to get the highest ROI.

EFT: So it can result in tighter control over the media budget. Can you elaborate on this?

MC: With online media, and as tracking tools get better on the web, you can get a better feel (quickly) for what is working and what isn’t. One thing we are starting to look at now is attribution. Generally, there are a number of touch points before a guest makes a booking. With new tracking technology, you are able to see all those touch points or websites a consumer used before completing the transaction. This allows you to better understand the consumer, their point in the transaction and the other sites that may benefit from additional media.

EFT: So how are you using attribution reports?

MC: As we are beginning to use Attribution reports, it will be important to continue to understand the impact of every ‘click’ and further the sentiment of the consumer at that click point – researching, planning, comparing and / or transacting. As Destination continues to utilise core metrics to plan effective media efforts, we continue to evolve the attribution analysis so that we can analyse the consumer decision-making journey and better understand each touch point.