The age of coronavirus is high on questions and low on answers. Many of the challenges COVID-19 brought with it have no precedent, leaving brands scrambling for solutions.
Over the past few months, your marketing teams have likely been presented with possible solutions in the form of myriad charts and graphs. Screen Pilot’s own
data dives
and proprietary data on the front page of our
COVID-19 Resource Center
can reveal anything you need to know about travel interest and shopping behavior in your region.
But a chart alone isn’t always enough. If you’ve ever peered into a new graph or chart and felt like you’re reading a map without a key, we want to help you find the way forward. At Screen Pilot, we focus on discovering our clients’ windows of opportunity for rebound and recovery. In this guide, we’ll help you take a few steps on your own.
To create an air-tight strategy, you need to know 1) who you should be talking to and 2) how best to reach them. Pull up your own data (or use ours for a quick visual) and follow the steps below to answer those questions for your hotel or resort.
Step 1: Use Data To Define Your Audience
Your audience is the bedrock on which you’ll build the rest of your marketing strategy. After all, the audience is who that strategy is designed to serve—it’s who you’re attempting to reach or already actively talking to. To profile your prospective guests, outline what we call the four W’s of data analysis: who, where, why, and when.
Who, where, why: User location and keywords
The first thing you need to understand is where website users are coming from.
Using a chart like the one below, you can get a sense of user location. Google Analytics also offers great user location and demographics reports. These are both signals around which you can create marketing collateral. The goal is to speak specifically to these markets. But that’s only the first of several layers.
A user's location and age alone won’t tell the story of their journey to your website. The next signal to pay attention to is the why behind their search for your hotel or resort.
To answer that question, turn to search keywords. If your hotel is still running paid media efforts (and you should be!), using the Search Terms report is a great way to understand what people are searching for before they even click an ad. Here are a few more tips on
monitoring paid activity
.
If you’ve made the tough call to pause media efforts (it’s okay, we understand, but it’s time to get back in business!) you’re relying on direct and organic traffic to pick up the slack. For these channels, Google Search Console will be your guide.
Google Search Console tells you exactly what your organic website visitors are searching for. It also provides associated metrics for each query, such as impressions and click-through-rate.
Use our
Search Console guide
to help navigate your analysis.
When: Shopping behavior
To explain shopping behavior, we’re going to introduce you to a brand new property: “Beachy Keen,” a beachfront resort in Florida. This resort has already successfully identified their audience using the process outlined above.
Beachy Keen’s main persona is travelers in their twenties and thirties living within the state of Florida who have been searching for terms like “hotels near the beach.” They now know who they are talking to and why users are looking to travel. When is their missing link.
That’s where shopping behavior plays a pivotal role in understanding your audience. If your hotel uses Google Analytics, start by
tracking your shopping windows
.
Accurately tracking the shopping behavior of prospective guests will reveal the months that users select in the booking engine. Analyze these data points to see if any patterns emerge.
For example, the below charts depict the gradual, week-over-week shortening of the shopping window. It also offers the exact month that people want to travel.
Beachy Keen has now properly implemented event tracking and has analyzed this information for users who live in Florida. They found that Florida users are looking to travel to their resort within the next 30 days—a departure from the average of 90 days at the start of the pandemic.
Beachy Keen’s digital marketing partner confirms this pattern by comparing their data to an aggregate of data from their other partner properties in Florida. Their partner uses a data visualization to confirm that there has been a massive spike in interest for travel to Florida properties within 1-30 days. (FYI: Beachy Keen may be hypothetical, but these data points and travel patterns are all real time data from Screen Pilot.)
Now that Beachy Keen knows travelers are interested in traveling to their property in the next 1-30 days, the question becomes whether or not those same travelers are actually booking.
Their marketing teams create the same shopping window visualization, but this time they use the arrival date for travelers who actually booked. This allows them to compare the dates of interest for those who were shopping (shopping window) with the actual dates of stay for those who made a reservation (booking window).
Layering shopping and booking window data bridges the gap between prospective travel and confirmed reservations. Some users are interested in traveling in the next 30 days, but Beachy Keen’s comparison might illustrate that users are more comfortable committing to a booking for stays three months down the road.
Beachy Keen can then pass these insights to their internal teams. Revenue managers can craft summer and fall packages/offers around this information, while marketing teams get to work on the next phase of the strategy: content development.
Step 2: Use data to inform content creation
Once a property like Beachy Keen analyzes and identifies their audience, there’s still the matter of speaking to them directly.
One of the best ways to capture and keep traveler interest in your property is content marketing—especially during a period when your hotel or resort may be opting out of or reducing their investment in the paid media marketplace.
Since regions across the U.S. are observing an increase in people shopping for travel, there has never been a better time to hone in on content. Let’s return to our Beachy Keen example from Part 1.
Beachy Keen already has the following insights in-hand:
- Who and Where: The main audience is people in their twenties and thirties that live in the state of Florida
- Why: Users are interested in direct beach access
- When: People hope to travel within the next 30 days, so summer is important.
1. Identify what users are interacting with
Use a report like “All Pages” in Google Analytics to identify your property’s most popular pieces of content within the last month. You can also consider what have historically been your most successful pages by comparing them to previous periods.
Assessing user behavior on the website can reveal new paths to purchase that may not have existed pre-pandemic. For “Beachy Keen”, they observe a large uptick in visitors to their food & beverage pages, along with the “Location” page on their website.
Pre-pandemic, these pages may not have cracked the top 10, but new behaviors are emerging. Beachy Keen can now optimize these pages with items like calls-to-action and internal links in order to better lead users towards making a booking.
2. Repurpose old content
Adding new content to your site may be your first instinct. Resist it. Most brands have more content in their inventory than they’re even aware of—and much of that can be retooled to support your new strategy.
Beachy Keen, for example, has been developing a must-read blog for the last three years, just like everyone else, right? They already have a treasure trove of content that may have fallen by the wayside.
Take inventory of your content, and make note of which pieces have performed well in years past. Beachy Keen analyzes their content inventory and finds an in-depth article about beach activities and their resort’s proximity to the nearest sand. It’s historically been a successful summer piece.
Because they discovered in their Phase 1 research that their prospective travelers are still searching for “near the beach” terms, this is the perfect piece to optimize. They can update this piece so that it’s relevant to the current times and better functions as a step in the path to purchase.
3. Develop new content
Repurposing old content won’t always cut it. The pandemic has actually created a great window of opportunity to deliver new pieces, and Google is looking even harder for meaningful content. Its most recent algorithm update
shook the hospitality industry
.
“Beachy Keen” has now satisfied its beach-goers with information regarding beach access and fun activities. However, they need to put a strategy in place to speak to the user location they discovered in their Phase 1 research. Most of their traffic is coming from cities near the hotel—their drive market.
In order to speak to this specific traveler type, “Beachy Keen” decided to develop a series of road trip articles that entice users to drive to their property for a weekend on the beach. These pieces also feature new summer and fall promotions that were developed in the previous stage.
Their new content strategy now hits every part of the audience and can even be incorporated into their booking funnel and paid media efforts.
In closing
When revenue is low but expectations are high, you must turn to data to make informed decisions.
Make sure you have a trusted marketing partner that will tag every action and track every piece of information not only from your own website, but any possible source of marketing information that can help you illustrate the whole picture.
Doing this will help you avoid costly mistakes when defining your post-COVID-19 target audiences and communicating with them directly and personally via your content.
By following the steps above and exploring some of the links we’ve included in this article, your hotel’s rebound from COVID19 is at your fingertips.