Making Hospitality Marketing Customer-centric

 Email Article |  Twitter |  Facebook |  digg it |   StumbleUpon |   LinkedIn |   Technorati 

Most often hospitality industry talk a lot about customer service at the property as a key differentiator to customer experience & satisfaction.

I believe this is not the case and most often, it starts with even before the customer visits the hotel or the restaurant of choice. Also, there are many a times, the post usage experience is forgotten and very rarely have I ever seen any credible data-led customer marketing intiatives in this phase. 

It was interesting to see Intercontinental Hotels do very interesting customer marketing work in this area. Here are some interesting facts: 

• Intercontinental Hotel Group’s (IHG’s) uses of data-driven marketing to improve communications with existing customers and prospects is an interesting case study for many hotel groups across the world.
  

• Lincoln Barrett, vice president for guest marketing and alliances, shared that, for IHG, building a customer-centric marketing strategy is based on 3 Key pillars:
  

          - Invest in technology
          - Expand into new frontiers
          - Build a centralized customer organization

She was talking at the UNICA Marketing Innovation Summit in Orlando.

• She talked about the need for real-time data mart that would allow IHG to match the data it was gathering through proprietary and third-party sources to existing customer information. 
  
• According to her this step also made it possible to gain immediate access to data for analysis or campaign building purposes – a significant upgrade to IHG's previous functionality, which updated records in batches and only made data available some 30 days after a customer incident (like a hotel stay).
• She talked about some interesting trends in hospitality Marketing - Right Time marketing, Channel Synergy, Glocal Communication, Non-member marketing etc. 

Closed Loop Marketing multiplies ROI

 Email Article |  Twitter |  Facebook |  digg it |   StumbleUpon |   LinkedIn |   Technorati 

The term closed-loop marketing has been around for decades. The huge increase in marketing channels adds complexity to the challenge of delivering relevant messages to customers and prospects. Put very simply Closed-loop Marketing (CLM) is interactive marketing where customer responses and behaviour are employed to direct and refine marketing strategy and tactics.

There is a "closed loop" where collected customer data and behaviour is used to build a profile of customers - profiles that provide the basis for further marketing initiatives. Typically, the recipient profile is adjusted by responses to the campaign and the campaign is adjusted to the recipient profile - there is a feedback loop.

Companies are constantly creating interactions with their customers. A lot of these interactions are outbound interactions initiated by Marketing. A Retailer may advertise an end of the year sale in media and also use some other channels like email and direct mail to invite specific segments of customers to their stores. Marketers do not need sophisticated technology to start measuring the results of each marketing action. Yes there would be no perfect answers. But the important thing is to start creating this “accountable marketing” philosophy.

Increasingly, organizations are using customer data and behavior to direct and refine marketing strategy and tactics, creating a closed-loop system between their marketing message and their customers that continuously evolves.

According to a recent report from Aberdeen, "The CMO Strategic Agenda: Automating Closed-Loop Marketing," 88 percent of best-in-class companies have adopted this full-circle or "closed-loop" marketing approach, and they have procured technology to help automate the process.

You can read about this here:Automating Closed Loop Marketing

 However we believe that Closed loop marketing is wrongly sold as a technology problem. Many IT companies almost seem to be sayings that automate marketing and you will accomplish Closed loop marketing-almost magically. Closed loop marketing is also wrongly perceived to be purely an Online kind of approach where you integrate all aspects of your internet marketing into a closed loop.

The real problem is that Marketers need to examine if they are process and ROI focussed. Do they measure how each leg of their marketing campaign is delivering value ? How does the sms,internet, DM and Advertising medium work together? Are you attracting a different profile of customers from these different channels? Are consumers primarily multi channel? Are you using Analytics to figure out the ROI on your Marketing investments.

Our perspective at Cequity is that companies must build appropriate marketing processes ahead of automation-only then can Marketing automation give you results.