‘Do more with less’ has been most hoteliers’ mantra for the past few years. Unfortunately that doesn’t look likely to change any time soon.
Hotels operate in a demanding, high-velocity market, where the product, price and channel where your customers are shopping changes continuously. That makes marketing your rooms extremely complicated at the best of times. But when you have less resource than ever before and more digital channels to contend with, it’s easy to see how building an effective, efficient marketing strategy has become such a universal challenge.
When your marketing effectiveness drops, it’s your ROI that suffers. Whether it’s an OTA offering a quick discount to undercut your direct price, a potential customer on your website who doesn’t see relevant content, or spending budget on metasearch when you’re being undercut (essentially paying to advertise that you don’t have the best price!) there are numerous opportunities to waste budget in modern hotel marketing.
But it’s not all doom and gloom! At Triptease our focus is always on how to get out in front of the problems hoteliers are facing and use technology to find a solution. That’s why we’ve launched the Triptease Data Marketing Platform - a brand new solution designed to provide the data sophistication of an OTA, for every hotel.
Four data points that matter: Right customer, right price, right channel, right time
Here’s the good news - there are really only four kinds of data that a hotelier needs to worry about when it comes to their digital marketing strategy:
- Pricing data: You need to know whether you’re competitively positioned so you can bid accordingly in traffic acquisition channels
- Guest data: You need a deep understanding of who your best customers are and how to target them
- Market opportunity data: You need to know when and where the best customers can be found
- Performance data: You need sophisticated website and conversion tracking to test, learn and optimize your marketing strategy
Guess who does all of this really well? That’s right, it’s the OTAs. That’s a big part of the reason why they’re still eating your lunch after all these years. But do you know who else has access to exactly this kind of hard-to-get, critically important pricing, market and customer data that makes OTAs so successful? It’s Triptease.
That’s why in 2023 we’re lifting the lid on all the work that goes on under the hood when hoteliers buy our digital marketing products. The data and connections that power Triptease tools are highly useful and valuable assets for modern hotel marketing teams. We’re now giving customers the opportunity to select both the digital marketing tools they need for their business as well as the right data package to help power those products. That means more flexibility for your business, better ROI for your team and much more efficient, effective marketing campaigns.
Three steps to great marketing: Capture data, understand data, activate data
The Triptease Data Marketing Platform helps hotels to do three crucial jobs that form the basis of great marketing:
- Capture data: Triptease provides the connectivity, tracking, security and storage required to actually acquire the critical, hard-to-access data we provide for hotels.
- Understand data: This is where we turn the raw data we’ve acquired into usable, impactful insights for hotels. This includes:
- Pricing intelligence (e.g. actionable insights and analysis of your hotel’s parity status in the Triptease Platform or our Price Match functionality for Metasearch)
- Audience intelligence (e.g. direct booking performance insights, audience analysis and CRM integration)
- Activate data: These are the marketing channels where we apply the data we’ve collected and analysed to increase performance for hotels. Hoteliers can select from the following marketing channels to activate via Triptease.
- Paid Search
- Metasearch
- On-site Messages
- Chat
- Display Retargeting
You’ll then also select from either our ‘Core’ or ‘Pro’ Data Marketing packages to power those products. The ‘Core’ package is best for mid-sized hotels looking to unlock the essential data needed for efficient, effective marketing. ‘Pro’ is typically used by teams working across multiple hotels, who need deeper insights and more automated integrations and configuration options.
Two new launches: Personalization that goes way beyond your website and booking engine
Onsite personalization is just one small piece of the complex digital marketing puzzle. As part of the launch of the Triptease Data Marketing Platform, we’ve introduced some game-changing new functionality that applies your unique data across the whole booking journey to personalize the customer experience consistently everywhere.
Price Match for Metasearch automatically discounts your price live in the metasearch auction by just enough to win the booking when OTAs are undercutting you. You stay in full control of your prices at all times. Decide which OTAs you’re happy to price match and by how much, and Triptease will then apply just enough discount to ensure you win the booking every time. Early access clients have already seen up to a 33% increase in bookings when Price Match functionality was switched on.
We’re also using your unique data in other parts of the direct booking funnel. Innovative new Audience Sharing features will allow hoteliers to download first party data enriched with additional customer insights (like party size, lead time and check-in dates). This would allow you to send hyper-targeted email comms to specific types of customers like families, last-minute bookers or people searching for stays on specific dates like Chinese New Year or Thanksgiving.
You can also send first party customer data collected on your website directly to your CRM automatically, saving time and making your marketing even more efficient.
One Data Marketing Platform, powering more efficient and effective direct booking strategies
By combining your unique data with industry-leading marketing tools, the Triptease Data Marketing Platform allows hoteliers to:
- Communicate their price across all touch points
- Have the best price everywhere, all the time
- Automatically target your most valuable prospects
- Adjust bidding and experiences based on parity data
- Co-ordinate guest experience and optimise budget for cross-channel performance
- Analyze real-time guest data to identify patterns and trends in booking and spending
- Measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and adjust strategies accordingly
- Synchronise data across channels to de-dupe bookings and get a true view of channel performance
- Capture and export emails and the audience data required to set up highly personalized email communication to prospects in your CRM
If you’d like to know more about what the Triptease Data Marketing Platform could do for your hotel’s digital marketing and direct booking strategy, fill out the form below and a member of our team will be in touch.