Real numbers about hotel guests

Advertising in front of your local community works, but you can only show them the same ad so many times and have it turn into folks buying what you’re selling.  There is an entirely separate flood of potential customers, ready to buy what you are offering, and they are staying in hotels, motels, hostels and bed & breakfasts, for 2 nights at a time, only to be replaced by another wave of potential customers staying in the same room for the next two nights…and it repeats, 365 days a year.

These are brand new sets of eyes that are spending their money, with a disposable income.  Here’s what the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) found out…

96%

Guests who will dine out at local restaurants

32%

Guests who will have food delivered

48%

Guests who will engage in paid recreational activities

25%

Guests who will visit a spa or beauty salon during their stay

55%

Guests who will spend $75 or more on shopping a day

15%

Guests who will need automotive repairs during stay

32%

Guests who will visit night clubs or bars while in town

Is advertising with Yelp really fitting in your marketing budget?

We’ve helped hundreds of businesses that are paying a pretty penny to advertise their business on Yelp, through their paid advertisement programs.  What a lot of people don’t realize, is that yes Yelp ads do work, but the cost per lead is questionable, depending on your business type, and demographic.

If you’ve been thinking about spending your marketing budget on Yelp ads, one thing to know is the pricing is not advertised, and is quoted like car insurance, so in other words there isn’t a static pricing platform for every business. However, there is a general average pricing in cost-per-lead that folks we’ve talked to are paying, and according to Venturebeat, here’s what one business they spoke with is paying:

Average Yelp budget

$300/mo – 500 targeted ads per month

$540/mo – 1200 targeted ads per month

$825/mo – 2100 targeted ads per month

$1100/mo – 3000 targeted ads per month

Let’s look at their lowest rate structure. Sure, you could potentially see five hundred new paying customers for that $300, but let’s say you’re a pizza restaurant that has an average ticket size of $20.  If all 500 clicks on your ad converted into folks having pizza at your restaurant, you paid roughly $1.60 just to make that twenty dollar ticket. Let’s say you only saw half of those ads turn into a customer, you paid about $3.30 for each of those 250 customers…You get the idea.

The Bottom Line

$300/mo for their minimum ad space program, you are paying $3,600 for only one year.

So why guestcompass?

We provide you with not 500, not 3000, but 10,000 targeted ads, and it’s a mere fraction of the cost. We’re talking only spending a few pennies to sell that $20 pizza.  Call us today and find out how we can do this for you. 619-365-5272

Why bother marketing to travelers?

Travelers have their wallets out, and they are looking to spend. In fact,

the average hotel guest spends $144 per DAY during their stay. And as you can

see from the numbers above, the myriad of things they do this spending on. Any

business owner should want 3 fundamental things for their business:

1. Lower overhead costs

2. Higher revenues

3. Increased market share

Local visitors are an active market of consumers in and of themselves, for which

the savvy business owner makes intentional efforts to pursue and capture more

of. And the best part is, hotels receive tens of THOUSANDS of these active

consumers every year.

So the question here is, how do YOU capture those travelers and increase

YOUR market share of your local area’s visiting spenders? Well, let’s get to

it…but first, we need to clear up some common misunderstandings about

marketing.

We can tell you the secrets, and it won’t take you long to learn them.

Travel is Top Priority for Americans

The travel industry is thriving more than ever these days, with business and leisure travel more popular than ever. The U.S. Travel Association accounted for 1.7 billion personal trips within the last year, as leisure travel makes up for about 76 percent of all US travel. With the increase in travelers’ desires for authentic experiences, people are willing to spend more to get authentic tastes of what an area is truly like. From food and beverage to nightlife and entertainment, leisure travelers want to experience as much as possible without feeling like they need to  travel too far once they’ve reached their destination. The US Travel Association cited that throughout last year, travelers directly spent $248.5 billion dollars in restaurants, grocery stores and drinking establishments while traveling throughout the country. The more authentic the experience, the easier it is to attract tourists to local businesses.

Another way to gain the interest of leisure travelers is to understand their rationale for wanting to travel in the first place. According to the US Travel Association, domestic leisure travelers are usually traveling for the following reasons: visiting relatives, shopping trips, visiting friends, dining and rural sightseeing. With that knowledge in mind, local businesses with a high influx of travelers can cater their marketing and advertising to the specific demographic they’re wanting to attract by implementing themselves within the travelers’ experience.

How Millennials are Changing the Travel Game

As we all know, Millennials are changing the faces of industries across the world, and travel isn’t immune from the millennial influence. In fact, businesses that aren’t utilizing different marketing methods for reaching different generations may be missing the mark when it comes to differentiating between Millennials and other generations. Millennials and Baby Boomers have very different ideas when it comes to priorities in travel spending. Coined as the “experience economy” by Topdeck Travel, a private travel research association, Millennials are willing to spend money on experiences, with a whopping 86% of Millennial travelers looking for authentic values and traditions within their vacation compared to other generations. They want to step out of their comfort zone, explore unique areas and understand the place in which they are staying.

Millennials are looking to combine their business and leisure travel into one experience, allowing them to be productive and make money while immersing themselves into a different culture. If a Millennial is able to extend their work trip a few days in order to experience local attractions while they’re already in the area, you can bet they’ll be extending that trip in no time.

Group and hostel housing accommodations are becoming more and more popular as the sharing economy continues to rise. In fact, according to Top deck Travel, Millennials now make up 70% of all hostel guests. With such low costs, these travelers are willing to spend more money on other things like food and drink and entertainment because they’re not shelling out hundreds of dollars on hotel rooms. Hotel chains around the world are catching onto this trend and plan to offer more and more “hostel-like” chains to their brand, creating a community experience.

Neuromarketing Tactics and Studies

Science is leaking out of field-specific industries and moving towards new domains. One such domain is the advertising industry that needs more sure-fire ways to attract consumers. This lead to the advent of a formal study to observe what affects consumer behavior. Neuromarketing, as it is called, tries to understand what kinds of marketing images our brains respond to.

Using equipment and technology like MRI, researchers constantly aim to learn about how branding images can stimulate our brains and make it respond. They measure brain activity to produce data that is valuable to the marketing industry to help understand how they make decisions about what to buy.

Highly advanced technology is used in these studies to help separate what consumers say and think. A large percentage of consumers don’t convey their actual thoughts about products and brands which makes such in-depth research necessary.

While it may seem highly appealing to business owners to implement neuromarketing techniques to an advertising strategy, you should know that such research doesn’t come cheap. Highly profitable brands can afford to conduct such research using their products, but others may not have the resources to do so.

Neuromarketing studies can be applied to a variety of consumer that have bought or developed certain thoughts about it. This is a scientific way to test factors such as a customer’s opinions and loyalty towards a brand. Neuromarketing research focuses on the effects of advertising messages on the brain, and many businesses can use results from such studies to implement an effective branding strategy.

Neuromarketing proves the importance of many factors that most advertising industries had to guess before science stepped in. Studies into the effects of packaging and colors have put these industries on the right track. Neuromarketing conducts different kinds of studies to learn about what kind of people a certain hue or palette attracts.

Other well-researched factors are the use of certain language and sound in an advertisement. By using words that help gain a connection with the viewer, it adds a more personal touch and gains their attention.

Other research about the brain’s response to advertisements is the effect that print medium can have compared to digital. While it may be the oddest thing to discover considering that brands are increasingly going digital, the results are impressive. The brain’s response to a ‘physical’ print medium advertising message is more focused. It perceives it as more real and hence, spends more time concentrating on its aspects.

This is leading many brands to take up their old spots among magazines and brochures because that helps them intrude into our thought processes, in a good way. You may have experienced this effect if you’ve seen a brightly-colored travel brochure peeping through a pile of mail.

The findings of the neuromarketing science will continue to help brands and industries thrive with the help of reliable statistics and research. To survive in the heavily competitive market, each business should learn to implement effective neuromarketing tactics into their advertising campaign so they can be an edge above the rest.

Print Vs Digital Ads, is newer always better?

The emergence of digital media as a medium for advertising is bringing forth a revolution that seems to be displacing print media in the marketing business. The increasing popularity of digital media is making several businesses question the current relevance of print media advertising. Answering such questions would require in-depth research on the advantages and effects of both types of media.

Digital Advertisements
The digital revolution brings with it some advantages and features that were impossible to apply to print media.

• Target Audience Digital advertising allows businesses to modify an advertisement according to the type of audience they want to appeal to based on their activities and the things they ‘like’ or ‘follow’ on a particular forum. However, many businesses in tourist hotspots would be unable to attract new customers since their digital following would mostly include old, local customers.
• Tracking A useful feature of online advertising is that businesses can follow and trace each response towards an advertisement. Businesses can track the kinds of people that respond and also have the ability to change features of the advertisements while it is online. After a successful campaign, businesses can use statistics from it to help plan their next one.

Print Advertisements
The declining relevance of print media makes businesses reconsider using it for marketing purposes. However, an effective method to advertise through print media is all one needs to bear a positive outcome.

• Locally Effective When well circulated; print media advertisements can have a positive impact on a campaign that is targeting a local population. Consumers feel more comfortable and confident when they respond to advertisements in a local magazine. Even guests and travelers in new areas are likely to look for local outlets to let them know the best places to have a good time.
• Easy Accessibility Making the message of your brand easily accessible is an amazing advantage that print advertisements provide. This means that your message gets across to everyone much faster since it doesn’t require a means such as a computer or an internet connection to be accessed. Comparatively, targeting new customers through digital advertising can be difficult. Especially if you’re aiming for tourists since they are less likely to check their social media accounts on the go as many of them don’t have data connections through a local network.
• The Psychological Benefit Print media has an ingrained advantage that allows it to compete with digital media: it’s the effect it has on our minds. Studies like the one conducted in 2009 by Bangor University and Millward Brown proved results using MRI scans. The results were in favor of print media, explaining that the physical nature of print media outlets occurs to the brain as more real than digital ones. A study in Germany researched on the number of people that trust online sources compared to printed sources. The results that were in favor of print media proved their influence on the minds of readers.

Importance Of Tracking And Testing In A Direct Marketing Campaign

Every business strives to organize an effective marketing campaign that will help with the influx of consumers. Today’s advertising market is highly saturated with solutions that are limited to the internet and the online world. These have the disadvantage of being volatile because once people look away from their screens, it’s gone.

This gives brands an upper hand when they use a direct marketing strategy which creates a realistic connection with potential consumers. These brands will spend a considerable amount of money but what comes next? The answer isn’t to cross your fingers each time you invest in a marketing strategy. Surely, you’ll want to know if the investment was worth it in the first place.

Learning about the usefulness of your direct marketing campaign is essential for developing better strategies in the future. This is done by recording or ‘tracking’ the results of direct marketing efforts. This is a highly important step that provides valuable information to a brand since they find out how much revenue and business the campaign brought in.

Tracking results can help a brand know what aspects of a campaign have the potential to increase revenue. This is done through surveying and asking clients how they heard about your brand. These facts prove to be highly advantageous since businesses can save more money by disposing of previously unprofitable strategies.

Using tracking systems that apply the use of URLs and QR codes is proved to be an effective method of tracking the number of responses to a direct marketing campaign. However, it is critical that businesses always track their direct marketing campaigns and refrain from observing any common trends. This is due to the difference in resources and investment that each business possesses.

Tracking has the benefit of letting businesses know what features of a campaign had led to its success so they can apply them again through means of ‘testing.’ Testing is a way to keep doing what works for you by enhancing and improving it: just because it worked once doesn’t mean it’ll work each time. Businesses often complain about how direct marketing is expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. Implementing changes into a campaign is what testing is all about, and it allows brands to predict an estimate of the return on investment.

Testing also helps a brand save money and resources by avoiding ineffective strategies in the future and helps avoid unnecessary risks and pitfalls. So, testing uses real responses to help you know what consumers want and how you can use creative ways to get on that boat. This is because the public’s opinion is an invaluable resource that can be used to your advantage.

There are no traditions when it comes to branding. Surely your product can be the same as it was a decade ago but it shouldn’t apply to your direct marketing campaign. By combining tracking and testing, you get an opportunity to revise the features of a campaign, so it bears better results.

How To Pick Your Business’s Color Scheme

With new businesses popping up every other day, the market is becoming increasingly saturated and competitive. This is why every brand needs a unique factor through which buyers and potential customers can remember them. Colors are the simplest way to do this since its psychological effect is what pivots their decision to buy. Long before any societies, humans used color as a means to know what nature is telling them. This trait is present in everyone, which is why it plays such a big role in influencing decisions. There are many dimensions that have to be explored to make a decision regarding the colors for your business.

Don’t Pick Too Many
Many brands make the mistake of using too many colors in the palette. This gives an impression of being messy and unorganized to the buyer. More colors will also be difficult to process in a small amount of time. Consumers might look at such layouts and be unable to remember them even a while later.

Pick Similar Tones
The first thing to remember is that it’s extremely risky to use mismatching tones when picking colors. This is because each color may mean a certain thing to a person and they’re more likely to get triggered by different tones. What’s worse is that consumers will get mixed messages

Use One ‘Stand-Out’ Color
Whether it be your brand’s website or magazine ad, you’ll need to highlight certain things like contact information or may even a discount. This can be done by using a color that sets itself apart from the other colors on your palette. Failing to do so and choosing a color that is similar to your palette will result in highlighted aspects blending into a similarly colored background.

Remember What You Do
What your business is and what products you sell is very important. The colors you use should be a reflection of what you do so that your brand looks more appealing. Colors such as blue promote trust, green is symbolic of nature and red represents a passion or even hunger. It also depends on the target population you are trying to approach. Assess if the colors will be perceived in a positive or negative manner by the consumers you are trying to convince while making sure that the colors actually send a message of what you are trying to sell.

Using Multiple Colors
Using more colors isn’t discouraged as long as it’s done right. It all depends on the image that a brand is trying to present and the target population it wants to cater to. Many brands effectively pull off a ‘multi-color’ strategy to send a message that they can offer services to a wide variety of people.

The colors that are used by a brand for its image will play a significant role in how people interpret and make assumptions about the brand itself. Colors also impact the logo or symbol, which will be used as a statement for consumers to remember the brand’s name by. These factors make it essential that businesses put in enough time to come up with an influencing color scheme that will leave an impression on buyers.

Advertising In The Travel/Tourism Industry

Many service and retail industries require a marketing strategy that will promote their business. This is why many industries pay large sums of money to find a perfect advertising solution that will help increase the influx of consumers, which will increase profits as a result.

Surely the idea of advertisements bringing in several customers can bring high hopes, but there are still many factors to consider before you can have an edge over competitors. In the travel and tourism industry, it is equally competitive even though there isn’t a product being sold. Each destination with its different aspects has to be advertised in a neatly packaged way to target tourists. While these aspects may be good or bad, many cities still become popular tourist hotspots. This leads to a change in the rate of business in local areas.

Many businesses are seeking to increase a customer base by implementing some digital and print solutions, but it can be extremely difficult to attract new customers while competing against more well-known brands make it seem impossible. This situation has sparked a unique method of marketing services and products to new customers. The strategy involves enhancing your business by attracting tourists and travelers. This unique method requires the medium of the tourism industry to do the marketing for you.

Tourists will be different customers compared to locals. They look for ways to spend their money on new and different things whenever they go to a new place. They’re curious to experience the wonders of the locality. This makes it essential that a business organizes different plans to advertise their products or services to travelers. This can be difficult since they’re in a new place with no knowledge of the local trends and environment. This is the reason to use a method such as hotels or resorts to help spread your message to potential customers.

Using combinations of both digital and print media to advertise is highly important. Many brands tend to leave out one or the other in attempts to either ‘go digital’ or stay retro. An online presence is extremely helpful for your customers to reach you. In the case of travelers, it is crucial that your online activity is constantly updated so they can share their experiences and link you to them. This makes for a good opportunity to get feedback. Social media platforms and even a website will put off a business to a good start. Use pictures of everyday business activity to make it recognizable and appealing.

However, a print media method can prove its effectiveness in what it means to newcomers and tourists. Posters, flyers, and brochures all have an effect on our brains that allow us to focus and concentrate on them more. These can also be put up anywhere and seen by everyone, regardless of the fact that they have an online presence or don’t. Hence, leaving it to professionals to come up with effective marketing solutions is smart and leads to a positive outcome.