• by Dave Spector , November 25, 2013

A recent study revealed that only 10% of all companies use their existing data sources in a systematic way to increase revenue.

Fortunately, the hospitality and tourism sectors have shown exciting improvement in this area of the last few years.

We suggest a few immediate steps you can take to leverage your data, increase visitation and drive more revenue:

1. Review past guest geography: create a simple chart showing where your visitors come from … this can help target your marketing investments.

2. Evaluate past guest demographics: your CRM, PMS or customer database can easily be queried to reveal the demographics of your customer base. Have low occupancy in certain periods? Who came right before, during and right after that period last year? 

3. Evaluate past guest frequency & spending: If you have periods of high demand, you can increase yield by to sending special invitations to loyal customers who spent an above average amount on past trips.

4. Measure sentiment: Affordable reputation management tools like Revinate make it easier than ever to measure guest satisfaction on sub-segments of your product experience. You may learn that service issues or cleanliness are causing past guests to post negative reviews … thereby deterring future travelers. Conversely, you may also discover subtle components of your product experience that customers love, enabling you to celebrate those assets with potential new customers.

5. Search engine data: chances are, your search engine reports include a treasure trove of info about how people find you. You can easily discern which other sites send traffic to you (i.e., nearby attractions, CVB sites, etc). Then, reach out to establish deeper partnerships with these relevant players.

6. Improve your product: the most important component of marketing is your product itself. How can you improve it to meet the desires of your customers? Amazingly, Facebook has given us a free way to do exactly that! Go to the search bar in Facebook and type: Favorite interests of people who like INSERT YOUR PAGE NAME. This will reveal the things your fans like to do … helping you evaluate your amenity mix!

7. Who's calling? Ask your phone provider to make sure the dedicated phone numbers on your website and advertising materials include a report showing the total number of calls … so you can evaluate the contribution of each source to overall inbound phone traffic. You may be surprised how important inbound calls still are to your sales!

8. Listen in: Companies like LogMyCalls and Marchex now enable you to record inbound calls to your res centers and listen in to monitor the performance of your res center staff. 

9. Monitoring your comp set: Wondering what your comp set is up to? Check out http://mixrank.com/  This cool site scrapes the web to show you (for free!) your competition's digital marketing placements. 

10. Pinpoint messaging to new guests: Ever wonder how to reach people who visit the attraction down the street or eat at that hot Italian restaurant nearby? Facebook has given us a free way to do exactly that! Go to the search bar in Facebook and type: "People who like INSERT PAGE NAME. This will reveal potential guests with a predisposition to your neighborhood. Then, its easy to target them via Facebook ads.

Try one of these and let us know how it goes!