Answering the Ever Allusive Social Media Tracking Question – “I Know it’s Working, but How Do I Track It?”

 One of the best things that you can do for your hotel is to ask new guests how they found out about you. But when you do this, don’t expect to get accurate information, unless you ask specific questions.

I know this sounds strange, but it makes sense, I promise.

If you make decisions about how to promote your hotel, then you will want to know how your guests find out about your business. The information you get when you ask these questions, is not always accurate. In fact it’s mostly inaccurate. Statistics show that it is about 25% accurate at best.

There are two reasons for this.

One reason is that people simply do not remember.  So something we can do, is make sure we ask questions that trigger their memory.

The problem is, a lot of people want to be helpful, so they say something that makes sense. “I saw your property on Facebook” they might say. Or “I think I found you on Trip Advisor”. If you think about it, haven’t each one of us done the same thing? It’s not that we’re dishonest; we just want to be helpful.

I recently read about a Hotel that did a survey for an event they helped promote. They asked people how they found out about the event and over half of them said they heard about it on the radio. On the surface this sounded like great marketing feedback.

But there was one problem.

They never promoted this event on the radio.

People said, “I heard about it on the radio”, because they wanted to be helpful and because they listened to the radio a lot. So, it made sense (to them) that they probably heard about the event on the radio.

The second reason this sort of feedback is usually not accurate is because people hear about your hotel in many different ways.

Remember, if you’re doing your social media marketing well, you are probably using more than one medium to deliver your message to your targeted market. Depending on your budget you might be using five or more different ways to let people know who you are, what you’re about, and what you do.

It’s not hard to find five or more ways to promote your hotel:

*Email Marketing
*Facebook
*Twitter

*Travel Review Sites

*Contests
*Newspaper
*Specials
*Networking
*OTA’s
*Radio
*Local sponsorships

*Hotel Directories

These build both awareness and credibility for your hotel. (Remember, the more ways a person hears about your hotel, the more credible and memorable your message becomes to them, and the more likely they are to stay at your hotel.)

The trouble is, people are not always going to remember (or tell you) that they saw it in all of these different places. They’ll give you the name of one place they that they saw your AD, (Usually being the most recent place they saw it.)

So, we have a marketing paradox.

To get the best results, you want your message to be seen by people in multiple ways, which makes it impossible to determine (with any accuracy) which social media networks are working best. You need to know which marketing strategies are working best and that are having the greatest effect reaching potential guests, so that you can make the best use of your marketing dollars.

What do we do about this?

It depends on a lot of factors like your hotel, your budget, your social media marketing goals, etc.

It also depends on how important tracking your Marketing ROI is to your hotel.

One of the biggest obstacles for tracking results is scale. As a small hotel, if you went through the expense of trying to survey and track every type of marketing available for your hotel, you’d spend much more on tracking and surveying than you would on the social media marketing itself.

If you have a multi-million dollar marketing budget, then you can afford to do some serious testing. Once your testing shows you reasonable results, then you roll out the big campaigns on a larger scale, but that only works because your testing costs are a tiny fraction of your whole marketing plan.

For those of us with small hotel establishments, this method simply does not work. The testing would eat up most (or all) of our marketing budgets.

Here are some tips to make your Marketing, and Social Media Marketing, work better and to help you monitor it.

1. Establish a budget and commit to it. Consider this as important as your rent or payroll. Don’t make it a low priority unless your revenue and profitability are low priorities.

2. Decide what you want to say and who you want to say it to. Keep the message simple, clear and concise.

3. Decide if you want to increase awareness for your hotel, or if you want a direct response. These are two DIFFERENT goals and they require different tools and strategies.

4. Stick to it for a reasonable amount of time. Don’t quit after a couple months. Give it time to work.

5. Get feedback from guests, friends, hotel associates, employees. Try to find out WHO is seeing your message and HOW they are seeing it. Always be willing to tweak and tune it as you go, based on feedback.

6. Watch your revenue and your new guest activity. Does it go up or down as you implement this marketing strategy?

Remember, that the key to bringing in more guests is to let more people know who you are, what you can do for them and why they should consider staying with you. Focus your resources on making sure your potential guests know you and remember you. Then they will consider staying with you.

If you focus too much on tracking, you can end up wasting time and money on efforts that do not build your hotel guest numbers or build your revenue.  It is however important to cover as many bases as you can within your allotted budget.  This enables you to spend your Marketing Dollars in the right places!

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