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Smartstay is a revolutionary iPhone app customized to your own hotel brand. The Smartstay hotel app serves as a 24/7 concierge and provides users with a micro mobile website, real-time news about events, and an interactive city guide.
Hotels have unlimited opportunities to communicate with their guests and can send them exclusive offers. Smartstay is a mobile solution for hotels looking to capture a wider market share, tap into a new source of revenue, and enhance the guest experience at their hotel and in their city.
O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing, a full-service marketer specializing in the hospitality industry, has just launched Smartstaya one-of-a-kind iPhone app that hotels can customize to reflect their own hotel brand.
Smartstayis a mobile solution for hotels who have been looking for a way to enter the mobile market and who recognize the many benefits the mobile platform can provide their hotel and their guests. Tom O’Rourke, Founder/CEO of O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing explains, “We’re opening up a channel that has never been used before in the hotel industry. This is not just another app – it’s an opportunity through a mobile channel to connect with a guest before, during, and after their stay.” Read the rest of this entry »
Our clients often ask us if they should use Facebook ads. Many hotels are skeptical about using the ads and question if they will be effective or not. We recommend that hotels do use Facebook ads, but that they do so with clear goals in mind, and that they follow best practices when it comes to designing, targeting, testing, and tracking their ads.
Before using Facebook ads, hotels should understand the advertising platform. As with any advertising medium, the objective of using Facebooks ads is to increase your business. Facebook ads have the power to do this, but as their representatives often state, their platform is primarily in demand generation rather than demand fulfillment.1
Brian Boland, Facebook Performance Solutions Manager, spoke with Tom O’Rourke, Founder/CEO of O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing, about how hotels can benefit from using Facebook Ads. Brian explained that if your target audience has seen your hotel ads on Facebook they are more likely to conduct searches on your hotel or click on your hotel listing when it appears in the search engine results pages. He also explained that your hotel can create ads that are highly targeted to very specific audiences and you can specify different age groups, genders, interests, and more. Facebook ads are also effective because of the social component. For example if a guest is a fan of your Facebook page you can also send very targeted ads to their friends.
Re-cap of presentation ‘Critical Email Prospecting Strategies for 2010’
Jay Schwedelson, Corporate Vice President of Worldata, focused on the newest trends and lastest developments in prospecting, in his presentation ‘Critical Email Prospecting Strategies for 2010,’ at the Email Evolution Conference 2010 in Miami Beach, Florida. Below are some quick tips your hotel can use to improve your email marketing campaigns:
• Test your e-mail creative on a mobile device to make sure it displays correctly.
• Keep your e-mail campaign on a server so that people can access the message at a later date.
• Don’t use recipients’ names in the subject lines because they can be picked up by spammers.
• Include the offer deadline date in the subject line. This can increase open rates by 39% (i.e. offer ends Jan 31st). Read the rest of this entry »