Your hotel will achieve its green marketing goals more easily when your team uses public relations (PR) as an organizing principle. Our company does this through an easy approach prioritized around content, search, and social media. An added benefit of this method is that it will help members of your marketing team stay fresh and be effective. This simple focus will enable you to leverage the pressure of daily deliverables instead of being swamped by them.
I will explore these priorities one at a time and share a key hub-and-spoke organizing idea.
Content
By far, content is the most important part of your PR program. To create your high-value message, first ask the team questions like: What is our marketing objective? What are our business goals? What is our key value proposition? What big problem do we solve for guests—or for owners? What is our unique differentiator?
We like to summarize the answers in a one-paragraph Elevator Pitch that follows a formula like this one:
FOR (target customer)
WHO (need or opportunity)
(company name)
IS A (product category)
THAT (key benefit—compelling reason to buy)
UNLIKE (primary competitive alternative)
OUR PRODUCTS (statement of key differentiator).
We spend up to 70 percent of our marketing time creating high-value content. Once you have created a high-value messaging platform, house it solidly in the center of a hub-and-spoke strategy. When the message changes at the hub, it is quickly updated through the spokes. This creates a seamless look-and-feel at every guest touch point which fuels sales.
Your content hub could be your website or—like Southwest Airlines—a blog embedded in the website. Southwest travelers can easily click through the blog to book a plane reservation.
Question: What is the hub of your marketing strategy? House the bulk of your content there, and then peel off appropriate micro messages to each of the different spokes. Your program may have only three spokes, for example, and that is fine as long as you reach your prospects.
Search
Search engine optimization is the new homepage. Here are three steps to help you participate:
1. Research your keywords. What keyword phrases are most relevant to your hotel, most commonly searched, and used the least by other websites? Hint: we use algorithmic software programs and have a specialist on staff. It is worth investing dollars to get your keywords researched by an expert.
2. Sprinkle keywords into every piece of writing, even tweets. Write first for humans, then gently rewrite for search engines.
3. Commit to learning about search engine optimization; it is now a vital part of your PR and marketing career. To get started, click this link to learn from two of the best resources I know: http://delicious.com/Juliesquires/Search.
Social Media
There is a reason social media is third on our list of priorities behind Content and Search. Is your property resource constrained? By creating high-value content first, you write it once and export it many times with variations tailored to each of your social media outlets. By optimizing each writing with keywords, you unleash a sales force multiplier that is talking via the search engine all night long while you are asleep.
We like to distribute press releases on PRWeb, Pitch Engine, Hotel-Online, Hsyndicate.org, Hotel News Resource, and via e-mail to a customized list of people.
As with search, PR pros must commit to ongoing social media education. Here are some resources to get you started: http://delicious.com/Juliesquires/sm.
Good PR is like a well engineered garden; when you plant the seeds correctly, they spread on their own. Try the above ideas and watch your marketing programs—and team members—thrive.
Julie Keyser-Squires, APR, is CEO of Softscribe Inc., a PR and marketing firm that applies SEO and social media to help hospitality clients increase sales. Give her a shout on twitter @Juliesquires or comment on the company’s blog at http://www.softscribeinc.com.
