I've Been Around
Marketing Support
For those that have been around a bit, have some experience and a general idea of where they would most likely need our help and support. This page flows progressively from some tactical areas to progressive strategic plans to remediation and proactive countermeasures to help your hospitality business.
To help get us started on our journey together it is important to know where we are meeting.
If you find that you can relate to these situations then you are in the right place, if this doesn’t sound like it could describe you or your business you may want to check the other two areas. I’m Just Getting Started, or I’m Next Level.
The whole point of knowing where you are is to know where we will be starting from on your journey. A map is great but only if you know where you are starting from. If you were trying to get to the CN Tower in Toronto and you are at the Hazelton Hotel the directions and resources needed to get you there would be vastly different than if you were trying to get to the CN Town and were at the Hotel Villa Ducale.
Social Media
You have put together your own social media pages and post content, but don’t know how to create ad campaigns where you are confident enough to scale. Scaling can increase your ROAS or just empty your account faster. You may also be looking for support in managing user-generated content when it comes to service failure situations so that your brand can take a bad social post and turn it into one that increases loyalty.
Website Design and SEO
You or your company may have put together a website on a platform with drag and drop technology but don’t know why having your site on a WordPress platform is better than a drag and drop and site and how your site is captive to the host company. You may have heard of SEO but aren’t familiar with the 200 factors that Google uses to evaluate a site.
You may not know about how the navigation bar on your site can be a winning and losing piece of digital real estate that most overlook, a UX design component more than a technical SEO requirement. If you were to search the 200 factors Google uses you will find somewhere on the list that navigation is important. The list doesn’t tell you what good navigation is yet alone what is best for a hotel, restaurant or tour company.
One of the challenges that a generalist in SEO has is how to help you and guide you to higher quality content. A generalist does not have the depth of knowledge that Nicholls Hospitality Marketing has in hospitality. The generalist guides content for all industries, a mile wide and an inch deep. When it comes to helping with search rankings there is a metric about page and domain authority and depth of content is a key component in helping increase your ranking. This will lead to lower site traffic, lower-quality content and at a higher cost because of the time, a generalist will require to gain an understanding of firstly your industry and secondly your competition. We are here to serve you, to help you on your marketing journey to get you where you want to go and help get prospective gets to your website.
Branding
You or your company may have a general idea about branding but perhaps not much more than just that a brand consists of a logo a slogan and a choice of some colors. There are over 15 different benefits of creating a brand and a brand management strategy, including the possibility of increasing your rates and productivity. It may have also been a while since you worked on developing your brand and you are not sure how relevant your message is now. Coca Cola changes its branding approximately every 2.5 years and has changed its branding slogan 46 times in 123 years. If it has been a while since you have worked on your branding it may be time to re-evaluate its effectiveness. Branding is all about you every bit of you from the way you look, your voice, the place you stand, where you hang out and how you position yourself in that space. Everything you touch everywhere you leave your fingerprint.
Marketing Plans
You may have read some blogs or possibly a book on marketing plans. You have watched at least a couple of YouTube videos about what a marketing plan is, but because there are so many components you aren’t sure what should be in yours. Marketing is a very broad scope of work and this can naturally cause confusion when trying to create a plan and often get mixed up with business plans. While marketing is a component in a business plan a marketing plan goes much deeper. Marketing plans need to be tailored to your business and your resources. You may just need some help in getting the right information specifically for your business and in organizing it into an actionable plan that produces profitable results.
When we help you create a marketing plan Nicholls Hospitality Marketing considers economic factors such as Allocative Efficiency and Productive Efficacy to develop a plan based on your business-specific resources. To help clarify this if you don’t have an economics background, we look at where you will get the biggest bang for your buck with paying more than you need to while still making sure that you spend enough in the right places to make enough noise to be worthwhile. When we help you develop a marketing plan we also try to identify if there is a Blue Ocean Strategy, a way to position your business where competition has a much lower impact on your operations and still using the tried and true Porters Five Forces when evaluating your competition and developing your strategy.
We will make sure that we can develop a plan for your budget. There is no point in spending so much money on a plan that there is nothing left to implement it. We are here to serve you and can help take your hotel, restaurant or tour company where you want it to go.
Marketing Audit
You have created a marketing plan and have a foundational knowledge of digital marketing and are capable of implementing most recommendations without support. You have all the components put together but things are not producing the results that you intended and after troubleshooting and making adjustments you still can’t identify the root cause of the challenge.
If you find yourself here a marketing audit would beneficial because you get a fresh set of eyes with a broader scope of exposure to industry-specific practices. For example, you may have put your website together and it is technically functional the pages load, and the links work but the site is not standing out. When was the last time you reviewed over 200 websites for small privately-owned accommodation business? You may also have put all the parts together but are missing opportunities for integrated communication strategies. As a private hospitality business owner or manager you are most likely masterful when it comes to guest service and can see how to handle each interaction and how what happened in the back of house impacts front of house but you may need a little help in seeing how to get all of the marketing pieces working together, our service audit helps you here.
Competitive Intelligence and Market Analysis
If you have created a marketing plan, that was working but now external market forces are negatively impacting your business and would like some help this service is for you.
You realize that you are facing business growth challenges as a result of specific competitors in your current geographic area or competitive set and need assistance in creating specific strategies to be more competitive. You desire to make proactive decisions rather than reactive ones. You may require information that you are unable to gain either because of technology limitations within your own business, a limitation of staff resources, or a lack of expertise in doing a market analysis to help in developing a strategy or in evaluating another location where competition is not as tough.
Service Gap Analysis On Site
If you are not sure why your reviews aren’t improving but know something needs to happen. Reviews have an impact on the volume of business that you produce, see a study done by TripAdvisor about how much of an impact this is having. If you haven’t figured out how to improve your reviews it may be due to selective attention. We can help you see what you’ve been missing.
Our on-site Service Gap Analysis is excellent if you are an independent operator that does not have a corporate structure who provides services quality assessments. This service is for businesses that would like to have regular checkups on the service standards of their business to remain competitive and solve service delivery challenges before they create large negative financial impacts.
We realize that you have a lot on your plate. That the demands of your business can get you running on the hamster wheel of work and you are impacted more by the urgent than the important. This can be a reason for selective attention. If you have a moment search “Selective Attention” on YouTube for a number of videos that helps demonstrate this principle.
We provide a service that looks for service gaps in general and specifically concerning your brand and marketing components. Many marketing companies only consider 4 components of the Marketing Mix. Nicholls Hospitality Marketing evaluates all 8 so you can get a full picture. Not working with a marketing company who considers all 8 would be like wondering why your car isn’t driving very well and only looking at the four tires, we get under the hood to help you get where you want to go on your marketing journey. This is a great proactive tool for your business or to remediate underperformance.
