Dynamic Content Personalization: Hoteliers’ Powerful New Tool to Maximizing Website Revenue and Conversions

Traditionally, hotel and resort websites have served the same content to all site visitors regardless of their preferences, demographics, past booking behavior, or even geographic location. Today, technology allows us to personalize content for property website visitors, making for a more intimate brand experience, and a profitable one at that.

HeBS Digital’s Mariana Mechoso Safer and Sara O’Brien discuss how you can use dynamic content personalization to deliver unique and relevant website content to specific customer segments. When dynamic content is delivered effectively, travelers enjoy service that is tailored specifically for them, while hospitality organizations enjoy more website engagement, greater conversion rates and increased revenues. You’ll learn to:

  • Recognize and reward specific customer segments by displaying personalized and relevant content that speaks to their preferences and expectations.
  • Differentiate your resort or hotel from the competition and the OTA channel.
  • Deliver higher levels of consumer satisfaction from the direct hotel website experience.
  • Significantly increase website conversions and revenues

Mariana Mechoso Safer is Senior Vice President, Marketing at HeBS Digital, overseeing advertising, marketing and public relations. Mariana heads the Las Vegas office, developing and implementing digital marketing strategies for HeBS Digital’s West Coast partners. She frequently conducts industry research and publishes in major travel and hospitality publications, and is also a guest speaker and presenter at hospitality events and conferences.

Mariana can be reached by phone at +1 702 463-1857, email at mariana@hebsdigital.com, on Twitter @mmechoso or LinkedIn.

Sara O’Brien is Senior Marketing Manager at HeBS Digital. She manages the development and execution of all HeBS Digital advertising, marketing and public relations. Starting with a position in consulting and client services, Sara has a solid understanding of hotelier’s business needs and objectives, including how to help them generate the highest ROIs from their most cost effective channel – their own website. Sara’s professional experience includes over nine years of advertising and marketing experience. Sara has a Master’s Degree in Global Marketing from Emerson College in Boston and a Bachelor’s Degree from University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire.

Hotel Marketing Summit 2015

Three of the hotel industry’s most creative and forward-thinking marketers joined eCornell for a live YouTube summit on hotel marketing in February, 2015. Access the video below.

ReviewPro’s Josiah Mackenzie, HeBS Digital’s Mariana Mechoso Safer, and hospitality marketing consultant and HSMAI Boston Chapter leader Greg Bodenlos discussed, debated and dove into emergent technologies and practices to predict what’s most likely to influence hotel marketing strategies for the year ahead. They also covered:

  • The hotel marketing ‘ecosystem’, from guest experience design to multi-platform marketing and operational feedback analysis.
  • Personalizing the customer journey, from the inspiration stage to booking and beyond.
  • How to leverage user-generated content to increase customer engagement.
  • What you should focus on when analyzing your ‘reputation’ online, and how to use that data to improve your business.

Josiah Mackenzie leads business development at ReviewPro – helping partners across the hospitality industry use 360-degree guest intelligence to create better travel experiences for their guests and unlock new areas of revenue growth for their businesses. The rise of data from the social web – where people are leaving digital data trails wherever they go, 24/7/365 – has given the hospitality industry a dramatically expanded ability to understand consumer sentiment and trending new demand areas.

Featured as a hotel technology trends expert by media outlets such as CNN, PBS, MSNBC, The Washington Post and Entrepreneur Magazine, Josiah is also a frequent keynote speaker at conferences throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Josiah can be reached by telephone at +1 415 671 9629, via email josiah@josiahmackenzie.com – or on Twitter @Hotel_Intel.

Mariana Mechoso Safer is Senior Vice President, Marketing at HeBS Digital, overseeing advertising, marketing and public relations. Mariana heads the Las Vegas office, developing and implementing digital marketing strategies for HeBS Digital’s West Coast partners. She frequently conducts industry research and publishes her major travel and hospitality publications, and is also a guest speaker and presenter at hospitality events and conferences.

Mariana can be reached by phone at +1 702 463-1857, email at mariana@hebsdigital.com, on Twitter @mmechoso or LinkedIn.

Greg Bodenlos is a passionate hospitality marketer and Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International (HSMAI) Chapter leader based in Boston, Massachusetts. With a passion for digital trends, social media and innovation – and over five years of hotel and technology work experience – Greg possesses a unique perspective on the hospitality digital marketing landscape. Playing digitally-focused marketing roles at the destination resort, luxury independent property, and now city center hotel has allowed Greg to play an active role in shaping hotel marketing best practices at the property-level as well as help bring hoteliers closer to creating more meaningful, personalized travel experiences for their guests. It was in his marketing role at Revinate – a SaaS start-up in Silicon Valley that designs and develops technology to improve the guest experience – where Greg was able to help hoteliers and academics better understand the power of leveraging consumer intelligence to drive better service and maximize revenue streams across the entire guest lifecycle.

Greg is a proud graduate of Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration and has been featured as a hotel marketing expert on National Public Radio. Greg has been featured as a contributor in Crowdcentric Media’s Social Media Week New York blog, eCornell’s Blog and HotelMarketing.com, as well as played a co-authored role in an award-winning piece for Cornell University’s Center for Hospitality Research with Chris Anderson entitled Best Practices in Search Engine Marketing and Optimization.

Greg can be reached by phone at +1 781 686 2177, email at gregbodenlos@gmail.com, on Twitter @gregbodenlos or LinkedIn.

 

Applying the Dual-System Approach to Executive Education

For decades, European and Asian countries have embraced the dual-education system for professional development. The concept is built upon a “learn-on-the-job” model, where training is highly targeted, timely, and designed to align individual competencies with broader company goals.

While education costs continue to soar, the dual-education system delivers specific educational tools at a very specific point in time, while keeping the “cost-value proposition” in perfect balance.

This approach can also be applied to executive education because it is an adaptive, agile and proven model for delivering high-quality education. In the dual-education model, executives receive ongoing, timely and targeted training that helps them make the greatest contribution to the organization, while fostering engagement, inspiring a motivational culture and helping to retain the highest-performing executives.

Join Uwe Wagner, a senior eCornell faculty instructor and CEO of Innovative Think Tank International, for a look at how the dual-system approach should be applied to executive education.

 

Applying Business Intelligence in Demand Generation

More than 50% of B2B marketers cannot accurately measure the ROI of their marketing efforts. In order to accurately measure the impact of their demand-generation programs, marketers must take a more holistic and strategic approach to demand generation.

Data is often not the problem as the B2B enterprise has expansive amounts of data. The challenge lies in determining the context of the data and knowing what actions should be taken based on the data analysis. Without this insight and analysis, B2B marketers will only rely on guesswork as they seek to optimize their performance and drive more revenue from their demand-generation investments.

In this webinar, Adam Needles, Chief Strategy Officer and Principal at ANNUITAS shows you:

  • What KPIs marketers should be measuring to get better visions into their demand-generation performance
  • How to use the intelligence of your data to better optimize performance
  • An example of a client and their success with business intelligence and analysis

Adam is a passionate B2B marketing change agent—helping companies build successful, modern, buyer-centric demand generation programs and transform their lead-to-revenue demand processes to drive profitable revenue growth and build sustainable brands. He is the author of Balancing the Demand Equation: The Elements of a Successful, Modern B2B Demand Generation Model, a book written for B2B marketing leaders.

How To Build an HR Strategy That Is Ethical, Mission-Driven and Gets Results

Ethics and workplace culture are at the heart of any successful business strategy. An organization’s ability to execute its mission and vision is directly proportional to the health of its culture and strength of its ethical values in action.

Today, more and more companies are looking to HR to bridge what may seem like an impossible divide: to align the high-level ideals behind mission and vision with tangible business results.

Susan Alevas, President, Alevas Consulting Group and eCornell Faculty Instructor, discusses how HR can bridge the divide and provide a winning strategy for senior leaders, HR professionals and managers at all levels. You’ll also learn:

  • How to develop and preserve a culture that supports the business strategy through ethics in action.
  • Several key steps your organization can take to strengthen its culture and boost its ability to execute its business objectives.
  • How to avoid common mistakes HR professionals make in this arena.

Susan F. Alevas, Esq. is president of the Alevas Consulting Group, an engaging management/training consultant and a principled private attorney licensed to practice law in the states of New York and Florida. Her previous management career included leadership in human resources and labor relations in both the private and public sectors.

Ms. Alevas is also an adjunct instructor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and teaches a variety of in-person and online courses in human resources, law and management-development topics and programs.

7 Strategies for Learning Leaders: Driving Agility, Accountability, and Results

Much is expected of today’s learning leaders. They must ensure that their organization has the learning opportunities and resources it needs, measure the business value the department provides, and stay on top of their evolving roles. This session is designed to help learning leaders build personal and organizational agility and success through learning. The seven strategies introduced in this webcast will help you stay at the top of your game.

Presenter: Mollie Lombardi, President and Principal Analyst, Workforce Management, Brandon Hall Group

Mollie Lombardi has spent the last 15 years working with HR leaders across the globe, surveying and interviewing tens of thousands of end-users to understand the key workforce challenges facing today’s organizations. Her research focuses on understanding the combination of strategies, processes, tools, and technologies that enable organizations to achieve measurable business success. Mollie’s research and consulting work has helped organizations in a wide variety of industries unleash the potential of their talent, unlock the insights from their workforce data, and think through the change management challenges required by shifting demographics, changing marketplace needs, and technological innovation in the human capital space. She has written and spoken about a wide variety of human capital management topics, including strategic workforce management, workforce planning, employee assessments, and the use of emerging technologies.

The Association for Talent Development and eCornell present a free webinar on Thursday, November 20, 2014 2:00pm – 3:00pm EST: 7 Strategies for Learning Leaders: Driving Agility, Accountability, and Results

It’s Not About You: Why Hotel Marketing Needs to Change

Is your marketing all about you? About how beautiful your rooms are, how delicious is the restaurant’s menu, how soothing are the spa services? All this may be true, but let’s be realistic: Your potential guests are hearing the same thing from every hotel.

In addition, a 2012 comScore study found that average ad effectiveness increases with age, meaning, traditional marketing is less effective with each new generation that comes along. Millennials (the youngest generation in the study) are more difficult to persuade via advertising when compared to older viewers. In just a few years, the majority of hotel guests will be Millennials, and traditional marketing will be useless.

So what should hoteliers do? Hotels need to switch from all-about-me marketing to targeted, guest-centric marketing.

Revinate marketing experts Daniel Mason and Betty Mok show you:

  • why marketing needs to change.
  • what hypertargeting is and how to do it.
  • how hoteliers can leverage customer data to deliver effective marketing, enhance the guest experience, and drive greater revenue.
Betty Mok, Director of Product Marketing

As the Director of Product Marketing at Revinate, Betty is responsible for new product and feature launches including pricing, packaging and messaging. Prior to Revinate, Betty has over 10 years of marketing experience at a range of businesses from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies including Intuit and American Express, with a focus on online marketing and launching new technology products. Betty has a BA from NYU, Stern School of Business and an MBA from Columbia Business School.

Danny Mason, Head of Demand Generation
As the Head of Demand Generation at Revinate, Danny is responsible for creating and managing programs that drive interest in Revinate, quantifying the success of those programs, and refining/optimizing performance. Prior to joining the Revinate team, Danny earned his BS in Hospitality Management from UNLV (sorry Cornell team!).

Reputation and Revenue Roundtable

An Ivy League professor, a leading hotelier and a reputation management executive walk into a bar…

Cornell’s Bill Carroll, citizenM’s Michael Levie and ReviewPro’s RJ Friedlander joined forces on for a live, in-depth discussion on hotel guest experience, online reputation and how the social web can be leveraged to drive revenue growth.

In this fast-paced session, Bill, Michael and RJ:
•    Show how to interpret guest intelligence analytics and turn insight into action across the hotel enterprise.
•    Provide tips on developing customer-focused operations and service strategies to exceed expectations and deliver unforgettable experiences for your guests.
•    Explain the importance of driving review volume across multiple channels and how to increase your rankings on OTAs and TripAdvisor.
•    Discuss how hotels can use guest intelligence data to improve operations and optimize their revenue generation strategies based on the latest research from Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration.

Monetization Strategies For The Internet of Things

Learn how “The Internet of Things” and the tidal wave of customer data can positively impact your service, grow revenue and increase profit potential.

Tom Dibble, President and CEO of Aria:

  • Highlights shifts in monetization models and recurring revenue
  • Discusses “The Internet of Things” and emerging opportunities in customer data
  • Shows you how a finance department with an agile billing system can maximize service, revenue and profit potential by leveraging their back-end monetization systems.

Will you be ready to exploit the revenue opportunities that come from 26 billion interconnected devices and the tidal wave of ensuing data?

Marketing Strategies: Driving Demand and Connecting With Today’s Buyer

Are you failing to make a real connection with customers? Are you dragging down your sales team by delivering low-quality leads?

In a recent B2B study, ANNUITAS found that only 2.8% of organizations rate themselves as effective in demand generation. That’s abysmal, but insightful at the same time. The study revealed that too many marketers are overly focused on tactics in lieu of a cohesive strategy.

Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of ANNUITAS, discusses:

  • The fundamentals of strategic demand generation.
  • How to build a demand-generation strategy that will guide your tactical game plan.
  • How to align your inbound and content marketing efforts around buyers’ needs.
  • How to measure ROI and optimize your marketing efforts for the greatest success.
  • The skills required to become a successful marketing strategist.