4 Vital Tasks for Hospitality Brands and Hotels to Do Before Hiring an Advertising Agency

Thinking of bringing on a digital marketing agency for your hotel? Ready to do more in-house digital marketing? Something not working, but not sure what it is? In any of those cases, you need to have your house in order first:

• Shore up your data collection process

• Own your social accounts

• SOP your website updates

• Document your first journey map.

You can do all of this in 4 hours if you're feeling committed, and it'll save you tens of thousands in agency fees.

Saving Money with Agencies

Why would I tell you how to save money with an agency? Because the hours and days spent working through the below are not hours we love to bill for. These aren't the gritty hours of digging into the data, doing research, creating iterations and joyfully playing with marketing ideas that will drive sales.

No, the below things are the must-dos before we can start a project. Yes, we get paid for them, but I'd much rather start work a month earlier on the fun stuff than make $10,000 spending time tracking down the college intern who used their school email address to create your Instagram account before she went off to work in investment banking with 3 assistants who all have no interest in helping me. It's a much better use of everyone's time and resources to get these in line first.

1. Data Collection

Everything is data, and data is everything. It's the difference between walking into a quarterly budget meeting and asking for "$10,000 for advertising" and walking in asking for "$35,000 in advertising so we can, at a minimum based on previous ad spend and ROI, generate $250,000 in direct sales." It's you feeling like you accomplished something at the end of the day instead of walking away thinking, "huh, maybe that worked." Data may be scary at first, but if you don't know what's there, you can't learn and improve.

Google Analytics - The minimum requirement

Google Analytics is the gold standard for website and digital property data collection. Yes, there are other more unique products. Yes, Google is the behemoth who owns everything above and below us. But do you know why Google Analytics is still the gold standard? Because it works. It's well-known. It's simple to setup. Almost everyone integrates with it.

New to Google Analytics?
Great.

If you're new to Google Analytics, this next step is easy: create an account. Use our handy guide here: The Right Way to Setup Google Analytics.

Already have Google Analytics?
Fantastic - do you own the account?

If you already have Google Analytics, this is perfect - it means you already have data being collected and likely have started to build a culture of being data-first at your hotel. Now, do you own the account your Google Analytics property is associated with? Because if you don't, you need to prioritize this: either gain ownership of the account or create a new account immediately.

To check if you have ownership of the account, do the following:

1. Visit https://analytics.google.com and sign in with your credentials

2. Click Admin

3. In the left-hand column, click Users

4. Find your email and check the permissions

5. Check the Account name - is it related to you specifically?

Sometimes agencies or marketers will setup a Google Analytics property under a Google Analytics account they already own. It was likely harmless, but the problem is that they now own your data. Unless they are willing to give you full ownership of the Google Analytics Account, your data will forever be tied to their account (unless you pay $150,000/year for GA360, which if that's what you're doing, you're not reading this article).

If you just discovered that you don't own the account, here is what we recommend you do:

1. Reach out to the account owner
   Maybe, just maybe, they aren't doing much business with that Google Analytics Account anymore and they are willing to hand over the keys to you. That's the best-case scenario. Just send an email, kind and to do the point, about how you are trying to bring the data in-house and need help getting full access to the Google Analytics Account. It probably won't work, but it's worth a shot.

2. Create a new Google Analytics Account
   This is something you should do right away, as you want to begin collecting data immediately. Create a new Google Analytics Account with a business-related email or give access to multiple people at your hotel so you can guarantee retained ownership over time. Use the new Google Analytics Property within the account and add it to your website, ideally leaving both properties on your website until you are ready to move away from the data you no longer own.
   See above for how to create a new Google Analytics account.

Google Tag Manager - The tool that will make your life easier

Google Tag Manager has been around for a while, but if you setup your data collection process more than 5 years ago, you probably don't use it. The benefit of using Google Tag Manager instead of a direct Google Analytics implementation is that you, as a marketer, can easily add new tracking pixels or protocols to your website without having to go through your development team. It can save hours of back-and-forth just to try out a new marketing tool. It's glorious.

Note: if you’re unable to use Google Tag Manager now, that’s okay. Your digital marketing agency will help you with this as part of onboarding, most likely. But if you can take care of it yourself, all the better.

Already have Google Tag Manager?
Perfect. Do you own it?

This is another situation, similar to Google Analytics, where you need to confirm that you own Google Tag Manager. From a privacy standpoint, it's actually more important than Google Analytics ownership because a rogue actor can basically do whatever they want with your website via Google Tag Manager (e.g. your competitor paid off Joe the Developer to add javascript to your Google Tag Manager container to capture all of your guest names and email addresses to build they marketing list).

Check if you own your GTM account:

1. Visit https://tagmanager.google.com and sign in with your credentials

2. Identify the account associated with your digital properties

3. Click the settings widget icon to open up the admin panel

4. Click User Management under Account (not Container)

5. Confirm your account is listed as Administrator

6. If not, find someone who is and reach out to get Administrator access

New to Google Tag Manager?
Easy-ish.

Create a new GTM account:

1. Visit https://tagmanager.google.com and sign in with your credentials

2. Click Create Account

3. Provide the account information related to your brand

4. Choose Web as the Target platform

5. Click Create

6. Add the Google Tag Manager snippets to your website

7. Ask your developer or do it yourself

8. At the same time, remove built-in pixels and move them to Google Tag Manager

Once you have Google Tag Manager active, you can add any tracking pixels into your Google Tag Manager container and publish them that way. If you're concerned about doing that yourself, as long as the container snippets are on your website, the digital studio of your choice will be able to quickly add all of your needed tracking pixels.

2. Own Your Social Media Accounts Before You Lose Them

A story as old as, well, social media: someone made the accounts on their own, never shared admin access, and now you can't get into social (which is where you make all your dollars). You've tried tracking them down, but they've since broken their phone while trying to TikTok their way to stardom atop the Burj Khalifa and only wrote down the passwords in their college psych notebook. And honestly, that's about it for your accounts. You can try a few ways to reclaim them, but success varies wildly and cannot be guaranteed. That's why, before you need to, make sure you have the proper ownership access setup on all of your social media accounts.

Facebook & Instagram

Ah, the big one and the bigger one. It's starting to change, but it's these 2 social media behemoths that make up the majority of influence and revenue potential for hotels. Don't lose access to these.

1. Create a Facebook Business

2. Visit https://business.facebook.com/ and sign in with your credentials

3. Do you see your brand there? If so, great. Otherwise, continue.

4. In the upper-right, click the dropdown and then click Create new

5. Create a new Facebook Business Account

6. Associate your Facebook Page with your Facebook Business Account

7. Associate your Instagram account with your Facebook Business Account

8. Confirm who has access to the recovery email for your Instagram and Facebook accounts

9. Confirm who has access to the recovery phone number for your Instagram and Facebook accounts

3. Standard Operating Procedure for Website Updates

You have a script for guest check-in, right? And a specific way that rooms are cleaned, correct? Then you should also have a standard operating procedure (SOP) for website updates. This is a tribal knowledge issue that most people don't think about until it's too late. Plus, the benefit of having an SOP for website updates is that you can begin to have some quality control checkpoints built into the process.

An SOP for updating your hotel's website should have the following information:

• List of people who have access to make updates

• List of people who have ability to manage the other people who have access to make updates

• Types of content on the website and how to update each of them

• Any standard procedures for updating content, such as

  • Sign-off on content prior to launch

  • Search engine optimization (SEO) process for page updates

Once you have the SOP for content updates on your hotel’s website outlined, you can quickly onboard new team members, and identify the problem when something goes awry on your hotel's website (and let's be honest, something will always go awry).

4. Simplified User Journey

This has the potential to get complicated and overwhelming really quickly, so you need to remember: keep this simple. The digital marketing studio you bring in will certainly pretty it up a bit once they get their hands on it, but what you are doing here is giving yourself a baseline of understanding and talking points for when you are interviewing prospective agencies.

To create a user journey, do the following:

1. Get a pencil and paper (there will be mistakes, so a pencil actually makes sense here). You will be drawing everything in a flow from left to right. If you hit the end of your page, go down a little bit on the page and go right to left. You will eventually connect it all with arrows.

2. Visit www.google.com and search for something which should bring up your hotel's website

3. Draw a dotted circle on the page and write SERP (Search Engine Results Page) or Google Ad in the middle of the circle

4. Click the listing for your hotel's website

5. Draw a vertical rectangle and write the name of the page that loads

6. Click where you think a visitor should click next in their process of learning about your hotel with an eventual intent to book

7. Draw a vertical rectangle and write the name of the next page that loads

8. Continue this process until you reach the point where you cannot continue without paying money. If you know the rest of the steps, please add them. Otherwise, draw a vertical rectangle with a dotted line and write Booking Process.

9. Draw a circle for Booked, meaning that they successfully booked.

10. Begin adding your post-booking flows as best as you can identify/remember them. Be as specific as possible, but don't worry about getting it all correct. Some things you may include

    • Confirmation Email

    • Upsell email

    • Upsell phone call

    • Snail mail

11. Draw a dotted line circle for Arrive at your hotel

12. Draw a dotted line circle for Check-In

13. Draw a doted line circle for Stay

14. Draw a dotted line circle for Check-Out

15. Draw a dotted line circle for Follow-up

In the end, you will have something like this:

Again, the goal is to keep this pretty simple. There are hundreds of variations that may take place depending on how ahead the booking was made, but that is something you can more specifically work through with your hotel's digital marketing studio. For now, you want to be able to identify the journey and be ready to talk about the different steps.

Bend is Here, Ready to Help

We're ready to help, even if you don't get these 4 digital marketing must-do's complete (most people don't have the time to do these, and they would rather get them completed quickly).