The organic balance

In the latest webinar from HOSPA, Steve Collins, VP of Digital Marketing at SHR, discusses the evolution of digital marketing, assessing the impact of AI and the importance of taking a measured approach to organic and paid traffic.

Collins told HOSPA CEO Jane Pendlebury that he had taken the chance to look back as far as 2000 when considering changes to the sector, commenting on the “huge amount of change across the industry, around types of markets … around the pandemic. We’ve had global upheaval” and since then, the arrival of AI.

Collins has embraced AI at SHR Group, across all of its different technologies, but also within marketing campaigns. He detailed SHR Group's Digital Adoption Framework, commenting: “Every single property is different. Every single property is on a different stage of their digital maturity.  You could be on your first website, or switching on your first booking engine, right through to high-level digital marketing maturity, running campaigns that are working to very niche and targeted audiences that suit your property.

“The discovery phase should be that your Google Search Console is connected to your website and you're tracking and you're tracking the queries that are happening and related to your domain. Your Google Analytics is switched on, so you're tracking traffic. Your Google Tag Manager is switched on and it's connected to your booking engine and your website.

“You should be getting really good, consistent data that’s helping you make informed decisions. It's, very basic, but being able to capture session, traffic and revenue data in your Google Analytics, that's the very start. Then having a technically healthy website, that's extremely important as well.”

With these pieces in place, Collins then emphasised the need to “stay just one point ahead of your competition” and then start to work on aspects such as brand capture and demand capture; ensuring that hotels were running Google Ads campaigns to compete with the OTAs, then running meta search campaigns to compete with the OTAs and Tripadvisor.

He then turned to AI, for example Performance Max for Travel, which utilises Google AI to automatically optimise ad placements across various Google platforms such as Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail, aiming to maximise direct bookings.

The advantage of AI, Collins said, was that prior to the advent of AI hotels were relying heavily on PPC specialists, putting hotels are the mercy of their bias. “With the AI,” he said: “you take bias out of it, it’s very much data driven”

And with this, he added, an independent hotel could develop the level of strategy that would have been “historically reserved for the bigger brands, or the even the OTAs”.

And who wouldn’t want to level the playing field?