People don't stop thinking about sex when they go to work

People don't stop thinking about sex when they go to work.

They don't stop thinking about potato chips, either.

People are, after all, people.

And the same people who book hotel rooms and arrange for offsite meetings or contract for professional services, also buy cars, beer, auto insurance and movie tickets.

Which means you’re competing for your target’s attention with everybody who sells those things. So, doesn’t it make sense to use the same tools – especially creativity – those guys use? Of course it does.

There are two components to any decision, the intellectual part and the emotional part. In the hotel business, the intellectual part is what you have to offer – location, how many restaurants, whether or not you have a spa and so on.

The emotional part is how excited anybody gets about it.

That’s where creativity comes in.

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Simplicity

This is a simple headline. 

Thoreau implored us all to “simplify.” Occam’s Razor says that “entities should not be multiplied without necessity.”

At Nasuti & Hinkle, we go for the “do a few things and do them well” approach.

There are so many marketing toys and gadgets independent hotels can play with these days, it can give you a headache. Chat boxes, price checkers and pop-ups on your website, retargeting schemes, Facebook lookalike marketing, metasearch, geo-fencing, commission-only advertising, sponsorships, whirligigs and whimsies – more than anybody needs.

And there’s an army out there busy trying to sell you new ones.

Thing is, you can’t do them all. Or even most of them. Not with any real degree of effectiveness. The more of them you try to incorporate into a limited marketing budget, the less impact any of them will have. Doing a whole lot of things halfway probably isn’t going to do as much for you as being more selective and aggressive. 

It’s really pretty much like back when advertising only really employed print or broadcast. Running a small ad in a dozen magazines wasn’t going to have as much impact as running bigger ads in the six that would do the best job of reaching your target.

So maybe it’s worth taking a hard look at who you want to reach, what you want them to know and what the best channels are to do it.

Remember when your mom wouldn’t let you get a new toy unless you got rid of an old one? It’s the same kind of thing here. When you’re drawn to a Shiny New Thing, ask yourself which of the Shiny Things you’re already using it ought to replace.

It’s sort of like choosing between whispering to a whole lot of people or shouting to a smaller, better qualified group. 

 

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