By Larry Mogelonsky, MBA, P. Eng. (www.lma.ca)
Central to building your property’s awareness and sales generation, is its ‘voice’ or unique selling proposition (USP). Specific to the hospitality industry, a USP is defined as the single most identifiable benefit a property can give to consumers.
In this day and age of endless distractions and screen bombardment, you have at best five to ten seconds, or one short phrase, to impress a prospective guest – not much time to communicate the full extent of your brand value. But this should be enough for you to get across one clear idea or selling point.
From a marketer’s point of view, an ironclad, well-thought-through USP makes our job so much easier, as it will help determine all subsequent priorities and logistics. Contrary to what you might think, by consigning us to work within the mold or theme of a proscribed USP, it frees our minds to think up bolder creative and more aggressive promotional placements. By not concisely defining your USP, it’s like taking the shotgun approach to sales – blanketing everyone ultimately means you convince no one. Check through this list to see where you might improve.
1. Basic Checklist. We’re in the conceptual stage here. Everything is on the table. In order to narrow the field, you need to find your priorities. First, you need a brain trust – a small group of individuals who know the industry and are devoted to the problem at hand. Next, what might qualify as a USP? What feature do you feel is the natural choice to select for this task? Importantly, what feature is most marketable as a consumer benefit? Brainstorm with your team about what is most critical for your property towards boosting sales or if any departments have any specific priorities. Lastly, this is the point where you abstractly define your timeframe for the next planning steps.
2. Build Your Calendar. Once you have your timeline in a rough sense, you can work backwards from a certain launch date or execution period to determine how much time to allocate to each of the upcoming tasks. This is the stage where you think in terms of a 12-month life cycle taking into account seasonal variations and disruptions. By assigning checkpoints or stage deadlines, it helps to ensure that no single element in this planning process lags behind.
3. Define Objectives. You not only have to think in terms of what your new USP will be, but also what its projected outcomes will be. Using past experiences in addition to comp set data and forecasted trends, what do you hope to achieve? Once you assign individual teams, what will their goals be? For this still early phase, I like to utilize a SMAC approach – specific, measurable, achievable, compatible – although there are plenty of other systems that work, too.
4. Develop Initial Offers. Now comes the nitty gritty of the specific details of your USP. At the onset, you are brainstorming and encourage participation to find your brand’s voice. Keep an open mind; no idea is a bad idea. At the completion, however, you should have a clear and concise concept to work with and guide the remaining stages. The product here should be your elevator pitch – the distilled essence of your property which makes it exceptional.
5. Refinement. Once you have your one sentence or ten second campaign slogan, it’s time to see how you will tune and adjust it for the outside world. Again, you should be open-minded during this process so that no good ideas are neglected or lost due to groupthink. Specifically, you should aim to apply parameters to your budding USP in terms of how it will benefit customers – that is, judging your selling point from the perspective of the consumer, not the hotel brand – and how it compares to that of your competition. This is the last dedicated ‘big picture’ phase as you are still trying to decipher what your USP will be and how it will connect to all other selling points for your brand.
6. Get Creative. The latter half of these ten steps is where the execution of tactics and logistics truly begin. Now is the time to open the doors beyond your brain trust and involve more departments. Source ideas in-house as well as from external agencies. Your objective here is threefold. You must generate enthusiasm for your USP and get your team behind it. You will also want to harness the power and diversity of your team as you never know where the best ideas will pop up. Concurrent to these two activities, you should now start to create offers – or rather, the framework for said offers – based on your USP with each themed appropriately and vetted by senior managers.
7. Tactical Elements and Budget. Prior to any full-fledged creative execution, you need to sort out the logistics, distribution strategies and fiscal resources allocated to every path chosen. Each channel is different in terms of what creative expression will gain traction as well as how much money is required to play ball. Major channels that you should consider include direct marketing, your own brand.com, traditional advertising, Google Adwords, SEO keywords, social media, past customer mailers, trade shows, telemarketing, Cvent programs, e-blasts and public relations.
8. Build the Creative. Knowing what channels you are committed to for the initial launch will help focus your creative efforts and the budget for your creative efforts. And now that you have refined the concept behind your USP, the most important matter now is consistency in the expression of your USP and the themed offers pertaining to it. All your creative should be informative, but also eye-catching and provocative. It’s a tough line to skirt between the two as too many facts will bore an audience, while all style and no substance will not work in your favor to build awareness.
9. Execute the Campaign. This is where it all comes together. You place your media, upload website updates to the server and get your sales team out in full force. Have them bend the rules as selling should be fun. Executing a campaign can be a stressful time, both in terms of workload as well as the uncertainty of it all. Be aware that equally as important as a smooth launch is to setup a lead following system so that your team won’t forget to close any prospective sales.
10. Measure Results. Record, record, record! Specifically, try not to look only at the numbers. Oftentimes it is very easy for participations to only fill in the numbered items on response cards without expressing how they truly felt. To alleviate this problem, scrupulously read through written comments and actively listen to people, whether they are guests, sales leads or team members. Lastly, know that launching a new USP is not a one shot deal but a constant evolution. Your campaign must be adapted to correlate with any measured deviations or unexpected results. This can be frustrating, but don’t give up; nothing is perfect at the outset, it is only through constant tweaking and hard work that this comes to be.
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