Do you like to sit around all day waiting for people to tell you what to do?
Or do you like to pick up the phone and make things happen?
If you stop reading at this point we both know what category you probably fall in, don’t we?
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Good! You’re still here.
I like to poke fun, a bit. But I do so for a reason; a reason that could add thousands of dollars to your hotel’s bottom line every month.
Listen up. Right now your website is nothing but an order taker. It stands there like a flabby, short order cook and does absolutely nothing besides telling people what’s on the menu.
That’s passive selling.

If you want to get more direct bookings in the shortest time possible, you’re doing to have to adopt a completely different world view. By that I mean you have to create an effective lead generation strategy.
You see, when a pick-up artist walks into a crowded bar he isn’t waiting for women to come to him. He isn’t giving his number to everyone, hoping they give him a call.
He’s going to walk up to the most beautiful girl in the bar, and in a calm, confident manner, he’s going to get her contact details. And he’ll give her a call when he wants to.

That’s the difference

The same thing holds true for hotel marketing.
You might be paying for traffic through Adwords. You might be spending tons of time and effort on social media. And you might be closely monitoring your rates to be competitive…
But if you’re not ‘asking for her number’, then you’re only going to ‘get lucky’ if your guests are ready to book – right here , right now.  AKA, they have to be desperate.

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Why settle for 5% of your visitors to convert on your website (Meaning you’ll never see 95% of your traffic again), if you can capture 25% of visitors emails on a daily basis and automatically market to them leading up to their buying decision?

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Remember, retargeting services with Google just means paying (again) for traffic that you struck out with the first time.  What’s to stop them from leaving you flat again and again?   Capturing their emails is what!

So how do you start collecting your visitor’s email addresses?
There are several ways to do this… but for today, and so you don’t start making excuses and ‘forget’ to follow through, I’m going to show you one of the easiest one I know.
Give them something of value in exchange for their contact details. Simple as that.

What should you give them?
I like to offer something that appeals to visitors who are still in the ‘dream phase’ of their path to purchase.
In today’s example, I’ll show you how to do that by creating a local, mobile guide, using the GoKamino app platform, that they can download and share with their friends.

I like this platform because it free. It’s easy to create. It’s useful for your visitors. It encourages them to add their own content – helping you increase your social shares. And, with a large SEO footprint, it gets a lot of organic traffic.
To get started, there are a few fun things you’ll get to do today.
First, grab your family, friends or that special someone and head out for the day. Your goal is to hit as many of the local hotspots as you can within a short distance of your hotel. Once there, just enjoy yourselves and take lots of pictures.
After you’ve had your fun, head back to your office and pull up the GoKamino website.
Once there, sign up by using the email option (Not signing in with Facebook) then add your hotel’s name in the [first name, last name] fields.
Once there, start by clicking on “Create a Tour”.

Type the name of your location until the location pops up. Select that.

After you give your tour a title, select the tour features and add tags, it’s time to drop a few pins on your favorite local spots. To do this, make sure the map view includes your location or it won’t appear.

Now, all this data is being pulled from the Foursquare app, so you have to realize it’s subject to errors and omissions. This is often the case because users haven’t tagged your hotel, pool, or restaurant as different places.
But you want to make sure your bar gets its own publicity, right!
That’s why you need to ‘straighten things out’ with Foursquare, directly.
Create an account if you don’t already have one, then enter this URL: https://foursquare.com/add-place
It will take you here:

From there just follow the instructions. It will take about 10 minutes for this change to take effect in the database.
While it does this, why not look up, or add a few more of your favorite local stops?
Altogether, your goal today is to create 3 walking tours with 4 or 5 stops each. That means you’ll need 15 – 30 nice pictures to go along with your posts.
So create 3 folders on your desktop and start collecting pictures:

If you don’t have Adobe Photoshop, here’s an easy way to copy pictures off the internet using Microsoft Word.
Just go back to Foursquare and enter the name of one of your favorite places. There, you can scroll through the images that people have already uploaded.
Open Word, and when you find a picture you like, go to the top-left of the Word command ribbon and select:

This will let you clip away at the internet to your heart’s content.

Then just ‘right-click’ to ‘save as image’ in the appropriate folder.

 

 

Now, with all of your points of interest added to Foursquare and a nice stack of cool photos, I’d recommend you do just a little SEO research to fuel your sales funnel.
The quick and easy way to do that is to focus on the “(Activity) (Close to/ nearby) (Place)” formula.

By doing this I was surprised to learn that there were only 4 results with this exact match for “Clubs near Mission Beach” on the internet. While that isn’t the end-all-be-all result, because we are using quotation marks in our search, at least this gives us a promising starting place to drill down on from using Google AdWords.
For brevity’s sake I won’t tell you how to do SEO research here; it’s a subject in itself. But you can get all the best insights on how to combine SEO with copywriting by visiting Heather Lloyd-Martin’s SEO Copywriting group on LinkedIn.

So far we’ve collected:
• A list of some great local places
• Some great photos for each one
• Some keywords that are useful and don’t have a lot of competition

Now we’ve just got to plug them into the GoKamino platform, create 3 walking tours around your hotel and make a map.
To make the map, open up Microsoft Word again.
Pull a screen clipping of your local map from Google. Take screen clippings of your GoKamino tours from your work today and make sure they’re hovering over the map background. Do that by selecting your GoKamino tour picture and then you’ll see a little box appear in the upper right-hand corner of your picture. Select that, then look for the “In Front Of Text” option on the lower right-hand side. This allows you to place your pictures in the appropriate places around your map.
Then hyperlink your pictures to the correct tour. To do that, select the picture, go to the command ribbon and select ‘Insert’, ‘Hyperlink’, then enter the URL that you pulled from the search bar of the appropriate GoKamino tour.
Altogether you should have something that looks like this:

Visit the live version of this map at: http://goo.gl/hCq7c3

 

You finally have something to trade for your visitors’ email address! This is a huge business improvement!
Now, instead of 40% of your visitors leaving your website – never to be seen again – you’ll be able to capture 5 – 10% of them as contacts.
This means that, as long as you’ve placed an enticing button on the very top, very right-hand side of your landing page to promote this info-premium, you have the potential of adding 10 – 20 prospects to your email marketing campaign every day!
Way to go!
Also, by creating something of value that your prospects can use to answer the ‘Where should I go? What can I do there?’ questions, you’ve started a very important conversation with your prospects, one that you can continue through email with a very persuasive message: If you want to see it all and do it all – our hotel is the perfect place to stay.
This is the kind of messaging that few of your competitors have figured out how to do well. This is the lead generation strategy that will separate you from 99% of all the other hotels out there, as you can see in this slideshow I put together on the subject.