E-hotelier: The Master Class in Hotel E-marketing

Master Hotel E-Marketing

When and Where
Course Duration: 2 days (9:00 - 17:00 on each day)

Johannesburg - 06 November 2009

Venue to be Confirmed

Cape Town  - 10 November 2009

Winchester Mansions Hotel, Sea Point
211 Beach Road
Sea Point, Cape Town
Tel: 021 434 2351

Fee
Fee: R1 950.00 excluding VAT (includes lunch and refreshments)

Discounts:
Two people: 5 percent off both registrations
Three + people: 10 percent off all registrations
Early Bird Discount 5% for payment >14 days prior to course date.

 
Terms and Conditions (read full Terms and Conditions)
In the even of a cancellation, for whatever reason, the following will apply:

• Reschedule Fee 7 days or less prior to course day - R500.00
• Cancellation 3 days prior to course day - Full payment will be held as a cancellation fee
• Cancellation 7 days prior to course day - 50% of payment will be held as a cancellation fee

Why You Should Attend
You're kidding, right? The whole world is researching and booking travel online. It's a noisy market. Half of all reservations are made online. Eighty percent of reservations are researched online. And every hotel on the planet is now vying for online attention. If you think that having a little banner ad on a couple of local directories is good enough, you are in for a shock. And just having "a website" is not enough either. If you are not doing a world-class job, you won't be seen by people who are researching their trip, you won't impress them, or you won't get their business. Now, you can be complacent and be happy that you are always full in peak season, and forget about trying to extend your season or improve your rates. Or you could build a better, more streamlined business that really puts you on the travel map. You will find that doing a world-class e-marketing job does not require world-class budgets.

It's not easy to stay up to date with online developments. But the travel industry more than any other is now emphatically an online marketing industry. It's customers' expectations have to be understood and accommodated. You can no longer demand that they come to you in your preferred medium. You have to go to them and engage them in the medium that they prefer. This Master Class will teach you how to get there fast!

Target Audience
This course will be of great value to you if you are

• responsible for sales or marketing in a large or small hotel, B&B, or other hospitality business.
• responsible for making strategic decisions
• implementing a marketing strategy
• in IT or web development and support websites for hotels
• tired of not looking or functioning like a 21st century hospitality business

What You Will Learn
The growth of the tourism industry online has been phenomenal. The rate of increase of online consumers is accompanied by a boom in website creation which has in turn intensified the battle for the consumers’ time and attention. A great thing about the internet is that it levels the playing field – whether you are a large hotel or a small one – the success of your online presence is determined by how smart you are and not by the size of your company or budget.

This course is about how to market your hotel online. It is about understanding all the steps you take to reach your market online and which are developed and defined within your internet marketing strategy. Whether you are large or small, the process is the same and is an ongoing cycle of attracting visitors to your web site, encouraging them to purchase from you and making them want to come back for more – all in an increasingly competitive and ‘noisy’ market. This course lays out all the tools available and provides references and practical hints and tips. At the end of the course you will have an excellent understanding of all the available online resources and be able to define the web strategy that best fits your hotel.

Course Topics
By the end of this course you will have a thorough understanding of the strategies, tactics and tools of e-marketing as it applies to the hospitality industry. And you will have all the elements of an e-marketing strategy for your own business. You will know what to do and how to get going. The course covers:

• Overview of the hospitality industry
• Developing an e-marketing strategy and budget
• Your website
• Search engines — what are they and how to increase your site's search engine prominence
• Linking strategies
• Communities and social networking, blogs, RSS feeds, podcasting, user-generated content
• E-mail marketing
• Online advertising
• Partnering and affiliate programs
• Newsgroups, online publications, viral marketing, mobile marketing
• Travel site portals and aggregators
• E-commerce - features and issues (online reservations)
• Winning international customers
• Measuring performance

Detailed Course Contents

• The Hospitality Industry
  • The state of the nation — South Africa, international practices
  • Global trends and consumer behaviour
  • Opportunities and threats
  • E-business myths and realities for the hospitality industry
  • Top 10 hotel e-marketing myths
  
  
• E-marketing for the hospitality industry
  • E-marketing strategy
    • The role of online marketing vs. traditional marketing
    • Components of an e-marketing strategy
    • Clarifying the techno-hype
  • Budgets
    • Options for big and small budgets
    • Guidelines for budget allocation
  • 10 factors for success in e-business and e-marketing
  
  
• Your web site
  • Definition of good web site design
  • Choosing a web site developer (getting ready)
    • 10 point checklist for selecting a developer
    • How to work with your developer — who does what, what to expect, what to demand
    • What to expertise to look for in a developer
  • Planning your website (laying foundations)
    • Defining your web site objectives
    • Defining your target market
    • Doing a competitive analysis
  • Developing your website (the meaty bits)
    • Developing a site for your customer — customer-centric, service-centric
    • 7 step methodology for developing your website
    • Hotel web sites — what they need to offer
    • Functionality (reservations, search)
    • Compelling content (how to write for your audience, where to get images to die for)
  • Examples of web sites — raves, faves, and rages
  • Stickiness — what is it, why does it matter and how do you make your site "sticky"
  
  
• Search engine marketing
  • What’s the hype? Why is it important, what are search engines, what do they do, how do they operate?
  • How to develop a site that is search engine friendly and ways to increase your visbility in search engines
  • What are keywords and how do you determine the most important for you?
  • What are tags — demystifying of all the different tags - what they do and how to develop them
  • Learn about pay-per-click and how to optimize your budget and maximise your click throughs.
  
  
• Linking strategies
  • Increase and improve the quantity and quality of external websites that link to pages on your site in order to enhance your site's visibility within search engines.
  • 5 ways to increase the number of links to your site
  • Explanation and illustrated examples of link popularity and link relevancy
  
  
• Communities and Social Networking, Blogs, RSS Feeds, Podcasting, User Generated Content
  • What is Web 2.0 and how can these elements be applied in hospitality operations?
  • What technologies are needed to implement them
  • What are the benefits of each
  
  
• E-mail marketing
  • 10 critical elements for success
  • How to integrate e-mail marketing on your website and in your offline marketing
  • The latest laws and rules about spam and how to conduct an e-mail campaign within the web etiquette guidelines
  • Creating effective e-mail messages that will be read — the 10 rules of great e-mail messages
  • Examples of e-mail campaigns — raves, faves, and rages
  • E-mail lists — how to create them, how to manage and cleanse them, when to buy one and what to look for when you purchase one
  • Response ratios — Testing Strategies and Response Ratios — 10 commandments
  
  
• Online advertising
  • 7 essentials for creating effective banner ads
  • Creating an online advertising campaign
  • Critical look at examples of banner and online advertising campaigns
  • Online and offline campaigns — the relative advantages of each and the way the two can be integrated.
  
  
• Partnering and Affiliate programs
  • How to use them
  
  
• Newsgroups, Online publications, Portals, Viral marketing,Mobile marketing
  • What are these media elements and how can they be used effectively for tourism operations
  
  
• Travel site portals and aggregators and how to use them
  • Lists and Directories
  • Expedia, Travelocity, Hotels.com
  
  
• E-commerce — features and issues
  • Online reservations — a must for all serious e-businesses - why and how
    • Resources guide on online reservations — what to look for if you are buying or building reservations.
  • Trust, security and privacy — how to reassure your customers
  • Examples of great sites — illustrating the 10 golden rules for online reservations
  • Search — 10 most important aspects for effective search
  
  
• Understanding your online customers
  • Web traffic analysis
  • Guest experiences — what they are looking for and how to target individuals through customization and personalisation
  
  
• Making the most of global opportunities
  • Attracting international customers
  • Developing a global presence
  
  
• Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing investments
  • Web traffic analysis
  • Metrics for measuring the effectiveness of my e-marketing campaigns
  • Accounting for marketing ROI
  
  
• Your e-marketing strategy

Course Leader
Your course leader is Karen Parkin. Karen is an outstanding leader with an enviable depth of experience in Information Technology, advertising, new media, web development and e-commerce. Wherever she has worked, she has rapidly acquired a reputation for planning, execution, and delivery on complex high-pressure projects demanding sound business judgment, creative flair, and technical innovation.

Her career to date culminated in her leading global projects that took Marriott International from having a US-only web site to its international presence in 20 countries and 9 languages. Marriott’s e-commerce operations now take over $10 million a day in online hotel reservations, for all of its 2,800 hotels around the world, and last year they were voted Best Hotel Website by Business Traveller magazine.

Karen is passionate about everything she does and inspires people around her through striving uncompromisingly for the best. She believes strongly in the importance of Project Management and communications as fundamental building blocks for getting things done professionally. She has developed great understanding of multicultural work environments and international markets and is a recognized guru in internationalisation and localisation. She moves with ease from large corporate structures to small entrepreneurial companies.
More about Karen

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Register for this Course
You can Register for this course in any of the below ways:
Fax: Print out this registration form (DOC 96kB) and fax it to us at 086 693 3575
Phone: Call us on 021 790 0303 and we'll take your details.
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