Articles

After last week’s Facebook Offers update, it looks as if several more companies are getting on the ball as they prepare to push out their own versions of deals, like Foursquare – who’s supposedly going to display personalized coupons come July – or enhance current deal offerings, as with Google who recently released a Google Maps update for Android devices which includes support for Google Offers.

Watch this video for more details on how Google Offers works with Google Maps for Android and find out how your hotel can get started for free:

Besides all that’s happening in the social and local offers space, there were a couple more articles that caught our interest this week. Check out this week’s wrap-up below:

• What do mobile business travellers want?
• 5 Ways to Benefit From Customer Testimonial Videos
• Distribution Strategy: Shifting Share in a Competitive Market
• Hotel photos: Quality or quantity?
• Consumers now pay more attention to online reviews than word-of-mouth

What links would you add to our list? We’re looking for input on what articles you’d like to see more of. Feel free to leave a comment and let us know what we’ve missed this week.

Facebook brought a lot of new changes and updates to the social marketing sphere this week, including the proclaimed “life-saving” addition of an Organ Donor status, customizable action links for app developers, as well as rolling out Offers to more business Pages. Were you one of the businesses that saw this latest update appear in your status update box yesterday?

However, apart from the social giant’s (seemingly) endless updates, we still managed to keep our eyes on a few other interesting topics this week as well.

Here’s our weekly round-up of hospitality and digital marketing articles of interest:

• Google repositions Hotel Finder atop organic search results
• Email Marketers Better Prepare for Mobile Opens, New Study Finds
• US Hotel Profit Recovery is Widespread
• How Does Social Media Affect Website Search Rankings? [INFOGRAPHIC]
• Booking.com Adds Urgency to Purchases with Real-Time Shopping Data

What other articles did you see this week that were particularly noteworthy? Leave us a comment to let us know which topics you found most interesting.

This week in particular has brought big changes, both in and outside of the VIZERGY office. Internally, we celebrated the promotion of Phil Faircloth (previously our Director of Client Marketing Services) to the well-deserved position of Director of Operations.

And, as always, we continue to watch as each new week never fails to bring exciting news to those of us dealing with digital marketing in the hospitality industry. Not only were we able to see Twitter break the standing TPS (tweets-per-second) record with a new all-time high, but we also witnessed yet another big change for marketers everywhere: Google’s new anti-spam algorithm.

Here’s our weekly dose of the best articles relating to hospitality and the challenges, changes, and news surrounding digital marketing initiatives:

• Video Is a Rising Star Among Content Marketers
• Has Timeline Increased Engagement on Facebook?
• Bookings on the hoof: the last-minute traveler in a mobile world
• High-tech hotels a hit with geeky guests
• Who do travelers trust most for trip information?

What did you find most interesting this week? Leave a comment to let us know which articles we may have overlooked.

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With so many online channels for properties and marketers to tackle, email marketing is frequently forgotten, or at least not prioritized.  However, email should still be a key component in properties’ online marketing strategies.

With your website, mobile website, SEO, PPC, social pages, local profiles and much more to integrate into your property’s digital marketing, it’s easy to forget what sometimes seems like an archaic form of marketing – email.  But just because email has been around since the advent of the Internet doesn’t mean it’s ineffective.  Quite the contrary actually, as Reuters reports that 85% of global online users communicate via email, trumping 62% that communicate via social media.  Furthermore, according to eMarketer, 47% of U.S Internet users have a positive attitude toward email, more than any other form of online advertising.

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With a beautiful holiday weekend behind us, we were able to get quite a few projects accomplished in our offices this past week. We began an early promotion of our latest white paper late last week focusing on local and mobile marketing strategies for hotels across the globe (download your free copy here). We also announced the roll-out of several new Facebook products designed specifically for hotel Pages on Timeline.

With more great projects in the work, we took some time to root out some of the latest and greatest news articles in the hospitality and digital marketing sectors.

Take a look through our list of interesting articles from this week:

• Video Boosts Brand Engagement, Site Visits
• Email continues to drive buying decisions
• 6 Ways to Integrate Print with Your Social Media Marketing
• Nielsen: Consumer Trust in Traditional Media Ads Fall, While Confidence in Mobile, Social and Online Rise
• Checking In? Hidden Ways Hotels Court Guests Faster

What articles did you find most interesting this week? Let us know in the comments below.

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In today’s evolving world of hospitality digital marketing, it’s important that all properties take inventory of their online presence, assess strengths and weaknesses across multiple channels and effectively take action to enhance visibility and bookings with integrated marketing.

From independent websites, to mobile websites, to PPC, to TripAdvisor reviews, there is a litany of online channels, including emerging channels like Pinterest, where your property most likely has a presence.  When you consider the average online travel shopper visits 22 sites across at least nine different sessions before booking (Google) and that over 50% of bookings come from digital channels, you see why a consistent and constant presence is key.  Savvy travelers are conducting more research and reaching bookings engines via more online channels than ever before, which means your hotel needs to devote more time and dollars.

But how do you keep track of so many channels?  Do your staff and hotel Internet marketing vendor know the effectiveness of your presence in each channel?  How do you form future plans of action when you may not be 100% clear on your paid, earned and owned media efforts?  To get started, you need to understand the different types of channels.

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We’ve had an exciting week in the office, especially as we recently received notice from the Web Marketing Association that three of our websites were named winners (one even earned the honor of “Best Hotel & Lodging Website”) in the Internet Advertising Competition. Beyond that, the VIZERGY team has been hard at work developing a couple of upcoming white papers we’ll be releasing over the course of the next week.

As always, we still managed to keep our eyes peeled for the latest and greatest in news from the hospitality and digital marketing sectors. Here’s our list of intriguing articles from the week:

• Mobile Apps vs. the Mobile Web: “It Doesn’t Matter to Consumers”
• Facebook’s Timeline Gives Brands 46% Higher Engagement Per Post
• 25% of Paid-Search Clicks Will Come From Mobile By December
• Yelp Metrics: New and Improved
• Digital Drives US Local Ad Spending Growth

Did we miss anything you felt was particularly interesting? Leave us a comment and let us know if there were any other articles you felt should be included in our round-up.

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We’ve had a particularly busy week in our office as we spent a lot of time prepping and presenting our special webinar on integrated marketing for hotels on Wednesday (download the presentation slides here if you weren’t able to attend). Though even with all the excitement of the webinar and other happenings here at VIZERGY, we managed to collect a few notable news articles we thought you might enjoy.

Take a look at some of the week’s recent posts we found particularly interesting:

• New Study Reveals the Power of First Impressions Online
• Hotels need to be more disruptive offline to trigger a better presence online
• Marketing in the Mobile Email Revolution
• Can the social web get travelers out of their armchairs?
• Allocation of online marketing dollars

Did you happen to read any other great articles this week? Leave us a comment to let us know if we missed something.

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By Sarah Atkins, Copywriter

What is Pinterest?

The world is abuzz with talk of a new social media site that’s taking the Internet by storm. Pinterest, an image-based bookmarking tool, allows users to find and keep track of things they like from around the web and organize them on virtual pinboards, which other people can see and “pin” from as well. Users can “follow” other boards, and a main feed shows every image, photo, or video being pinned in real-time. There are also categories for pins, like “Food & Drink”, “Travel & Places”, and “Weddings & Events” that users can peruse, as well as a search function for when they’re looking for something specific.

Still not sure you quite understand? Check out our Digital IQ on Pinterest for a quick rundown on the web’s newest social-sharing site.

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This week was a particularly busy one what with the start of the Spring Break travel season, as well as a rush of articles covering several conferences and events concerning hospitality digital marketing (SMX West and ITB Berlin, to name a few).

But, amidst all of the chaos we found a few moments to round up some interesting articles from the past week that may be of interest to your property:

• The Millenials Check-In
• Hoteliers toil to capture mobile demand
• Global Hotel Recovery in 2011 Signals Growing Market Confidence
• Social media in travel by numbers
• Determining email’s value

What were your favorite articles of the week? Comment below to let us know what we missed.

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