In a tete-a-tete with Kenichiro Nishizu, President, Marketing Services at DerbySoft, the candid Nishizu talks about how the company has developed intelligent technology in the metasearch and marketing space to track every single success metric, and robust data that allow hoteliers to get a clearer view of their performance.
Beyond deep-pocket spending
The company is supporting over 150 hotel brands to use data and digital to build successful businesses. Competition has never been fiercer, margins never finer and driving bookings never more complex. For hotel leaders, there’s no such thing as ‘deep-pocket’ spending, in which you invest money in marketing and wait to see how it works out. Instead, hotel leaders should demand their marketing or advertising tech companies on radical transparency, they should demand to know where their money is spent, what purpose and the anticipated return.
The Metasearch game
Take Metasearch for an example, it is a numbers game and not an emotive game unlike Paid Search or Content Marketing. Sounds radical but we at Marketing Services at DerbySoft recommend this highly to our partners as we have developed our intelligent technology in the Metasearch and marketing space to track every single success metric, and robust data that allow our hoteliers to get a clearer view of their performance. Increasingly, we’re taking a Machine Learning approach that can now provide near real-time insights into opportunities and performance, particularly with focus on the intent of the traveller and returns on the dollar spent.
Automation key to drive maximum productivity
The pandemic and government Covid policies have had a major impact to customer behaviour. Hotels are struggling to keep up with the new online consumer behaviour, sporadic travel search and booking patterns and somewhat last-minute travel intent patterns. Add to that, just as underperforming marketing programs or initiatives sometimes continue to receive funding out of inertia, hotels should not chug-along even though there are faster, intelligent alternatives to solve both these issues. High-performing hotel companies should continually scour their organization for outdated, inefficient ways of marketing operations.
Detailed process mapping
In order to get the full benefits, hotels should engage in looking at the travel intent, eliminate manual redundant processes and hunt down opportunities to rationalise their spend intelligently.
We are advocates of self-machine learning and our Ad Technology allows hoteliers to tap into powerful capability in driving new levels of efficiency. Forecasting what they spend and their returns in advance, looking at travel intent ahead of time, they are able to use advanced analytics to predict the future by reduce their costs by 10 to 20 percent, while improving revenues. Automation - Machine Learning have allowed hotel companies to stay clear of outdated manual approach to bidding and unlock significant efficiencies, resulting in enormous savings through efficient bids, time, errors, and personnel costs (currently a big issue for many hotels post the pandemic).
Use your own audience to trim excess spend
The pandemic accelerated hotels shift to saving costs and hotels had to transform their operations to keep up with new travel consumer behaviour, needs, and expectations. Though, hotels are under utilising their own past customer audiences. Whether it sits in a CRM or a PMS, how to activate and speak those customers once again during their booking journey is quite a useful tool.
We have built the ability to bring those audiences into our Ad Tech environment. This way, the hotels have the ability to have the option to speak to their audiences during their search or booking journey. We call this the ‘Click Audience’. This means that hotels can utilise their CRM data much cleverly to either reduce costs or gain better conversion.
Simple marketing activity is not enough. To get the most from your budget; strategies, campaigns and decisions need to be smarter and more accurate. To achieve this, we have built intelligent technologies that will optimise your budget, audience, channels and results; producing multi-channel campaigns that just work, in your hands or in ours.
