We all know that marketing, particularly hospitality marketing, changed dramatically during the pandemic. That radical shift in consumer behavior required equally radical shifts in messaging and strategies.

But when the pandemic subsided, consumer behavior changed again. But it wasn’t a rubber band snapping back to how it was before. Some behaviors and corresponding marketing strategies returned to normal. Others didn’t. Still, more continued to change in other ways. What’s different today? What current trends do those of us in hospitality need to know about?

That’s exactly what Tyler Anderson discusses in this recap of Social Pulse Podcast: Hospitality Edition, hosted by Agorapulse’s chief storyteller, Mike Allton.

Tyler is the founder and CEO of Casual Fridays, a social media and content production agency, focusing on hospitality and tourism through his guidance. Casual Fridays has become a leading social media marketing agency for hotels and resorts, serving diverse clients from luxury brands to unique boutique hotels.

With his experience, Tyler and his team have successfully propelled hundreds of hotels and resorts into the digital spotlight, crafting memorable experiences and driving unparalleled engagement.

What’s Casual Fridays?

Mike Allton: I’d love it if we started with you sharing more about how you got started and the work your agency is doing today.

Tyler Anderson: Sure. I could elaborate and make this a long answer, but I’m not. I’m going to give you the short end of it all.

  • My background was in traditional media, but I was a very early adopter of social media and digital marketing. to the point where I literally was probably one of the first 1,000 people on MySpace.
  • And I leveraged, you know, just my—I don’t want to say passion. That’s not the word. But I was kind of like the same age of the people who are hardcore into TikTok now, right? Like, I was a young 20-something.  And I was on MySpace back in the day, an early adopter.
  • I just saw the power behind it.
  • So even though I was still in traditional media and I worked in radio, by the way, I would, I would actually create promotions, you know, for my clients at the time, like, and I had some pretty big clients like Pepsi and Vitamin Water and I would do  crossover promotions through radio with MySpace for the radio station.
  • I created the radio station’s MySpace profile. So total early adopter.
  • And then in 2009, I decided to start a social media agency because a lot of the traditional agencies at the time, they kind of rolled their eyes when you would bring up social media.
  • They did not see the value back then. And I just kind of knew that this was going to be like a new frontier and transform things. And absolutely, that’s what it’s done. I just kind of worked with a wide range of clients back then, everything from car dealerships to dentists, you name it.
  • And I stumbled across our first hotel in 2011.
  • And that’s kind of the rest is history.
  • Fast forward a couple of years, we just started adding more and more hotels and then I’d say our peak was in around 2018-2019. I think at that time we were serving like 160-something hotels.

We did have some other clients that we would serve. We did a lot of music festivals and we did like Jersey Mike’s and some other brands. And then the pandemic hit, right? And so pretty much everything hit reset and then coming out of the pandemic.

That’s when we doubled down, and we said we’re going to go back and exclusively work with hotels as we were coming out of it. And that’s what we did.

So, in 2021, we repositioned the agency to be exclusively a hotel and resort hospitality agency, and that’s what we do today.

The Pandemic’s Effect on Business

How did the pandemic impact your agency and the hospitality industry overall?

Tyler Anderson: On the agency level, like going into 2020, we had some other challenges. At that time, we were working with a large music festival, too. And they overdid themselves. Like they expanded to multiple cities and all that. They had some financial times, which anybody who’s ever worked in the agency [will tell you] when you have huge enterprise level clients, and if they have rough times, you’re going to have rough times.

So going into 2020, we were already kind of going into a little bit of a rough patch, with some staff. And then that’s when we were, like, you know, we kind of had some preliminary conversations like, well, we need to go all in on hotels cause that’s what we know best and that’s what the plan was, but what’s that quote? Like Mike Tyson says, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth or something like that. That’s what we were kind of going into.

And lo and behold, you know, I remember it clear as day. I was at Social Media Marketing World, which is a conference you and I met at way back in the day.

And I remember I was sitting in front of Jay Baer‘s talk with Brian Fanzo, and he was another speaker, and he nudged me, and there were some preliminary talks about COVID kind of going into that conference because that conference was in February. And I want to say it was around the first or the last week of February, right before March.

And you kind of heard a little bit of COVID in the news, but not a lot. And then Fanzo nudged me, and he was supposed to be speaking the following week at South by Southwest. And he nudges me, and he shows me a text he had just gotten right there from the conference organizer saying, “Hey, we’re canceling South by Southwest.” That’s when I’m like, “Man, it’s going to get bad.”

I got a phone call the next day. We had about, I don’t know, 10+ hotels that we worked with in Atlanta, and they were supposed to hold the final four. And one of the hotel GMs [was] like, “Hey, we need to pause, suspend everything. They just canceled the final four. Our city is basically gonna be shut down for the next month until further notice.”

And literally, it was just like for two days straight taking emails, taking calls, every single hotel, except for one estate, which I’ll get to in a second, shut down. And everybody just immediately needed to pause. And even the ones that still stayed open, they were impacted to the point where, you know, there’s no way we’re going to sustain.

Overnight revenue [was] just like gone.

And, like a lot of businesses, we immediately had to furlough people and had to figure it out. We got a PPP loan. The only saving grace which has nothing to do with hotels. We had a nonprofit that reached out to us ahead of time. We lived in San Diego at the time. It was Feeding San Diego and they got an abundance of donations to the point that they also needed help and support with social media to get the word out on all the missions that they were having, trying to help people out during the pandemic. And so that we did pick them up as a client, and between that and then the state of Florida and the hotels that did remain open during that time, that’s what allowed us to survive, I’d say from, you know, March until September of 2021.

So that’s that, but yeah, to answer your question, it was just like overnight, it just dried up. And as far as how it impacted the hotels … I mean, a lot of the hotels, and, you know, I don’t know about the audience, what they know, but you know there’s usually the leisure side of business, which is people are going on vacations, trips, whatever it may be. And then there’s the group and business side of hotels and that’s, you know, conferences, meetings, events, business travel.

But with the pandemic, what happened? Business travel just shut down. Conferences shut down. People were doing virtual conferences.

Mike Allton: Yeah. We got through it. You’re now focusing 100% percent on hotels.

What are some of the other changes that you’ve implemented since then?

(And that could be from how you structured the agency to even just how you’re doing marketing.)

What are some of the results that you’ve seen?

Tyler Anderson: I think the biggest thing I just want to touch on first with the hotels: After a while, we got to open up again like we needed to. But I remember going to one or two hotels during that time and it was a ghost town and I remember the horror stories [I heard] from some of these hotels.

They would have to furlough their whole staff, and so there would maybe only be two or three people at a hotel who were still employed: maybe a general manager, a director of sales, and then maybe an engineering operations manager. And those three people would go into these hotels …

I remember talking to one in New York City, which has 1,300 rooms. It’s a massive hotel, and there’s only three people going in there, you know, from March until like September of 2020 and their whole job is, literally, every two or three days, they had to go into every single room and just flush the toilets just to make sure that they would still remain operational and they wouldn’t have issues and make sure the lights work. Talk about an eerie time.

But then, when they all decided to kind of open up, the biggest change that impacted the hotels is, well, I don’t know if you remember this, but people were definitely having pent-up travel demand. Because we were all in lockdown, we’re stuck at home.

Everybody just wanted to get out and go on vacations. That’s why Florida flourished. But regardless, people just wanted to get out of their house, but nobody was going to be able to get out for business travel. And no one was going to be able to get out for conferences or anything like that.

So what I’d say the biggest impact the hotels had to adjust just to get out of the pandemic is everybody shifted their focus to basically 100% leisure business, where before a lot of these big box hotels or big, huge hotels in big cities that are near convention centers, you know, leisure, maybe only represented like 10-20% of their business before the pandemic.

Now, all of a sudden, they’re asking it to represent all of their business just so they can remain open and remain in business. That was the biggest change for them to survive.

And then, of course, social media became a great way to do that. And while most hotels were maybe active before the pandemic, you know, this was their one way where, you know, social media was maybe one of many components that they were doing before the pandemic.

They were doing a lot of other stuff to target that group business, but now here we’re coming out of the pandemic, they were all in, and social media provided a viable way, and I don’t want to say done like at a minimal budget, but let’s be honest … You know, we were talking about traditional media and some of these other things.

It’s expensive. Like, in theory, you can run social media ads for 50 bucks a month if you need to, or a hundred bucks. So it just provided a little bit of an easier way for them to at least dip their toes in again and get the word out, maintain presence.

And then the other reason that social media was so important at the time is because, again, because they all shut down in a matter of minutes, in early March during 2020.

When they did start opening up, people would go to those pages and they’re kind of weird. You look at some hotels’ social media accounts, and you can tell like when everything turned off because their last post was March 12th, March 13th. And there was nothing. There was no activity.

Now you’re getting people who are going on these channels, sending Instagram DMs or Facebook messages. Hey, are you guys open? We’re looking to do something. And social media became kind of the channel that allowed them to reconnect with their guests as they were coming out and being able to provide the hotels for guests to kind of go on these vacations from all that pent-up travel demand.

So, that’s kind of how the hotels recovered from it. A lot of the hotels, you know, they had massive layoffs. They lost a lot of people, and they have limited teams [while] maybe prior to the pandemic had a full-time marketing team or department where they were able to do social media.

It was a great opportunity for them to leverage an agency to do that.

And so, we came up with a COVID relief package, which, was just minimal presence, but it was at least something for them: handling their Instagram DMs, responding to comments, getting some basic ads out there, sprinkling out some basic content, just so people would know they’re open again.

We just decided to double down: Serve the hotel space, the resort space, provided some just kind of really bare bones packages that were in full transparency. And we weren’t getting rich off of them, but it got our foot in the door with the hotels again.

And it really reminded me of my early days at the agency, but it was good. It got us back and reacquainted with many of our old partners but also newer hotels that we’ve never worked with before. So, and then I know you also asked, like, how’s the agency evolved and whatever. Definitely one of the pros, I will say, that did come out of this is it allowed us to kind of reestablish how we wanted to do things.

Sometimes, you would maybe have an old hotel partner who was setting their ways or setting things being done a certain way. Coming out of the pandemic and having that little hiatus of six months with a lot of them allowed us to kind of hit the reset button and just shift some of those things in patterns that we were doing.

Obviously, we can expand on that, but that was really (I’d say, from a high level) how we adopted it and came out of the pandemic.

Mike Allton: That makes a lot of sense. I definitely remember that sense, after being cooped up for so long, that need to get out. We went to New York City for Christmas and New Year’s 2021. We finally were allowed to so we were living in Manhattan for years. We didn’t go to the ball drop. We went to Times Square earlier that day. We weren’t quite that crazy to be among thousands of people at that time, not tens of thousands like it used to be, right? But it was just thousands, but now it’s 2024, and things have continued to change and evolve.

How are you seeing the marketing industry within hospitality today?

Tyler Anderson: So, I was going to maybe intertwine this in my last answer.

One of the other things that I think happened from the pandemic … If you look at the data, what exploded during 2020 was TikTok in short-form video because people were stuck at home and consuming it. And like TikTok massively exploded in that, where before the pandemic, it was like, “Oh, that’s just for teenagers.” Right?

When the pandemic hit and now you’re having moms, 30-somethings, older millennials, and then even some younger Gen Xers who are now becoming avid users on that platform, it changed the game. And then Instagram, of course, followed suit.

So to answer your question, I’d say that’s the biggest thing from then to now.

What’s changed is the significance and importance of basically short-form videos across the platforms.

And that is the one thing, too, from a strategic perspective, like with hotels. And I mean, gosh, we could make a whole separate podcast just on the performance of organic content in social media right now. So I’m not going to rant on that, but video is the one way that we see with all our hotel partners. I can pretty much do any random spot check, even on other hotels that we don’t work with. I think this is the same for all businesses. That’s why I said, I’d be curious about you.

Video is the one thing like your newsfeed content if it’s images or carousels, that content is primarily only being served in the newsfeed to your majority of your followers. And then, whereas Reels content is what, when we look at the analytics, a lot of times that’s reaching non-followers. That’s how you’re growing your audience, seeing new people.

So from the travel perspective, those who are definitely adopting Reels content and short-form video content. That’s where we’re seeing the most success. And, of course, that’s a result of the pandemic, and I give all that credit to TikTok.

Mike Allton: Yeah, I totally agree with that.

We’re seeing a lot more videos coming up and performing well on TikTok when it’s a search perspective, right? People are going to TikTok to search for destinations and options and leisure destinations for instance. Whereas, yeah, you’re right. The Instagram Reels in particular are being served to a far greater audience that isn’t already following the accounts. I got a notification this morning, maybe yesterday from Instagram, you know, specifically saying, “Hey, this particular Reel has reached a significant, exponential number of people that aren’t already following you,” which I’d personally seen. So I’m not a Reels producer, but that was pretty cool.

On the flip side, I got a notification from Facebook saying, “Hey, your engagement is down. Why don’t you create more Reel content?” And I’m thinking I’m publishing the same content to my Facebook page as my Instagram account. So I’m reaching different audiences on those platforms, but I think you’re right.

Tyler Anderson: It’s nuts because I will log in, I’ll do random spot checks. I obviously don’t manage the accounts, but I’ll do random spot checks with some of our hotels.

I’ll usually maybe sign into the Instagram account for, like a high-end luxury, beachfront resort. And then I’ll also do it for maybe a big box hotel in an urban city. And it’s consistent across the board when I do these checks, usually, their video content, the Reels are reaching usually anywhere from 30 to 40 percent non-followers. Whereas just a standard image post is reaching 90 percent of only followers.

You brought up a good point, too, of how the landscapes changed is the integration now of social SEO. So, Instagram has made changes where you can write keywords and phrases. So, it might be planning a trip to New York City and just trying to change the copy to include that. That’s been a big change in the last four years because that didn’t exist.

One thing I just don’t want to forget to bring up just from a content perspective: Pre-pandemic, I’d say one of our job applications, when we would hire new talent and people to work with our accounts, we had a lot of writing examples.

We asked for writing examples, and I’d say being a super-strong copywriter was super-important. That’s not the case anymore.

I’m not saying we rely on AI, but we can use AI to teach people how to write copy and better copy and improve their copy. And we had one girl who works for us … We hired her before AI took off. And she’s great and she’s awesome, but we joke with her that she was like a B minus copywriter before, but she’s taken the time to learn how to use AI and she became one of our best copywriters. And [she] knows how to use the right prompts and nail it.

Tying this back to what we look for now, though, and how it’s changed, we look for people who are good creators, who know how to create good video content. Not that you have to be a professional videographer, because nowadays, anybody can be it with their smartphones. And I’m sure we’ll talk a little bit about influencer marketing stuff, but really, we try to train a lot of our people who work for our hotels to almost be like influencers or creators.

You’re just not a creator professionally, if you will, or you’re not an influencer, if you will, but you should be able to create content like that. And, so we’ve invested like a lot on that and a lot in training on that. And  that’s the number-one thing we look for now.

Can you create good content? We’ll worry about the copywriting later. So that’s been a big evolution that, you know, was not the case four and a half, five years ago.

Mike Allton: That is such a good point. In fact, we talked about that a little bit in our first episode, with the social media marketing manager for MGM and about the importance of shooting content on-site.

In fact, for those of you who want to learn more about TikTok SEO, check out our sister podcast, the Social Pulse Podcast: Retail Edition. I did a whole episode with Wave Wyld all about TikTok SEO. It’s incredible.

get a free trial of agorapulseIncorporating SEO

Tyler Anderson: Mike, you brought up a point I want to go back to. You’re talking about, just like the social SEO. I’ve not seen the study yet … A part of me wants to do it on my own and just fund it. Like, maybe I should do this, but I’m very into like anecdotal, just like observations and trends and stuff.

And, you know, a majority of our employees now are under the age of 30. They don’t Google stuff. They don’t. They don’t go onto Google and search it. They go to TikTok and Instagram, and usually it’s TikTok, and they search if they’re looking for a hotel or they’re planning a vacation or they’re looking what restaurant to go eat. “Hey, I want to do sushi in Dallas tonight.” Or they’re traveling, they’re looking on TikTok and Instagram and they’re searching there.

You know, they’re not going to Yelp. They’re not going to Google. They’re not going to TripAdvisor.

I asked the point blank, “Is that what you and all your friends do?” Like, yeah. And so like, okay. Some hotels may say, well, we’re a resort and we’re more luxury and they’re not our audience because they can’t afford us right now. And I hear that. Okay. But they will be in five years. So you can get involved now here. And if that is your audience, like that’s what you got to be mindful of.

We noticed that we’re encouraging that with our hotel partners. We incorporate that when we’re creating content. We try to keep the vibe in mind as well as incorporating those keywords and phrases that can help them show up on that search, but it’s changing for sure.

I’m kind of a tweener between a millennial and a Gen Xer. So to me, I still do like reviews. If I’m buying products and services, I will look at the stars, and I will read people’s opinions. That would be like my first criteria for a lot of younger millennials and Gen Z or Gen X or Gen Z.

What we’re seeing is they’re looking for the vibe, the ambiance. That’s their first priority, then it goes to the reviews and the five stars or whatever it is, so. Just an observation.

Mike Allton: That’s an excellent point. It’s a lot like Pinterest was for years. Where people were pinning pins, we would often refer to them as dreamers, right? Because they would be pinning things that they wanted to make, they wanted to do, or wanted to buy at some point in the future.

A luxury brand who says, “I don’t want to be on TikTok. That’s not my target audience.” You’re absolutely right. Those are the people that they want to get in front of so that maybe somebody can’t afford the Conrad in Manhattan today, but if they see the vibe there, if they see the magnificent vaulted ceilings and they see where they’re situated, that might be a hotel that they want to save up for and dream about going a year or two, five years down the road.

And you’re right. The entire search landscape is changing beneath our feet. I subscribe to Search Engine Journal and MarTech Search and these kinds of newsletters. People are freaking out, search marketers are totally freaking out because TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest and AI. Between those facets the Google blue links are going away. They just are.

So that’s changing. But to your point, social is an opportunity for luxury brands. So that’s a particular trend. And I’m glad you brought that up.

Tyler Anderson: We’ll touch on influencer marketing a second.

  • The other trend that we are seeing is the de-emphasis of the vanity metrics. Hotels have now been, and I think a lot of small businesses kind of feel this way, hammered. Originally, there was a land rush to be on social because it was quote-unquote free advertising, right?
  • And over time, they’re noticing a lot of times their organic reach has just been just decreasing, decreasing, decreasing, right? There’s a decrease in organic search results, but you still need to have it for the point we just made.
  • People still are going to go search. So maybe while your content will naturally show up in the feeds of your followers, you still want good-looking content. So when people are searching or they stumble across you or you’re running ads, because that’s a big proponent, maybe you’re running ads and then they click through to your profile. And the reason they do that is this kind of ties back to the point we’re just talking about. Search has gone down … By the time like a Gen Z person or a younger millennial is hitting your hotel’s website, they [are] pretty much in the bottom of the funnel.
  • They’ve already decided they’re going to your destination. They’re just debating between you and maybe one other hotel. They’re not looking at rate. They’re not going to your website to check out all your beautiful photos to read about the destination. They did all that preliminary research on social media, on TikTok, on Instagram, whatever may be.
  • So we’re seeing the trend that we’re seeing now is actually having that elevated content. Hotels are now kind of putting a different style to their content. They’re investing more in lifestyle content productions to almost make their social media be a replication of their website, just not as traditional like a website, like having more that kind of blend of influencers slash UGC style content, but maybe created by the hotel. So really, I guess what I’m trying to summarize, we’re seeing a bigger investment in original content by the hotels, to make their social feeds be an extension of their website, knowing that it’s not gonna maybe get the, the reach. It’s not going to get maybe the engagement and it’s maybe not going to get the follower count that they were maybe hoping for five, six, seven, eight years ago when they started all this.

So that’s another big shift that we’re seeing, too.

Mike Allton: I want to hone in on that a little bit because that is different from what we’re seeing on the retail side.

On the retail side, there’s definitely an emphasis on UGC. I was talking to a product manager at TikTok in a recent interview. They were showing us the statistics with this, but with that kind of content on the retail side, the emphasis is definitely on authentic like homemade-looking. I don’t know how else to put it, where it really looks like somebody made this video themselves, not in a production studio.

I gave the example where I was on TikTok personally and I saw somebody demonstrating a product and he was standing in his garage next to his car with a crappy overhead garage light. The garage door was closed, and he’s like using the back of his garage door as the background on which to frame this product. The product itself was cool. The production value of the video was really, really crappy. But the more I looked at it, the more I realized it was the brand that was creating that video.

It was just, to your point, a UGC style. But if I understood you correctly, it sounded to me like you said that:

With the hospitality edition with hotels, the focus is on UGC content but elevated in the production value.

Tyler Anderson: Yeah. And when I say elevated … I mean, that still can happen maybe for the ads. This probably is a perfect blend into the influencers, too.

Influencers or content creators? Yes, that’s a strategy, but it has to be done carefully. And we’ll get to that in a second. But one of the challenges or problems that a lot of the hotels find (and we find this, too) when you would work or partner with some of these creators, it’s all about them.

Like they show up and when they’re creating the content, it’s not really featuring the hotel. It’s not featuring the amenities. I get it. That creator maybe wants to be authentic to their audience, but there still is a ROI that the hotels are measuring. So it’s one thing if you’re working with that creator and you want that creator to create that content and then they’re posting on their channels, that’s fine.

But some of these hotels were also trying to do that as a means to getting more of their own content that they would want to post as well. Then all of a sudden, the content then gets off brand. Like you lose a little bit of your brand authenticity then too. So it’s like a double-edged thing. Like you kind of want it, but then you don’t want it too much.

So that’s why I was saying: Hotels are willing to kind of compromise some of those vanity metrics. Like, hey, we know that we may not get as much engagement on this post if we use UGC as if we do something that we create that’s maybe a little bit more elevated and is on brand. But it has still that portrayal of it.

So that’s why what I was saying: What we’ve done at our agency, we try to do a blend. So that’s why we’re training our team to be like content creators. But they’re going in to do it for the hotel, not for their own thing, because they’re not an influencer, right? So, that’s where we’ve invested a lot in our training.

Most of the time we’re shooting most of it on iPhones, and we teach them how to edit and cut that. So it has that UGC look.

In the pre-show you said who do you get your news from?

One of my favorite followers is Adam Mosseri. Do you ever follow his content? He’s the head of Instagram. I mean, he, to me, it’s straight from the horse’s mouth. Like he’s telling you what they’re doing, what they’re working on and all that. Well, if you watch and listen to his reels and stuff, it’s really interesting. When he’s talking about all these strategies and best practices and what you should be doing, I’d say, I’m not going to say all the time, but like 90 percent of the time, he says, “If you’re a creator, if you’re a creator, if you’re a creator …”

I actually want to do a mashup of his videos talking and never do I hear him say if you’re a business or if you’re a brand or whatever, you know, it’s always about if you’re creators.

And if you really think about it, like going back to my opening here, when I said, I came from traditional media:

“That’s just the world we live in now. Like Facebook is no different than what NBC was in the nineties. Like Facebook’s just a network. And as opposed to in the nineties, we’d watch Friends or we’d watch Seinfeld.

Now people are watching this creator or that creator. And so Facebook wants these creators to create all this content. They don’t want brands. Not saying we can’t be there, but it’s not their first choice.

The brands I’m tying this back here, I guess the trend though, is we are still seeing hotels that realize that. And so they’re like, all right, if we’re going to run ads and we’re going to do pay to play, and we want this stuff, we at least want our end result or our product representing our product the best.”

So that’s where they want to maybe have some elevated content. They realized they can’t just show the room that would be on the website with nothing in it. They need to have a couple in there, maybe having some drinks or having breakfast in bed or the children jumping on the bed.

So we try to stage some of that and make it more lifestyle with some models. And that’s why I say a big trend is like that lifestyle aspect to it, not just like an architectural shoot and then doing it from a UGC perspective.

I know I’m bouncing around here, but that’s kind of the trend. And then tying this back to influencers, I’m not saying influencer marketing doesn’t work (my personal opinion on this). And one of the things that we’re trying to shift for it is, you know, if you’re a hotel out there, I get it, especially if you’re a nice hotel.  For the listeners out there who aren’t a hotel, maybe you’re an influencer and you’re like, “Hey, I want to work with more hotels.”

Here’s my advice: The hotels are in no shortage. Good hotels, they’re in no shortage of getting influencers who want to work with them. They get hit up all the time, like all the time, especially if it’s a nice resort.

And I’m sorry if you’re an influencer, that request that you send saying, hey, you’re coming on your family vacation and you have X amount of followers and you get this amount of reach and you want a free hotel room and all this stuff because you’re 90 percent of the time? The hotels don’t see the ROI there.

So they can’t quantify it. Okay. That’s just the reality. And they get so many of those. And then furthermore, we see this, too. Mike, this cracks me up. Those same people sometimes are staying at one hotel on a Monday, Tuesday, and then Wednesday, Thursday, they’re staying at the competitor’s hotel across the street.

What kind of mixed message is that sending to the hotel, right? Or to your audience? Well, okay, well, am I supposed to stay at that hotel or that hotel? Right?

So, my advice: Play the long game. And this is what we’re trying to do more. We’re trying to have our hotels select partners and influencers that they feel represents the brand well, that has the audience that we think also would be interested in the brand.

Don’t look at it as a one-time engagement, but let’s try to do a multi-engagement. So, we’re trying to have it be at like a year, year and a half. Now you can tell the story with their audience. So the first one might be like, “Hey, we want to do a multi-campaign agreement with you. It’s going to be four hosted stays to be done over the next 18 months.”

Part of that, we want you to talk about the various phases of travel. So it might be: “Hey, I’m thinking of a girls’ trip with me and my friends. Like you can picture this on an influencer’s account. We’re going to go to San Diego. We’re like narrowing it down. Oh my God, I was thinking about some hotels.
I think I’m going to maybe do this hotel. It has this, this, this.”

Now, her audience is being told of the story, right? But then they’re also going to see it now a week before she goes. And then they’re going to see it while she’s there. Then they’re going to see the wrap-up. Then they’re going to see four months later: “I had so much fun in San Diego. You know what? I can’t wait to take my husband back for his birthday.”

You know, now you’re building that relationship. And it’s so interesting. Maybe it’s because I’m an old school marketer. Marketing hasn’t changed like the principles of marketing. Like it’s the same principles of marketing that were for whatever reason with social media, we get so caught up on the new shiny object.

And if you ever worked with in radio, television, print, the number-one thing they’d always talk about is frequency. People aren’t going to make a decision off of a frequency of one. They’re not going to hear one radio commercial and act on it. They’re going to hear your radio commercial maybe five, six, seven, eight times, then they act on it.

Why are we not approaching influencer marketing the same way?

That influencer needs to have a frequency with their audience, not three times in a 24 hour period. Oh, big deal. If they did three stories, we’re all going to disappear. But if you’re following an influencer and you’re hearing them talk about any product or service in January, then again, in April, then again, in September, now you’re building that credibility and trust.

Mike Allton: I 100% agree. Tyler, this has been amazing. The time’s going by so fast. I just have one more question I want to slip in here because you talked about the ROI of influencer marketing, which I do influencer marketing, so I understand that’s a challenge no matter who you are.

But what about organic social media?

How are you measuring the impact of social media on these businesses, on these hotels?

Tyler Anderson: So there’s a couple of ways. That’s a great question. It’s kind of a loaded question.

[It] depends on who our hotel partner is and what their goals are because each one of them may have different goals. For some of them, it is still, it pains me to say this, but you know, at the end of the day we can educate our clients. And sometimes they don’t know what they don’t know. But, for some of them, sometimes it’s still vanity metrics. They want to know, are we growing our social accounts? Are we getting engagement? Things like that.

For other ones, it could be something very transactional. They want to see that they’re actually getting heads and beds, room bookings. There are some restrictions we have just as if it’s a large big brand hotel. Obviously, Marriott or Hilton or Hyatt‘s not going to give us pixel data to track that.

We might have to get creative. We might come up with social media packages or deals only. So then we might only run them from social media. So maybe it’s like, “Hey, we have a triple-A special that we want to offer for this hotel” where they’re not advertising any other place, but social media, we might run it there. Then we can at least track the heads and beds …

So it’s like reach, impressions, cost per thousands, just those various metrics, which brings us back to traditional marketing. It really does depend on the hotel. And then I’m going to throw the wild card at you. That wild card metric. It’s just the eye test. And I know that sounds so stupid, but we have a lot of hotels who have ownership groups who literally just want to go to their Instagram feed, look at it and have this confidence that they love it.

Thanks for listening [and reading] the Social Pulse Podcast: Hospitality Edition, where we’re digging into the challenges, successes, and stories of social media and community professionals in the industry, just like you. Subscribe to gain valuable insights that you’ll be able to apply to your own work and social presence from each and every episode.

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