Introduction
Social media influencers have emerged as a powerful asset in modern marketing strategies. Their ability to connect with vast and highly engaged audiences often surpasses the reach of traditional media and conventional tactics like email campaigns or newsletters. Given this, it's crucial for hotels to integrate influencers into their marketing plans. Providing influencers with the right tools to facilitate seamless bookings for their followers and accurately tracking the impact of these efforts on revenue are essential steps in maximizing the benefits of this approach.
With Clock PMS+, you can accomplish all of this in just a few simple steps.
What to Set up
To effectively integrate influencers into your marketing strategy using Clock PMS+, you need to set up the following key elements:
- Company Profile for the Influencer
- Company Contract
- Deep Link through the Link Builder
Let's get into the details of each.
Company profiles
To start, set up a company profile for each influencer you work with.
- navigate to menu Company -> New company.
- enter the name of the Influencer as a Company name and optionally enter some contact information
- scroll down to section 'WRS' and enter the code you want to associate and set the role as 'Agent'
- we recommend to also set Marketing source and channel
- create the profile
Important: DO NOT enter contact persons!!!
Company Contract
Next step is to create a company contract with the rates that the audience of the influencer can book.
Full details on creating and using Company Contracts can be read HERE, however, in short the steps needed are:
- create the rates that will be part of the contract with their respective (discounted) prices
- create and attach a TAG to those rates (press the '+' icon to create the tag, then select it)
- switch to the Company Profile, scroll down to the 'Company contract' section and press Edit
- select 'New', enter a name for the contract (e.g. Influencers), set an expiry date (if applicable), select the TAG and press ADD. Save.
With this, you are now done. You will have special rates, part of a company contract through the TAG and associated with this company profile.
Specifics
- It is not necessary to publish the contract rates on the BookDirect. They will be pulled when the company code is used.
- You can use the same contract for many Profiles (Influencers)
- If you have different pricing agreements with the different Influencers you must create separate rates, tag them with a different tag and create the different contracts.
- The rates that will be presented to the guests are only the ones added to the contract. Guests will not see any other publicly available rates.
- The other publicly available rates can also be presented to the audience, however, in that case, all public rates should also be tagged with the TAG for the contract.
- This will require more maintenance. as any new rates you publish to BookDirect must also be tagged so they are also available to the influencers' followers.
Deep Links
Using Deep Links, generated through the Link Builder, is highly recommended because they allow followers of the influencer to access special rates and complete their bookings more easily and quickly.
By leveraging Deep Links, the influencer’s message to their followers can be as simple as, “Follow this link to book at exclusive discounted prices,” rather than the more cumbersome, “Follow this link and use code INFL-A to get your special discounted prices.” This streamlined approach eliminates the need for followers to manually enter a code, reducing the risk of errors such as misspelling, and enhances the overall user experience, leading to higher conversion rates.
To create a deep link:
- Navigate to menu Web -> BookDirect - Link Builder
- Select the respective 'Company code'
- Optionally select a language in which the BookDirect to open when following the link
- Copy the generated link and provide to the Influencer for them to use and distribute across their platforms
Tracking generated revenue, number of bookings and other statistics
By using the outlined approach you can easily track the performance of each Influencer - generated revenue, number of bookings, nights, and much more. All that information can be obtained through the following segmentation reports, by selecting the 'Agent' segment.
- Booking Segmentation Report
- Charge Segmentation Report
- Bednights Report
