A recent Timeshare Board Members Association Conversations Series webinar featured a discussion of social media for legacy resorts. The panelists, pictured from left, were:
- Madeline Berges, Interval International’s vice president, digital marketing, consumer marketing.
- Laurie Hansen, Interval International’s director of business development.
- Matt Meyers, Star Island Resort’s executive vice president.
They joined Shep Altshuler, TBMA president. Following are edited highlights:
Importance of social media
Berges: Social media allows for instant interaction and customer feedback. It increases awareness about your brand and helps you stay connected and bolster your brand sentiment. A few of the popular social media platforms that you should be thinking about are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn for the B2B part of it. At Interval, we also have Pinterest.
Social media provides immense potential for resorts because people log into their favorite social media platforms daily, and they’re exposed to all kinds of companies. Social media helps boost visibility among your potential customers and, of course, your existing customer base.
First you need to get attention and build your brand awareness. Creating a business profile is extremely important. Start your profile on any of these platforms and be sure to communicate your expertise and authenticity. Customers are increasingly savvy and particular about whom they give their business and money to – it’s very important to establish that you are a knowledgeable resource on your property, as well as the destination where your property is located.
Make a positive impression by showing that you are trustworthy, knowledgeable, and approachable. Show authenticity—have a personality. While a lot of brands can be polite and empathetic to their audience, finding that voice that can connect with your customer can be more of a challenge.
Also encourage engagement and conversation. Try to encourage your audience to connect with your business and each other. You don’t want to oversell. That’s a turn-off to anybody in social media.
Then, of course, provide support. Instead of calling customer-service lines, many people now turn to their social media platform of choice for support. Create a system to track the customer’s comments, questions, and complaints, and respond as quickly as possible. Sometimes that might be within 24 hours.
Go out of your way to be positive and helpful. Listen to criticism, make your customers feel heard, and know when to respond or resolve things by contacting them privately.
Also encourage user-generated content. If you have hashtags, use them. Then use that content on your social media posts, and say, “This person was here and had a great experience.” That’s believable, very reliable content that other consumers love to see.
Keeping up with social media
Berges: To keep up with trends, my team and I are constantly reading social media news sites. Much like aggregators, these sites pull information from a variety of sources and summarize everything that’s going on in the social media world. Sites such as Mashable, Social Media Today, Social Media Examiner, and The Next Web are fabulous tools that we use at Interval on an ongoing basis to keep our fingers on the pulse of what’s going on. You can also subscribe and listen to podcasts.
YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine, and it offers some great tutorials. Some other social channels to think about are Examiner, Social Media, Agency, Ignite, and of course Mashable, as I mentioned earlier.
Social media marketing campaigns
Meyers: Purpose-driven curation of content and analytics are paramount in successfully implementing a social media marketing campaign in our digital economy. Every picture, story, and poll tells our story to the customer. Likewise, the customer’s interaction with our content provides data that enables us to better understand our customers and determine what they want and what is important to them.
You can then design marketing campaigns to give customers what they seek by predicating marketing decisions on “data-backed facts,” not theory. So, whether you’re using the browser cookies that are soon to be obsolete, or the more robust server-to-server API or Conversion API, a Facebook pixel is placed on your website and your booking engine. The pixel allows you to track people who click on your ad and what they do afterwards.
This allows you, for example, to remarket to those people who show the intent to buy or create lookalike audiences to push advertisements to people with a similar digital footprint. This allows you to scale your business exponentially and become even more efficient over time.
We further test ads with slightly different pictures and copy, and have them compete against one another. We funnel ad spend. The strongest ads gauge the overall success of our campaigns. I then look daily at cost per click and revenue per click.
The importance of our social media marketing campaign was never more important than during the pandemic. When many resorts reduced their social media ad spend, we continued to use data-driven techniques to target those still wishing to travel.
First, we established clear data markers to better understand the COVID-19 concerns and travel patterns of potential vacationers during the pandemic. We then rolled out our “vacation with peace of mind’ campaign to target that dwindling subset of consumers still wishing to travel.
Our carousel ads and video ads focused on the top three traveler concerns of potential vacationers according to our data: commitment to health and safety, flexible cancelation, and best rates with extra benefits direct. So, we gave some people complimentary upgrade spa discounts, free drinks, and what have you. Every picture, every ad, every survey, had a purpose. Those with the best engagement were leveraged with the greatest use.
With a budget of just $2,500 a month, we were able to increase our year-over-year direct booking revenue by 25 percent during the pandemic and create $2 million in additional revenue.
By the end of this year, we will be living in a cookie-less world with new privacy. Data tracking restrictions are being put in place. Like Google and Apple, others are likely to follow, so while Conversion API will provide a solution to this change, social media advertising is an ever-evolving platform. You need a team in place with the knowledge, creativity, and determination to evolve with it.
Social media marketing tools
Hansen: This can sound pretty overwhelming, but Interval can help support you with your social media and communications efforts. Over the last year, Interval has enhanced its digital capabilities and we now have even more tools to help you engage more effectively with your audiences.
As mentioned earlier, good content is the key to any successful communications or social media campaign. So, this is where Interval can step in to help.
To assist homeowners’ associations and resort managers in fostering owner engagement and highlighting the benefits of an Interval membership, we have a variety of professionally designed and written pieces that can be used for owner newsletters, social media efforts, meetings, presentations, websites, and other communications needs. We also offer half and full-page articles that are easy to request and access via our website – resortdeveloper.com. Finally, we have a series of digital publications to help clients stay up to date on industry trends and keep Interval members informed on ways to enjoy their membership.
Your owners are your biggest advocates. Encourage them to promote your property. Nothing is better than word of mouth, particularly on social media. Keep your owners engaged through great content, speak with them as frequently as you can, and of course, listen to their feedback.
If you want to get on our mailing list, let me know. We’re here to help guide you through that process.
Pay-per-click advertising
Berges: Pay-per-click advertising can be elusive. However, you can drill down into some aspects of it with the use of keywords. You can start with a small budget, and once you’ve been able to capitalize on that, you can decide how you would like to continue to move forward.
The verbiage that you use is critically important. In fact, testing your keywords is strongly encouraged. Whichever keywords seem to work, you should update or optimize your content accordingly.
When thinking of your budget, you can continue to expand and tweak your budget in order to get the highest engagement. The beauty is that you don’t have to worry about your budget getting out of control. You can tell Facebook, for example, exactly how much you want to spend.
Let’s say your budget is $100 for one week. To ensure you don’t spend that in one day, Facebook has an ads manager that helps you set your budget. Once you set your budget, Facebook algorithms are able to determine what time of day to present your ads to get the highest engagement. It’s a free tool on your business account. You can set budget limits, a daily maximum and/or daily minimum. You can also target your demographics—a certain audience in a certain location—so your money is being well spent.
For more information visit Interval International at intervalworld.com