Hi, this is Tom from O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing. I’d like to do a demonstration of how conversational marketing actually works on the weddings pages of an independent hotel website. However, before I get into the the live demo, I just want to review real quickly as to what’s happening today. A bride to be typically comes to a website and clicks on the wedding navigation. She’ll take a look at the overview, the venue itself, the menus and all this other information that she needs to get her to the point where she decides to request for proposal, then she clicks into the RFP page.

In today’s RFP form she’s asked a bunch of questions like name, email address, street address, number of guests and is the date flexible. She submits the form and then that information goes to an inbox on property and somebody from the sales and catering department will get back to them to begin. This is the first stages of qualification. That’s what’s happening today, but let’s say the same bride to be comes into a conversational marketing environment like this page.

The conversation immediately opens up and this is where we start to engage. We say, “hello, thank you for visiting”, then there is a number of questions that she can go through. If you have photos and videos, she can view sample menu but because she’s already decided in this situation to request an RFP, she’s interested in an estimate.

So we move from engage into qualification. We start with, we’d like to know who we’re chatting with. We’re chatting with the bride. How did you hear about us? We’re past guests. What year are you looking to get married, in 2024. And we’d like to get married in September in the fall. How many guests are you expecting at your wedding. She can plugin 150 guests. Click continue below to get your estimate. So now we’ve completed our qualification standpoint and we’ve served up for proposal.

So in this situation, based on your details, our estimate for your waiting as $75,000, so one or two things can happen here. The bride to be can decide, well, this is way outside my budget. So the sales process ends because she knows that she can’t afford this. Or the other thing can happen is yes, this does fall onto my budget and I’m ready to schedule a tour of the space. Now, a couple of things happen here. First, nobody is wasting any time, the sales person gets to understand right away that this is not a qualified lead, and then the the bride to be also has made a decision that it’s not something that she can do. But the second thing that happens is we move her from qualification into conversion. At this point, the calendar gets served up and we make a decision to say, I’d like to meet, to do a site tour of the property on Monday, May 9th at 11:00 AM, Plug in your email address and continue.

So what’s happening now is the the website visitor has gotten an email to say, you’re all set to do the site tour. And at the same time that email confirmation has gone on the calendar of the sales person on the property. So that’s difference between conversational marketing and what’s happening in real time versus the traditional reports of a form fill.

If you’ve any other questions, please feel free to head on over to orourkehospitality.com, click on Insights and choose the topic conversational.

Thank you for watching. I appreciate your time.