Hi, this is Tom from O’Rourke and today I would like to answer a two-part question. The first question being, “what is the definition of conversational marketing” and second, “how does it get applied to my hotel?”

So, to answer the first part of the question, the definition of conversational marketing is that it’s a customer centric, dialogue driven approach to marketing. It allows for one-to-one interactions on the website in real time on such platforms as live chat, chat bots, and other messaging apps, whether it’s WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, Instagram messenger, and so on.

So, the next question is how do I apply this to my hotel? If I’m a hotel owner or a director of marketing of an independent property, or I’m a corporate marketing person at a hotel management company, I’m going to want to know how does this get applied and what are the benefits? What I’ve done here is I’ve put together a graphic that will help explain this in more detail. I think the first thing to understand here is we believe that here at O’Rourke, that conversational marketing should be applied on your wedding pages with the business goal of driving site tours. So, what do we mean when I say that? Well, let’s take a look at the graphic.

This is how we’re doing it today. A bride to be comes to the wedding page on the website. She takes a look at the content, decides to fill out a form when she fills out the form, that information goes to an inbox on property. Then somebody in the sales and catering department will enter that information into the CRM. Once the information gets into the CRM, then the conversation tries to get started in the form of emails, go over back. Maybe some phone calls are made and eventually when the connection is made, they decide to set up site tour time, or they decide that, this venue was not for this prospect in the first place. Then the sales process comes to an end.

This is how we’re doing it today. It’s a pretty arduous process and it doesn’t really have to be done like this. Now that we’re in the era of, of conversational.

So, what’s happened here. What’s really happened is if you look at the sales process overall, what we’re trying to do is engage, qualify, and convert. So, what this process that we’re using today is it just allows us to potentially engage. We can’t engage right now because all we’ve done is we’ve filled in a form of send it to an inbox.

Now let’s flip it over to conversational marketing and talk about what happens. This time, the same bride to be enters, that wedding page and the conversation begins. Maybe the bot fires open, ask a question and we’re starting to engage right away. Once we, once we engage and ask a preliminary question, then we start throwing out other questions like, would you like to see a floor plan? What’s the date of your wedding? How many guests do you expect? And we can actually help them calculate an estimate here in real time.

Now this does a couple of things by, by calculating the wedding in real time, the potential bride knows there and then if this is the right venue from a budgeting standpoint, without sharing the budget with the director of sales through a form. What are we doing here? We’re qualifying. So here, the bot opens, we engage here. We qualify the prospect all the way through. And then the final piece is that we drop the calendar in the conversation and we book a site tour.

So, if you compare traditional with conversational, traditional has begun the process of engagement, but it hasn’t yet engaged. The conversational piece has engaged, qualified, and converted in real time.

So that’s difference between traditional and conversational.