Cracking the Code: Essential Platforms for Hospitality Social Media ROI

Imagine a world where your hospitality social media presence isn’t just a checkbox on your marketing list, but a powerhouse driving bookings, guest engagement, and brand loyalty.

Picture your restaurant’s Instagram feed not only making mouths water but also filling tables night after night. Envision a digital strategy where every post, every tweet, and every Reel translates directly into measurable ROI. This isn’t just a dream. It’s the reality that savvy hospitality brands are creating every day with the right social media tools and strategies.

But how do they do it? What are the secrets to turning likes into bookings, followers into loyal guests, and social media buzz into bottom-line results?

Our Social Pulse Podcast: Hospitality Edition guest Eddie Garrison joins Agorapulse’s Chief Storyteller Mike Allton. Eddie has helped countless hotels and restaurants navigate the complex world of social media, turning online interactions into real-world success stories from leveraging user-generated content to harnessing the power of emerging platforms. These insights have helped brands, large and small, maximize the success of their social ROI. He’s here to share his wealth of knowledge, practical tips, and insider strategies that can elevate your social media game and drive tangible results for your hospitality business.

[Listen to the full episode below, or read along for the transcript of the Social Pulse: Hospitality Edition, powered by Agorapulse. Try it for free today.]

Mike Allton: Eddie, I appreciate you coming on here because we’ve known each other for a while. I’ve known about your work in the industry and I’ve known for a while. I need to get you on this show and share some of your insights and your experience.

Could you start by just sharing your perspective on what I would call the current state of social media marketing in this industry?

Eddie Garrison: Yeah, I look at it twofold, Mike.

One is that there are people that understand the power of social and digital marketing and especially social media platforms to help build their brand awareness to help actually drive bookings—be that putting heads in beds, putting butts in seats in restaurants, or even booking transportation.

A lot of people don’t realize that hospitality isn’t just hotels and restaurants. It’s bars. It’s event spaces. It’s transportation companies.

You have the people who understand the power and the reach that social and digital marketing can do for their hospitality brand.

And then you have the others very similar to what you touched on in the opening where it’s just a checkbox for their marketing campaign.

• Now the hospitality brands that are maximizing and utilizing social media are seeing more bookings. They are seeing more guests. They’re seeing more dining reservations, their buses and vans are full of people trying to get to these hotels and restaurants and event spaces to host their conferences, their events, their mastermind groups, and there is a huge separation, and you can see it in the content that they post.
• You can see it in the copy that they post, and you can just see it when they have somebody that says, “Oh, I’ve seen these job postings before where it’s like we want a front desk person and marketing manager.” Those two do not go together at all. So the ones that actually bring on someone like myself [who] has a track record and [is] in the niche of hospitality specifically to run their social and digital media marketing campaigns.
• Those are the ones that are beating out everybody that’s just relying on O.T.A.S., which just stands for online travel agencies. Those are the ones that are seeing direct bookings come from digital and social media marketing. Those are the ones that are seeing the higher end and more reservations coming into their restaurant because they understand how to leverage and utilize the power of social media marketing.

Mike Allton: And you’re absolutely right. There’s a lot more to this industry than just hotels and restaurants. We did an entire episode earlier with Glenn Haussmann talking about events and event venues—and that’s important to keep in mind, not just because of who we’re talking to as brands working in the hospitality industry, but the businesses in this industry need to understand that they’re more than just the one thing that they might think of.

If you’re a hotel, that means you have event space, and you can be catering to businesses that [are] looking for those kinds of venues. So that’s a great reminder to keep in mind.

Common Hospitality Social Media Misconceptions

What are some of the other misconceptions in hospitality, particularly when it comes to things like social media ROI in this industry?

Eddie Garrison: One of the biggest things that I run into is everybody gets caught up on the I in ROI, which everybody knows stands for Return On Investment.

They think the investment is only monetary, and that’s all they want to see. And that’s all they care about. “I’m paying you thousands of dollars a month to do this. And how do we know what that ‘I’ is? How do we know what the return on our investment is?”

Well, the simple fact is the investment part can be one of threefold. Yes, the investment can be the monetary value. But how about this?

A lot of people don’t understand that. Let’s just say that you’re a marketing agency and you charge $5,000 a month, right? So $60,000 a year to partner and work with these hospitality brands, well, now they’re like, “Well, we have somebody that can do that. Why can’t they just do that again?” It goes back to having someone at your front desk trying to run your entire digital and social media marketing campaign. They’re like, “Why don’t we just hire you as an employee?”

Well, candidly, you can’t afford me. The last job was well over $200,000 a year. I’m not going to be your director of marketing for 45 grand. And that’s what I see. So a lot of people, the investment part again, comes back to those threefold. It’s going to be the investment of the original income that you see from your investment that you put into social and digital media marketing. The investment could also be time. I am selling you back the one thing that you cannot get more of, and that is time to run your business, and your business runs on your guest satisfaction.

So, if you’re worried about chasing these trends and trying to learn how to post on Twitter 20 times a day, or what the newest algorithm shift is on LinkedIn and Facebook, you are neglecting your actual moneymakers, your revenue drivers, who are your guests? The investment again can come back to knowledge.

• Are you investing in your own knowledge plate?
• Are you reading the books?
• Are you listening to the podcast?
• Do you know how the Facebook algorithm works?
• Did you even know there was a Facebook algorithm?
• Did you know the Instagram algorithm is different?
• Did you know Reels are better than Stories and Stories on Facebook don’t work and only don’t work on Instagram?

All these are huge misconceptions, but everybody—especially in the hospitality industry—the wall that we come up against with that return on investment is, okay, I’m paying you $5,000 a month. When can I expect to see that return come back in the form of revenue? And when I say “when they expect it,” they mean they want it the next day. And that just doesn’t happen.

As a marketer not even in the hospitality industry but just marketing in general, you have to be able to educate and be very clear. Open with your clients to be like, “Okay, we are spending this on this amount. We’re doing this amount on Google ads, we’re doing this amount on Facebook ads, and we’re going to track these. We have KPIs that we’re looking for and trying to drive more people to your booking site to stay off OTAs. We’re trying to get people to book more spa treatments while they’re here at your hotel.”

So educating them, being clear and open with them about what your KPIs are.

And this may mean monthly calls. This may mean weekly calls, but that’s how we combat everybody’s stress over that investment, which is the return on investment, which is always coming back to monetary value.

Mike Allton: I’m glad you mentioned KPIs cause we’re definitely going to get back to those in a moment. I loved how you stressed putting the customers first.

We had a terrific conversation with Mike Scott from Potter’s Resorts earlier in the show. And he was sharing the story about how during the pandemic, like every other hotel (they’re a hotel resort in the Southeast side of England on the coast) like every other hotel in the pandemic, they had to shut down, right? They had to send all their guests home and turn guests away. And they had 80 percent of their booked guests say, “Keep our deposits, keep our money. We’ll come back when you reopen.”

If you think back to March 2020, nobody had any idea when or if anything would reopen. So that was a tremendous amount of faith. It was all about their focus on community and giving back to their community. They have a metric that they use to track their customer success score; they’re hitting 99-100% over and over and over again.

That shows in the value and consistency of their business success.

Which Hospitality Social Media Garners Best Results

You also talked about a bunch of different platforms, which I love. So that’s what I want to talk about next. You talked about Instagram and Facebook and so on in your experience:

Which hospitality social media platforms today seem to be delivering the best results for the brands and this industry that you’re working with, and why do you think that is?

Eddie Garrison: With each of these platforms comes a very specific audience.

• Content on Facebook for different generations. The content that you would post on Facebook may not resonate with the audience that you’re trying to target on Instagram. What I mean by that is Facebook predominantly has a little bit older of an audience. So say people that are 35+ or maybe even 40+—I’ll go with 35+ where Instagram is more of the younger people, the Gen Z’s that the millennials and I guess Gen Alphas—they’re going to see a predominantly younger audience. And, for some, a platform like TikTok is even younger than them.
• Pinpointing target audience. Brands—especially hospitality brands—when they’re creating their content calendars, and they’re creating their marketing strategies, and their campaigns need to be very cognizant of what target audience they’re trying to pinpoint with that content more along the lines of what they’re going to post on certain social media platforms.
• Facebook research. Now, obviously, Facebook is the granddaddy of them all right now in the social media platform space. People are researching on Facebook more than they’re researching on Instagram. So you may have a little bit longer form content on Facebook that dives into a little bit more brand awareness and say, “Did you know this? We have this, we have that. We have a spa here. Did you know you could get 20 percent off at the spa if you book more than three nights?” while on Instagram—especially with the uprise of Reels, over the past two years—people on that target audience want more quick and concise content. They need more eye-catching content.
• Quicker content. I am not a firm believer that the attention span is becoming shorter. With the youth and just everybody in general. I don’t believe that whatsoever. I believe their attention span is less when the content doesn’t resonate with them.
• The one big thing. It doesn’t matter if you’re posting on TikTok, it doesn’t matter if you’re posting on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. If your target audience [or] your potential guests cannot see themselves in the content that you’re producing, they’re going to scroll right past you [and] find the hotel or the restaurant that has somebody that looks like them, sounds like them, acts like them. They’re going to get the booking over to you.

Tools and Tactics to Know

Mike Allton: If we’re focusing on creating vertical video content for Reels and TikTok and story content and that kind of thing, what are some tools that you can recommend either for those tactics or others that hospitality social media managers in particular really need to be using and aware of?

Eddie Garrison: I’ll talk about short-form video content ’cause I’ve been on a big deep dive into this lately. If anybody follows me on my social media, you see a lot of short-form video content from me.

One of my undergraduate degrees was in graphic design. I’ve worked in Adobe for 24 years. I’m very comfortable in their environment. I’m very comfortable with their platforms. So when I’m filming short-form video content on my mobile phone, I use Adobe Premiere Pro Rush. Now you are not trained in graphic design and video editing, apps like CapCut and Video Rama are two of my favorite ones to use. They’re very intuitive. They’re very easy to use. And a lot of them actually have some kind of pre-made templates and cuts that are going to be eye-catching to your audience.

Now, when it comes to video content, yes, the video quality matters, but a lot of people—if they can’t hear you on videos, they’re not going to stick around to watch you. So you can go out and buy a $60,000 Arri, or Red camera, all the lighting, the best Sennheiser microphones, everything. If you don’t have that good quality audio, it doesn’t matter what the video looks like, but it does need to be eye-catching. They need to understand what you’re actually looking at.

I like the quick-cut video types that are real eye-catching and what I would consider thumb-stopping content—but don’t have a cut every two or three seconds! You have to be cognizant [that] you don’t know the physical limitation or the mental capacity of somebody that could trigger something in their physical health that could trigger a seizure that could trigger something in them that actually physically hurts them or leads them to harm.

You have to be very careful of how you put this stuff together. Loud music, big sound effects. You want to stay away from those yet. And I know everybody wants to jump on the trending audio so they can get more reach. But if you’re reaching the wrong audience, reach isn’t really something that I look at. I want to reach the right audience, but yeah, as far as when it comes to like short-form video content, again, if you’re not a trained video editor, or even if you are, and you just want something more simple, CapCut, InShot, and Video Rama are probably the top three that I use.

And if you do have a mobile phone and you’re doing it, I highly recommend looking at an app called Filmic Pro. It basically turns your mobile phone into a DSLR or a video camera where you’re able to actually do different things with the exposure and the ISO. You can actually change the color pattern of your phone with CMYK wheels where you’re able to adjust the coloring of your phone. Your mobile phone camera doesn’t have that capability. This is a paid app obviously, but if you’re going to be doing a lot of video content from your mobile devices, Filmic Pro is one of the best apps out there to do so.

Using UGC Content

Mike Allton: Speaking of audience, let’s talk about how brands in this space can actually use their audiences.

How does UGC content play into that? How effective can it be, and how can we use that to boost our social media ROI?

Eddie Garrison: User-generated content, unfortunately, is the most underused piece of content in the hospitality industry when it comes to social media marketing. And it’s funny because it’s free. Somebody else is doing it for you so you don’t even have to create it. It’s already created.

What better way to get word-of-mouth marketing than using somebody else’s content who took the time to post pictures or videos about your hotel property, about your restaurant, about your event space than someone who’s actually stayed at your hotel or ate at your restaurant?

And I’m here to tell you I don’t care if you hired the best marketing agency in the world that has the best CMO and the best digital content creators. Nobody cares what the hotel says about itself. No hotel stands on top of a mountain and goes, “Hey, everybody! We are pretty good.”

Nobody cares about that.

Every hotel [and] every restaurant’s going to say they’re the best. They’ve got the best beds, the best sushi, and the best pizza. Your target audience, your potential guests care about what other people’s experiences at your property have been. So when somebody takes the time to post a video or a picture or even a customer testimonial on Google or Facebook or wherever they have it, use that user-generated content to actually form your own word-of-mouth marketing from these people.

Word-of-mouth marketing is still the best marketing. Your friends are going to believe your friends over the restaurant. That’s what they’re going to do. The restaurant’s going to say they’re the best, but they may not be the best. Your friend may have had a great experience and you didn’t even know about it.

And now you do because the restaurant is scouring the social media platforms, or they should be because they could use something like Agorapulse to do social listening.

And, yes, that is a shameless plug for everybody here, but the social listening component of Agorapulse is great because you can put keywords into “find” and they’re going to see when everybody is talking about your hotel. Everybody is talking about your restaurant because a lot of people aren’t savvy enough to know how to tag you on Instagram or how to tag you on TikTok or any other social media platforms.

You have to proactively go out and look for this content. But, again, user-generated content is the digital form of word-of-mouth marketing.

Like I said at the beginning of this kind of semi-rant about UGC, you should be using it. It’s so underutilized in the hospitality industry.

I want to jump back to something I said at the beginning of this show: If you look at people, they want to see themselves in the content. Because if they’re a family of four, they don’t want to see two 18-year-old or two 21-year-old girls drinking in the pool bar. That’s not them. That’s not the family vacation they want.

But if they see somebody else’s family that’s of similar age—maybe even the same race or economic background or whatever—they see them enjoying the pool. Then all of a sudden they’re like, “Hey, you know what? This isn’t a photoshoot. You know, Mike and his family are at this pool at Disney, we want to stay there because we saw how much fun they were having.”

UGC (user-generated content) is this generation’s version of word-of-mouth marketing.

Can you simply share to your own social profiles that content? Are there any rules or stipulations where you might need their permission? You might even need to compensate them for using it in a certain way. How do you approach that with your clients?

Eddie Garrison: We approach it in a couple of different ways. If they tag my brand or the brand that I’m working with that is giving us permission to use that, they’re actively seeking us out. They’re tagging us. They’re putting us in that location pin. And, to me, I find it very ethical to just be able to repost that.

Now, if I’m looking around Instagram and I see somebody that doesn’t tag us or tag the brand that I’m working with, I will reach out to him to directly to ask him if I can use that picture or that video that they posted and always tag them. Obviously, they’re on that platform. They may not be on Facebook, but always give credit.

Now it gets a little bit more tricky if you’re talking about minors and pictures and things like that because a lot of people may not want—yes, I know they posted a picture of their kids, but they did that on their own accord. They may not want you to use their children’s—and I’d use this term lightly, I don’t mean to exploit them—but exploiting their kids and their likeness to help promote your brand.

So if there are minors or some that can be difficult to ascertain the actual age of, just reach out to them, ask them, and say, “Hey, you know what? Thank you so much for allowing us to use that picture. Here’s 15 percent off, or here’s a $20 restaurant credit the next time that you visit our place.” So just make sure that you do have permission if they didn’t tag you in it.

But, again, I still think it’s ethical marketing if they tag your business in a post that you are able to use to promote your hospitality brand.

Effective Hospitality Social Media Strategies

Mike Allton: So, Eddie, regardless of what industry you’re in, we all want engaging social media content. We want to see that our audience is seeing our posts that they’re liking and commenting on, and they’re demonstrating that they’re interested in that content. It makes them more likely to see content in the future. It makes other people more likely to see those posts. So that’s all great.

But how do we turn that engagement into actual bookings for the business? (Because at the end of the day, we need butts in the seat somehow.) What are some of the strategies that you’ve found most effective for converting that kind of social media engagement into actual business results?

Eddie Garrison: I’m going to share what I have: I didn’t help work with them directly, but I helped work with their marketing department and it was a hotel chain here in Orlando. There’s a thing in hospitality, especially in the hotel industry, in hotel space where they want direct bookings over OTA bookings, and OTA just simply stands for online travel agencies.

Now when people book through an OTA, they probably seem like they’re getting a better deal, and they are the people that are booking are most likely getting a better deal—but there are so many fees on the back end, and they’re actually undercutting the hospital, the hotel property.

Hotels want direct bookings because they’re going to see more of the revenue come in directly to them. So when you’re looking at creating your content calendar and your marketing campaigns, I’m just going to keep going with this specific example of a hotel offering your guests something in return for booking directly on your website.

This particular hotel was called Avanti. They have a few different properties here in Orlando. And if you were going to book directly on their website, they were giving those guests 20 percent off to their spa, or they were giving them a $20 meal voucher to eat, and dine in their own property restaurant.

Now, this does a couple of different things. It’s enticing the potential guests to book directly with them because they feel that they’re getting something for free, even though that’s probably baked into the price of the room—but obviously that’s the back end, we don’t need to tell them that—but if they look and say, “Oh, well, It’s the same price as if I’m booking on Google or I’m not Google. It’s the same price if I’m booking on Expedia, but I’m not getting a 20 percent off coupon for my wife to go to the spa. I’m not getting that 20 food credit. So I’m going to book on Avanti’s website directly and get that discount.”

Again, it may not even really be that much of a discount, but people like to think that they’re getting something or getting over on the company.

Try Agorapulse for Free

Being able to have an offer in place is going to help drive those bookings.

Now I like to tie in those offers with what we just discussed about user-generated content and word-of-mouth marketing in the digital age. So, when you do that offer, and these people are checking in, and while they’re at your hotel, they’re going to say, “Hey, we stayed at this hotel, check it out. We got a free $20 to eat!” They’re going to post that on Facebook, and people are going to see it. You can repurpose that into user-generated content.

Hopefully, those people are going to leave some sort of review or customer testimonial on Google or on Facebook or wherever you can then create a graphic for that, post it on all of your socials, and say, “Hey, you know, Mike Allton said, that they couldn’t believe that they got a $20, you know, free meal voucher, and that helped pay for breakfast every morning for their kids before they went to the theme parks.” And that just becomes shareable content. It becomes that word-of-mouth marketing for your brand because all you’re doing is offering them something there.

Now if you do something like the $20 meal voucher, a family of three or four is going to spend more than $20 anyway. So, yes, you may sacrifice $20, but if you could say, “I’m going to give you $20, but they’re going to book for five nights. And now instead of not staying at our property, all we had to do was give them $20 and they booked five nights at $250 a night.” I will gladly take and give somebody $20 if they give me a thousand.

So having some sort of a valuable offer, one that is almost instant, right? When they check in, it’s going to be great because what that does is you gave them $20 one time.

Now they’re staying at your hotel and spending a thousand dollars for the stay, but also they know how convenient the restaurant is. So that $20 now turns into every day. They’re going to breakfast. You only give them that one $20. It’s not every day. It’s just one $20 meal voucher, but they see the convenience of it. Then it’s going to drive more revenue for your hotel because they’re going to be dining in your restaurant instead of leaving your hotel to go eat at some quick service restaurant and give them their money. You want to keep as much money on your property as possible. So many of these value-based offers that you can do on the front end, it’s actually going to help you generate more revenue on the backend. Once they book directly with your website and not an OTA website.

Trends for Hospitality Brands

Mike Allton: Now we’ve been talking a lot about Facebook and Instagram.

Are there any other platforms emerging social media platforms, trends, or features that you think hospitality brands in particular should be paying attention to?

Eddie Garrison: I don’t necessarily believe there’s some new platform out there because, let’s face it, Mike, all the platforms basically do the same thing—I mean, they all have basically the same features. It’s just you’re targeting a different audience on each of those platforms.

A few things that I want to talk about are in the hospitality industry, it’s not just about the consumers. Hospitality businesses also need employees. They need team members. They need allied partners. So something like LinkedIn newsletters for these marketing directors or food and beverage managers need to leverage a LinkedIn newsletter.

Don’t miss out on brand new, piping hot episodes of Social Pulse: Hospitality Edition just for you.

The reason I stress those and love them so much is they actually create four different pieces of content for you. So you post it as a LinkedIn newsletter, and it stays under your newsletter. Then it’s going to create a post on your main feed on LinkedIn. It then has the capability to send that link to a direct message on your LinkedIn contact list. And to subscribe to your newsletter on LinkedIn, everybody has to put in their email address or their email address is tied to the LinkedIn account. It then sends them a notification in their email, that you just posted a new LinkedIn newsletter.

So by doing one thing on LinkedIn, once a week, you’re actually generating four pieces of content, not only on LinkedIn, but you’re getting right into their email inbox as well.

Now, when it comes to creating content on these different platforms, again, you have to realize that the audience differs from platform to platform.

• Instagram is a visual platform. People on Instagram don’t want these lengthy, copy, heavy-based posts. They want images. They want short-form video content. Make it as visual and splashy as possible because we want them to get back to that thumb-stopping content.
• Facebook, on the other hand, you can go a little bit more lengthy on the copy. Try not to do it too much, but you can go a little bit more lengthy on the copy. And again, it’s going to be more research based on Facebook. You always want to drive them. You want to give them awareness, but you always want to drive them off the platform as much as we all love social media. It’s just.
• As much as social media gives the world at our fingertips, you still want to get your potential guests off that platform and onto your own real estate as quickly as possible. You know, blog posts, top five things to remember when you visit Disney, top five things that you know that you can’t bring on airplanes, anything that’s going to be very educational based and very brand awareness based that is longer form content is going to really, really work on Facebook.
• Short-form content visuals are killing it obviously on Instagram because that’s a visual platform and everybody knows the rise of TikTok.
• But again, here’s the thing, too. When you have to realize you’re marketing to all of these target audiences, Mom and Dad may be paying for the vacation, but the 12, 13, and 14-year-old kids are on TikTok. So, if they see your property on TikTok and they know that they’re about to go on vacation in Orlando, they’re going to be searching Orlando, and they’re going to see all these videos pop up.
• You want to tailor that content to the younger generation, the kids of the families that are doing the research on Facebook, and little Bobby or little Susie is going to run up and go, “Mom, Dad, look at this pool at this hotel!” They’re probably going to jump on Facebook and look at the hotel.

This content works symbiotically across all social media platforms. Just be very conscious about the audience that you’re targeting with your content. It all needs to work together, but in the end, it needs to be about brand awareness and driving those people to your website as quickly as possible.

Measuring Success and Impact

How do we know what’s working? How are you measuring the success? And how are you measuring the business impact of all of this social media activity?

Eddie Garrison: KPIs and data, data, data. If you are not living in your data when you hear marketers stand on their soapbox and on preacher’s corner and they’re saying, “Listen to your audience. Do you know what we really mean?” We’re listening to our audience through the numbers, through data, Agorapulse.

Again, the reporting and Agorapulse are unparalleled. It gives me so much insight into what’s working, why it’s working, and how it’s working because I’ll hear a lot of people say, “Oh, well, if I post a link on Facebook, they’re suppressing my reach.” No, they’re not. That’s just such a marketing myth. I can’t even believe that it even exists anymore in 2024.

If somebody finds your content appealing enough to click on it, they’re going to click on it. If they don’t, they’re not. It has nothing to do with the algorithm. The algorithm isn’t a person. It doesn’t have feelings. The algorithm runs on data, it runs on numbers.

The more people that engage with your content, the more people are going to see the content.

Now, if you’re looking at your data and you want to see how something is performing, or if something is doing what you intended it to do, you need to know the overall goal of that piece of content, is it to actually drive bookings right then and there? Honestly, social media isn’t going to do that unless it’s a restaurant, maybe like an Instagram Story that says, “Book now to receive 20% off,” but you can track that because you can use a UTM or you taking them to a landing page so you can see where all these clicks come from.

So, if you go to your UTM tracking system (which Agorapulse has) or if you go into your backend on your website, and you see the landing page has 500 hits today and 375 of them came from your Instagram Story, you pretty much know that campaign is working, and then you see them get to your website. And from those 375, you got a hundred bookings to your restaurant. That’s a pretty good conversion rate from just posting a quick little Story on Instagram.

Being able to know where your data lies, being able to understand and interpret these analytics into what piece of content is working again, why it’s working, and how it’s working and you have to track that, export that report, print it out. If you have to, a lot of people like to print it out, be able to circle things, highlight things, and you need to look at that monthly.

Don’t stress over the data the next day that you post something because it hasn’t got time for people to engage with it. And you know, again, the algorithm feeds on data points.

So the more people that are commenting, the more people are sharing, and the better that piece of content is going to perform. So you need to look at it at least at the end of the month.

And let’s just say that you post every other day and most months have 30 days. So you’re looking at 15 pieces of content. You want to look at the top three and the bottom three, the top three money. You’ll want to replace the bottom three with content more like the top three. Keep doing that month over month over month. And all of a sudden your content is just going to be performing exponentially better because guess what?

You’re listening to your audience. And the only way that you can do that is through data and analytics. Yes, that’s the boring side of the marketing business, but actually, to me, that’s the most exciting side because I actually get to see the content that we created. If it’s working that gets us excited to go make more content.

And here’s the flip side to that. When I see the content performing poorly, I actually get more excited because it drives our focus and determination to create more content that’s going to perform better and ultimately drive more revenue for these hospitality brands that we’re representing.

Mike Allton: I’ll put in the show notes to a free webinar that Jen Herman and I did. It’s all about all the different ways that you can drive traffic from Instagram and track it. We know that’s one of the hardest platforms to drive anything from, but you can track everything if you know how to do it.

Client Brand Success Story

So that whole webinar, we’ll walk you through step by step how to do that. Eddie, we’re almost out of time, but I was hoping you could share just as our last question, an example of a client that you’ve worked with, where you guys have been able to together craft some social media campaigns and actually significantly improve their social media ROI.

Whatever tools or platforms you use, I’d love it if you could share that with us.

Eddie Garrison: I’ll tell you one brand. I wish I could [name it], but it’s a very large company that that a lot of people would know that has a mouse as a mascot—so we won’t say the specific name—but we were able to put together a social media campaign that was driving brand awareness, but driving brand awareness in the form of checklists and ebooks to help you plan a better vacation.

Now, you might say, “That seems so boring,” and “Why do people want that?” Well, in this day and age, people are scouring the internet to try to find all these tips because coming to a major city with theme parks like Orlando where I’m based, costs a lot of money. Guess what? There are a lot of people here. Last year alone, almost 100 million people visited the city of Orlando and I guarantee you 80 to 90 percent of those who came were coming here to visit our theme parks.

Being able to be top of mind when you’re talking about people coming here to Orlando, that you want them to stay at your property. You want them to dine at your restaurants. So putting these guides together, and then once they download the guides, I know this is actually technically social media, but there’s nothing more social than email marketing. We were able to put together email drip campaigns that were like, this is what we were talking about. “Here’s the number one step, here’s the number two step, here’s the number three step.” And it was just this constant drip campaign.

What we did on the back end was we were watching the click-through rates and the open rates of these emails and which ones they were actually opening more than once. We took that data. We flipped it back over onto social media and started to turn those into short-form video content with the same overall goal of driving people to the booking websites or the booking restaurants or the, you know, to book a restaurant or to book bus transportation or private transportation. So the data, it all comes back to data. The data that we were getting from the open rates and the click-through rates on the email were guiding us down a path to what content people wanted to see more of. We started creating content from what we saw the people clicking on and reading more in the emails.

That started to drive more engagement on hospitality social media, which in turn drove more website visitors, which in turn in the end created more hotel bookings, more restaurant bookings, and more revenue for these hospitality brands.

Thank all of you for listening and reading the highlights today. Don’t forget to find the Social Pulse Podcast: Hospitality Edition on Apple, and drop us a review. We’d love to know what you think. Don’t miss other editions of the Social Pulse Podcast like the Retail Edition, Agency Edition, and B2B Edition.