Half a Million Contact Points Hotel Online Marketing
Half a million CP's - What does this mean?
CP's are 'contact points', and this concept came out of a meeting with a very forward thinking hotel.
This is a hotel that has been practising Online Marketing for7/8 years, and they long ago realised that marketing only makes sense when you are reaching out to customers in some shape or form, they were having problems getting this through to their sales staff and outsourced marketing company, all of which were advancing their own pet marketing projects and demanding a share of the marketing budget. If not put in to some sort of framework this can result in money being scattered to the 4 winds with very little return.
To try and unify this they set the target of 'half a Million Contact Points' ie Whatever marketing was used they must somehow touch half a million customers in a 12 month period. This forced the various parties to row back from thinking about website design, new brochures, Trade Shows etc and ask themselves how their marketing actually touches customers.
An initial assessment of what they were currently doing only brought this to just under 25,000 Contact Points (see attached) , but this sparked some creative suggestions and ideas that brought the total up to 500,000 (not shown to protect some of the hotels ideas).
This wasn't an exact science, it nearly raised as many questions as answers. (do we count how many e mails are sent out or just the ones that are opened? etc), and we dont doubt that over time this concept will be fine tuned and tweaked. But for example it forced the Sales People to quantify how many meetings they want to get from the World Travel Market, it forced the Online Marketing People to plan how many people they want to reach with the FaceBook campaigns they wanted to run this year. All in all it forced all parties to focus on orienting their marketing towards reaching out to customers, not just spending money on 'latest trends'.