Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Tracy Sabattis. I manage the Regional Guides at Mannix Marketing along with Valleri who is our Director of Sales. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Regional Guides and the tourism part of Mannix Marketing, we have several sites from Albany to the Adirondacks that have millions of website visitors and hundreds of thousands of social media followers and newsletter subscribers. Valleri will be taking you through tips for marketing your lodging property during all the phases of the COVID 19 pandemic. A couple of housekeeping items before we get started. We're going to be sharing a lot of information today. Don't worry about taking notes. We are recording the webinar and we'll be sending it out this week. If you have any questions, enter them into the Q&A. And we will leave time at the end to answer those. If we don't get to yours, we'll follow up later. Valleri, take it away. Good morning everybody. As Tracy said, I am Valleri James. I am the Director of Sales at Mannix Marketing. My primary role here is to help local businesses with their marketing and advertising. I want to start off by thanking you for joining us today. We have a variety of properties from the capital region and the Adirondacks on the webinar. But the concepts I'm going to show you will work no matter what size or type of lodging property you have. I've talked to a lot of people in preparing for this. I know some of you aren't sure where to begin. I know that some of you have started, but you're not sure if you're on the right path. So my goal today is to see what I can do to help you. The first thing you want to do is be mindful of your messaging. Currently, New York is on a pause. Our governor has mandated that we need to pause now and play later. Hotels are considered an essential business, but I do know some county officials are asking visitors to remain at home for the time being. You need to be mindful of the situation for your area. When talking about visiting the region, for now it should be about the future. But definitely talk about it. Encourage people to plan and do their research for their next vacation. Here's a nice example using a pause now, play later hashtag. You also want to daydream with your guests about future stays. People will be traveling again before you know it. Here is a great example of daydreaming in Lake George. You're going to hear me repeat this daydream theory throughout the webinar because it's really important for you to stay connected with your guests and get them excited about vacationing with you. Now that we've talked about the messaging. Let's talk about the marketing. There are three phases of marketing during COVID, which we'll talk about in a few minutes. But first, I want to talk about a little preplanning. You need to preplan before you do too much marketing. All of you are at different stages of marketing your business, but these are good things to consider at any stage. You also need to keep in mind that you might need to adjust your plans throughout the different phases of reopening. First thing you need to do is determine your target audience. How has your target demographic changed because of COVID? Conferences and large events have been canceled. Did you have business travelers before COVID? Has that been impacted by people working at home? Did you have Canadian travelers before COVID? The border is closed. Your guests may look a little differently this season. How do you need to change your marketing strategy based on who your current and near future guests are? You need to figure out your cancellation policies. People are going to be uncomfortable about booking a vacation even after the travel ban has lifted. Tell them a cancellation policy that is going to give them peace of mind. That way if they need to cancel, they're not going to be worrying about it. Offer direct booking incentives. What incentives can you offer to get people to book with you directly? This is a great time for you to save OTA fees. Create packages and incentives for future bookings. I love this example where Golden Arrow is polling their guests to find out what would appeal to them. What kind of packages can you offer your guests? Now is a good time to try something new. Know what your safety measures will be. How are you going to protect your guests and your staff? Your guests are going to want to know what you are doing, especially if they have not stayed with you before. Make sure you have this safety plan in place before you start your marketing because people will be asking about it. Now that we have talked about preplanning, let's get into the different phases of marketing. There are three phases of marketing during COVID. Phase one is staying connected while we're on pause. Phase two will be the initial demand for travel. And phase three will be the increased demand for travel. Right now, we are at the tail end of phase one. We are nearing the end of the pause. It's time for you to start planting seeds for future travel. If your property is a seasonal property, this phase is critical to your success for 2020. The first thing you want to do is create brand awareness. What is your property known for? How many times have people heard of you? Help people get excited about staying with you. Here is an iconic photo of Mohawk Mountain House. It's sure to get their guests excited about visiting them. Create a connection to the region for your guests. What is your region known for? Should you be showcasing hiking in the Adirondacks, boating on Lake George, horse racing at Saratoga, going to a concert at the Time Union Center? Whatever your region is popular for, you should be talking about often. Show support for your community. Tell people what you're doing. It can be as simple as a shout out thanking your local hospital staff, or a donation to your local food pantry. Keep your guests informed. What are your safety measures? Are you open? Are you taking reservations? Is your restaurant open, but your rooms are not, or vise versa? Make sure people know the status of your property at all times. Consider making your status a pinned post on Facebook. Pinned posts stay at the top of your newsfeed, and then all your other posts show up after. This way it'll be easy for people to find out what your situation is. When we move on to phase two, the initial demand for travel, the pause has ended and some people are going to be ready to travel now. You need to be very aggressive during these early stages. Reach out to people who are daydreaming about vacations with incentives and flexible cancellation plans. There are going to be a lot of properties vying for less travelers, so this should be your big ramp up phase. Continue to help people dream about traveling. Keep them dreaming about your property and your destination. For example, if you're in a beach town, live shots of the ocean are a great way to keep people dreaming about a visit. Think about what brings people to your destination. How can you keep them daydreaming? Promote your property's unique selling points, as well as those of your region. Continue to sell your brand, but also start to encourage people to book their trip. Let potential guests know what makes you different from the properties in the area. Here's a great example of Lake Clear Lodge showcasing their on site amenities like private beaches and trails, kayaks, on-site dining and takeout. You can also promote your regional amenities like open spaces and fresh air. Upstate New York is going to be a very popular destination for people who want to enjoy the outdoors. Introduce incentives for those who want to book direct. For example, you could do, book early and save, say, people who book their vacation by the end of June and get 20% off. You can give credits for on-site purchases such as food and beverage or activities. Maybe you could include a gift card to a local restaurant or attraction. You can provide early checkout, or early check in excuse me, or late checkout. Offer better cancelation policies than your guests get with the OTA's. That'll be a big one. It's really going to be important to market to people in drive markets. People will not be comfortable taking long trips that involve mass transportation. We love this gas and go package. It's a great way to market to those in a drive market. You're providing a gas card, a gift card to a local convenience store, and some iconic Ocean City taffy. What can you offer to your potential guests to get them to choose you? Finally, we hit phase three, the increased demand for travel. The stay at home order has been completely lifted for a while and travelers are ready to vacation. Your objective is clear. Get more bookings. You want to be the most aggressive with your marketing during this phase. Let people know you are open and ready to welcome them. We love this example from Naples Grand who recently reopened. There will be a lot of people that want to travel. They're just going to need a little nudge to get out the door. Promote bookings via your social media, your email newsletter, and paid advertising to get ahead of your competition. During this phase, you want to move from promoting your brand, to more of a book now message. Promote incentives for booking right now. Here's an example from B Ocean Resort offering 35% off to book by June 1st. That's a pretty aggressive incentive. Create some packages that will appeal to your new target audience. Here are a few ideas for you. Maybe you can promote stay-cations for people who don't want to go too far from home. How about weekend getaways for people who went back to work, but still need to get away from their home? Or how about a romance package for those who've been cooped up with their kids for a couple of months? I bet those are going to be popular. You may also want to consider some all inclusive packages for essential workers who need to relax and unwind. Think about what your property has to offer and what incentives you can give. Another unique idea is to create a blog post or press release that you can share with the media or local influencers. You can use this opportunity to announce that you're open for business and taking reservations. You can use it to promote incentives and safety measures. You can showcase the unique selling points of your property. Since travel is just starting to reopen, I could not find a current example, but here is a piece we did for Trout House last fall to let people know why they are the perfect place for a Fall getaway. What can someone do to showcase your property? Now that we have talked about the phases, let's get a little more specific on what you need to do to update your sites, and how you will be doing your marketing. Things you need to do during each phase are update your website, your social media, and your property listings. By property listings, I mean things like TripAdvisor, Google My Business, and Saratoga.com. Make sure all your information is always accurate. Let's first talk about your website. The first thing you want to do is update the status of your property. Are you open and taking reservations? Are you closed and taking reservations for future bookings? Make sure it's clear. We love this pop up done by Western Resort. It's a great way to let people know what's happening at your property as soon as they hit your website. Prominently display your cancelation policy. Having your cancelation policy front and center on your home page shows that you have nothing to hide. It gives people the peace of mind that if they book with you now and need to cancel, it's not going to be a problem. You want to promote direct bookings on your website. You should always want people to book with you directly, as it helps you create a better relationship with your guests, and now more than ever, you do want to save the OTA fees. If you don't have a booking engine on your site, now's a great time to invest in one. Highlight special offers and incentives on your website. Fundings might be tight right now, so providing incentives is a great way to get guests to choose you over your competitors. A special offer may also make booking directly more attractive than any rewards they'll get from booking with their OTA. How about offering free breakfast or a free drink at your bar? Or better yet, offer both. You also want to reassure guests safety. Your guests need to know that you are taking proper precautions to ensure their safety, as well as the safety of your staff. Add a COVID page to your website that you can update throughout COVID 19. Here's an example of the page Lake Motel added to their site. Now that the page is in place, they can update it as they move through the different phases of reopening. Let me give you a couple other things to reconsider for your website. Add a re-targeting pixel to your website as soon as possible. This way you can remark it to people who are visiting your site now. If you're not sure what a re-targeting pixel is, just make sure you ask us. Ad live chat. Your guests have questions. They want to know what your property is doing. Consider adding links or doing blog posts on which local businesses are open. This is going to change throughout the phases of reopening, but it's definitely something your guests are going to want to know. Here's a great example of a post done of where to eat in St. Augustine during the coronavirus. Next up is social media. I can't stress enough how important your social media is now. Most people go to social media to look at what you're doing before they go anywhere else. Do not go dark. I am really surprised by the number of properties both near and far that are not posting on social media. We think this is a very big mistake. Not only are you losing a connection with your guests, but you are also potentially impacting your future reach on social media. So again, I cannot stress enough get out there and post on social media. In the initial phase, we've been mindful of being on pause here in New York because some of our regions are sensitive about encouraging people to visit right now. But you should be asking people to plan for travel later this year. We love this example, telling you that staying at home gives you more time to plan. How can you encourage your guests to start planning their next vacation? You're hearing this again, encourage daydreaming and memory sharing. We live in such a beautiful area. There is no shortage of photos and memories to share. This post done by The Lodges at Cresthaven hits the trifecta. It's a beautiful photo of the area. It asks you to share your special memories. And it also subtly promotes visiting this summer. How about doing a virtual tour of your property and showcasing your amenities? Walk around with a camera, or even a phone, and show guests your private beaches, your access to biking trails, on-site dining, playgrounds, outdoor pools. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just get out there and do it. Show some support for your community. A little love does go a long way. People like to see you helping your community. Here, the chef at Saratoga Arms is making cookies for the hospital staff at Saratoga hospital. It's a wonderful way to thank the hospital workers, but it's also a nice reminder of their signature cookie. What can you do to support your community? Ask people to sign up for your newsletter. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to stay in touch with your guests. You can also offer incentives to those who are joining your list now. Talk about your safety measures. Consider doing a walk-through that explains your safety plans. Take photos of your staff cleaning your property, and link to pages on your website that keep your guests updated. More than ever, use your social media to encourage people to book their vacations. You can start right now with encouraging future bookings, but you need to get more aggressive with the book now messages as the travel bans start to lift. Consider doing a live video inviting your guests to return. This will be especially helpful to those of you who have guests that return every year. They will love to hear from you personally. I know it sounds crazy but you have to ask for the sale. We love this example reminding people that this property is taking future bookings, and it's encouraging their guests to give themselves something to look forward to. Lastly on the things you need to do for yourself, you need to update and inform your email subscribers. During the early phases of the crisis, people want to hear about what your COVID plan is, how you've been impacted by COVID. Are you taking reservations for the future? Do you have packages and incentives that you're going to offer? And once again, what are your cancelation policies? You cannot reassure your guests too many times. During the later phases of reopening when the travel ban is lifted, invite people to rebook if they've canceled. Announce that you're open and taking reservations. Promote your special offers, highlight your cancelation policies, inform your guests of the safety plan, and highlight your destination. This hotel in Sanibel is offering an amazing deal for booking now. What do you have to offer? Now that I've told you what you can do on your own, I'm going to share some things that we can do to help you, or do for you. As Tracy said, Mannix Marketing has local tourism based web sites from Albany to the Adirondacks. We've had these sites for years and have built up quite a following. Millions of people visit our website sites each year, hundreds of thousands follow us on social media, and tens of thousands subscribe to our newsletter. We are also a full service digital marketing agency that can help you with all of your digital marketing needs. So let's talk about how you can reach new audiences. As I had mentioned earlier, email is a great way to reach people. Right now, you should be building your email marketing list with giveaways. You want to have the best, biggest marketing list possible so that when the stay at home order is lifted, you are hitting the ground running. There are a lot of companies that you can use to run giveaways, but I want you to try our killer giveaway program. When you do a giveaway with us, we do all the work and all the marketing. We set up the giveaway, we promote it in our email newsletters, we promote it on our site, and we promote it on our social media. Giveaways are very popular with our users right now, so the results have been fantastic. LakeGeorge.com currently has three giveaways running. Two of those are for lodging. Lodging giveaways tend to get between 750 and 1,500 new email addresses per giveaway. Here's another note. People don't tend to enter giveaways for things that don't want, so you do end up with a really targeted list of subscribers. At the end of the giveaway when the property does get the new email addresses, they can immediately use those email addresses to promote bookings. It can also use them to promote midsummer incentives for slow weeks, and promote fall getaways. You'll have the list forever, so you can use it anytime. Another way you could be marketing yourself right now is through display ads. We like to call those online billboards for your property. Brand awareness is key always, but it's especially key in phase one. Keep your name out there as much as possible. This is the lodging section of LakeGeorge.com. We currently have display ads running on every single page of that section. These properties are being seen by thousands of people visiting our site, exploring the local lodging options, whether they're looking for a hotel, a cottage, or a camp ground. In later phases of re-opening, you should use display ads to promote offers and incentives, and again, that book now message. You're going to need to work harder this year to get your bookings than you ever have. And don't forget, I mentioned that re-targeting campaign we mentioned earlier. If you need help with that, let me know. Reach out to social media influencers too. There are a lot of travel bloggers, but most of them aren't region specific. I want you to think of Saratoga.com LakeGeorge.com and Adirondack.net as influencers in our marketplace. We've built quite a list of followers, and in fact there's over nearly 200,000 for Lake George, and almost 100,000 for Saratoga.com We have a lot of people who are fans of our area. So let us help you promote that you're open and ready to take reservations. Or we can promote special offers and booking incentives. Here's an example of how we can help Lake Clear Lodge showcase their unique amenities and also promote booking your summer vacation now. If you're not open yet, you can still ask for future bookings. So think about what you can do and what you have to promote that we can help you with. Lastly, I want to talk to you about using our email marketing list to promote your property. We have built a list of loyal regional enthusiasts over the years. We have more than 75,000 total subscribers. You can send out an email to all of them or part of them, and let people know what your property is doing. Here's a campaign we did last year for Adirondack Wine and Food Festival when they wanted to sell more tickets to their event. If you are ready to take reservations, let us showcase your unique selling points, detail your special offers, and get you bookings now. I want to leave you with one well-known quote from Forbes. People who are aggressive with their marketing and advertising during an economic crisis always fare better when it's over. You have a lot of tools at your disposal. Figure out which ones are best for your property, and get moving. If you don't know what you want to do, please do not hesitate to reach out to me. I love to brainstorm and talk about marketing. So does everybody at Mannix, so you can call anybody. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm going pass it back to Tracy to go over those questions that you asked. Thanks Val. If you have questions enter in the Q&A. We did have a couple come in. You mentioned a re-targeting pixel. You mentioned that a couple of times. What exactly is a re-targeting pixel? A re-targeting pixel is a piece of code that you put on your website now. Your webmaster can do that for you. What it does is capture the IP addresses of people who have visited your site so you can market to them again. A good example of that is say you went to Macy's and you thought about buying a pair of shoes and you didn't buy them. And suddenly you see ads for that pair of shoes popping up all over the internet. So that's how you use a re-targeting pixel. You talked a lot about social media. How often should we post to Facebook? Is it still good practice to only post a couple times a week? I think you could post at least once a day. You have to keep in mind that not everyone who is following you is going to see your posts, so you're not bombarding the same people with information like it used to be. So I wouldn't recommend that you do that. You want to keep people top of mind to make sure that they are thinking about your property. I gave you a lot of ideas. So you could literally do one of those things a week and not be overdoing it. OK. This is probably a tricky question. How can you reassure people who are scared to travel when no one can guarantee that they will be safe? I think there's only one thing that you can do to reassure people, and that is to have a really good safety policy, and to make sure you are getting it out to the guests. And it's really ultimately up to them at the end to decide if they think your property is a safe one to visit. Let's see. How would you encourage people from drive markets to stay overnight versus same day travel? I think you're going to have to go with incentives and safety policy. So if people think that your place is a safe place to stay, I think that's a good start, but also what can you offer them to get them to stay overnight? I think that is going to be your two keys this year. Another question is I know your focus is marketing, but does Mannix know of any good sources for best practices for cleaning to the new standards? I really don't have any of those handy. I can certainly look into it see if there is anyone else in the company who any connections on that though? All right. Are there any other questions? I think that's-- I don't see any other questions coming in. Thank you. I think that was great, Val. Thanks everyone for joining us. And if you have any questions you want to send in later, just reach out to Val or anybody at Mannix, and we'll be happy to help you.