66 – 5 Ways To Attract Groups Using LinkedIn

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

In the first Suite Spot episode of 2021, host Ryan Embree identifies five unique ways hotels can attract groups using LinkedIn. Ryan shares tips on how to optimize your hotel’s LinkedIn and get your employees at the property involved. He talks about the importance of making the right connections on LinkedIn, including the best groups and associations to join to capture group business. This episode is a great guide on how to leverage LinkedIn post-COVID-19 to impact group occupancy and revenue at your hotel. If you're looking to learn more information about how Travel Media Group can help with your hotel’s Linkedin strategy or want to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. Suite Spot Podcast · 66 - 5 Ways To Attract Groups Using LinkedIn Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello, welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot, the first Suite Spot episode of 2021. I want to thank all of our listeners out there - yes, we've made it and we're super excited - 2021, a year of hope and recovery hopefully for our industry. Today, we've got a great episode, we're going to continue talking about LinkedIn, and specifically what we're going to do today is review the five ways to attract groups using LinkedIn, because we know one of the biggest impacts that COVID-19 has had on the hotel industry is its effect on group business and occupancy. So some of the creative ways hoteliers are combating this occupancy loss is by leveraging social media sites, especially LinkedIn for groups. When we look at the demographics overall for LinkedIn, we're looking at professionals, tech savvy travelers. It's a place of positivity, so businesses are sharing updates, they're sharing exciting news that people can get positive around and excited around. And it's a really great way to attract and market groups. So let's go ahead and talk through five ways to attract groups using LinkedIn. Ryan Embree: And the first, is really one of the tips and best practices that we talk about for all of our social media, that's optimizing your profile. Now, for some of you out there that might not have a business or even a personal LinkedIn account, that might mean - optimizing your profile - just building it. But once you build that, there are a multitude of things that you can do to optimize that profile. Some of the things include: industry - obviously hospitality or hotel - your company size, your website URL - so you want to place that direct booking link in there so that we can funnel traffic to those booking sites - groups and individual travelers, descriptions - now, description is very important, we're going to kind of talk about that in a second - logo - that logo could be for your brand, if you're an independent property, a really nice shot of the property, or if you have a logo for the property itself - making sure you're updating things like your street address, and then LinkedIn actually has the opportunity for you to fill in a custom button - so for most hotels out there, that's going to be a "book now" button like we put on other social media sites, like Facebook. Now, going back to description, description is very important because you really want to highlight what makes your property unique and what could appeal to individuals that are responsible for booking groups. So when we're talking about group travel, you know, an example could be in your description, "upgraded four star hotel, with first-class amenities and spacious meeting space, great for groups, events, and weddings." When we're also talking about optimizing our profile,