The Lobby Lizard Method: Why Hotel Revenue and Marketing Silos Keep Costing You Guests
The lobby lizard method and the five hotel marketing questions I get asked most
This was my first Q&A episode, answering the five questions I've been asked most this year. They've stayed pretty consistent over the six-plus years I've been running my company.
The biggest social media mistake
Hotels aren't taking enough risk and don't understand who their audience is. We had a hotel that gained roughly 200 followers in all of 2024. Its audience was close to 70% female, mostly aged 25 to 35. We partnered with an influencer who was tapped into that demographic, and she made a TikTok with her friend in the hotel room, doing their makeup and popping a bottle of champagne to a Pitbull song. Within two weeks of it going live, the hotel gained over 300 followers.
The pushback was that it wasn't luxurious enough for the property. But what you at the hotel like doesn't really matter. Your audience reacted to that video, and seeing results like that and deciding you know better is arrogant. Twelve years ago a professional photo stood out on Instagram. Now people are shooting movies on iPhones, so your content has to go past the pretty picture.
Measuring whether marketing drives bookings
We add a proprietary link in bio to every account and to our posts on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook, and we count the clicks each month. Then we check click through rate, meaning how many clicks reached a page on the site and didn't just jump off at the link in bio. The number that matters most is clicks to your book now page. Apply your conversion rate to those clicks to estimate reservations, multiply by your ADR, and you have a very good estimate of the revenue your social media drove that month.
Why I'd put the influencer fee into a photoshoot
The tactic that sounds great in theory and rarely works, for me, is paying for influencers. It depends on your market. A lot of our properties are in New York City, LA and Miami, so they don't struggle with inbound requests.
An influencer with a large following can charge $3,000 to $5,000 just to come out, on top of the complimentary room, any F&B and maybe their travel. For that money you could get a full photoshoot with models and a year to a year and a half of content. Stage your Thanksgiving, Halloween and Valentine's Day shots in that one shoot. Influencers are accustomed to promoting themselves, and very few walk into a hotel thinking about how to use their audience to promote your product. Get the photoshoot done, then stretch it out with influencer partnerships along the way.
How revenue and marketing work together
Hotels have talked about working in silos for years. A good revenue manager has always paid attention to marketing, and since Covid more people hold commercial titles that officially cover both. It starts with understanding your guest. People say they do business midweek and leisure on the weekend without checking. In a market like Nashville, a guest might come in midweek because the concert is on a Wednesday night.
When I worked in hotels we had something we called lobby lizard. You'd work the lobby in the morning, floating around, helping people and asking questions. I always used it to ask guests where they were coming from. You'd hear "I'm here for a concert" or "I'm here for a meeting", and you'd gain so much insight from that. Then do the same with your product, and work out why guests choose you over your competitive set.
We always say in revenue management that "revenue management is putting the right price in front of the right person at the right time." Content is very similar, but seasonality doesn't always cross over into marketing. Pull up any hotel's feed on Thanksgiving and you'll see a happy Thanksgiving post. The people seeing it are already with their family or already at the hotel they chose. They needed to see it two to three months ahead, during the booking window.
What a GM should look at every week
Start with the goal of the campaign, because awareness and bookings call for different metrics. Say you partner with an influencer who has 100,000 followers for exposure. Reach is the number of individual accounts that saw the content, so a collaborative reel that reaches 50,000 people has a reach of 50,000. Impressions count how many times it was seen, since one person may see it more than once. For email, which is still a tangible strategy, watch your open rate. If your emails aren't being opened at a regular rate, your subject lines may not be engaging enough, or your offer isn't thrilling enough to open.
We go through all of this in the full episode. Watch on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Calvin and the Revpar Media team build hotel marketing that drives bookings, from social media management to influencer campaigns.
Book a 30-minute callFull transcript
Calvin Tilokee Hey, Calvin Tilokee here. If your hotel's revenue team and marketing team are working in separate lanes, you're leaving real money on the table. And today I'm breaking down exactly why that disconnect is so costly. We are covering the five most common questions I get asked about hotel marketing, including the biggest social media mistake hotels are making right now, how to actually measure whether your marketing is driving bookings, why paying for influencers really delivers, what hotels expect, and how. A simple practice I call the lobby lizard method can align your entire commercial strategy. In today's episode, I am speaking directly to hotel operators, general managers, revenue managers, and marketing professionals who want a clearer, more connected approach to growing their property. You'll walk away with practical ways to bridge the gap between your revenue and marketing teams, understand who your actual guest is, and use the data that is already available to you to make smart decisions.
I'm Calvin Tilokee and this is socially awkward. Hi, I'm Calvin Tilokee, founder of Rapport Media and hosts of Socially Awkward podcast. And today, we're going to do a solo episode answering some guest questions. So I'm going to take the top five questions that I've been asked so far this year. And they're pretty consistent over the time of me running my company, which is over six years at this point. And, we're going to dive into those. I'm going to answer those questions. We'll dive into those. So please leave some comments. We can leave that and answer some of those questions for for future episodes. And of course, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or email us at, Calvin at RF, PA media.com. So we're going to jump right into this first one.
The first one is what is the biggest mistake you see hotels making with their social media right now. And this one is a bit of a hot topic for myself. As you guys know, my background is in the hospitality world as a revenue manager, spent 20 years working in in hotels, primarily in revenue management. So as a revenue manager, your job is to promote the hotel through all facets, through your website, social media, PR, all of these different avenues. Of course, using leveraging the OTAs, the online travel agencies like Expedia and Booking.com. So your job is to promote this hotel, in the best way possible and as many distribution channels as possible. And the biggest mistake that I see hotels making right now with social media specifically, is not taking enough risk, not understanding who your audience is.
And I went into this a bit on last week's episode. We have spent too much time getting enamored with fluff in the hospitality industry in general, but specifically keeping this to a social media conversation. We're enamored with esthetics and fluff and not really paying attention to what the audience wants. Again, this is one I touched on briefly in last week's episode, but this is just a great example of of and really illustrates what I, what I mean when we talk about not listening to your audience. So we had a hotel that had that gained roughly 200 followers or so in 2020 for middle of last year, we partnered with an influencer who was really tapped into their demographic, which happened to be close to 70% female demographic on this particular social media account. And most of these people were in the, age of 25 to 35.
So millennials seemed a little bit Gen-Z in there. And this person made a great TikTok for us is very energetic, fun. She had her friend join her in the hotel room, had the Pitbull song Meet Me in the hotel room, and it was just videos of them getting ready, doing their makeup pop in a bottle of champagne, just having a good time. Things that young people do going to the city and, going to your hotel. I don't care what hotel you have. This is what people are doing on Friday. Saturday nights. No matter how fancy or fancy your hotel is, if you're in that type of destination, this is what people are doing. So long story short, we posted this within two weeks of this post going live.
The hotel gained over 300 followers. Now mind you, they gained roughly 200 all of 2024, so they outdid that within a two week period by simply posting something that the audience loved and tapped into that demographic and what that female demographic was looking for. However, the pushback was that it wasn't luxurious enough for this particular property. The way they envisioned themselves was not, didn't align, which is completely fine. Right? We all have our vision, and hotels have a certain brand to upkeep. However, the reason I bring this up one is, and calling this a mistake is what I like. What you at the hotel likes honestly, doesn't really matter. And that might sound like something to say for rage bait or a hot take. However, it doesn't matter.
What matters is what the audience likes your audience reacted to this, which means the people that you have here on this page are vibing with that content. Give your audience what they want. It's very arrogant of anyone to see information like that, to say, hey, this audience really like this, but think I know better. I know what you want. I know what you should be getting as opposed to looking at the results and the audience telling you, this is what I want. This is this is relatable. This is fun. This gives me an opportunity to envision myself in your hotel doing the things that I want to do, having fun with my friends, enjoying a weekend, going to a cocktail party, a show, whatever this is.
They got to envision themselves in that space in 30s doing that, and for you to turn around and say that that doesn't fit your vision for what they should like is arrogant. And it's a mistake that I'm seeing a lot across the industry, particularly in the luxury lifestyle space. Of course, we, you know, esthetics matter, right? Esthetics will always matter. But as I've said in many times on this show, so just the starting point esthetics were the be all end all about 15 years ago, 10 or 15 years ago when before cell phones became as powerful as they are now, everyone has the ability in their pocket to take a fantastic photo. You know, 12 years ago when you posted something on Instagram, if it was high quality, if it was HD or something by a professional photographer, it stood out because no one else could really could do that.
Now, we can all do that. I mean, there are people shooting movies on on iPhones at this point, right? So we all have the ability to shoot fine, fantastic esthetic looking content. It needs to go beyond that. Your content needs to reach people and the biggest mistake we're making as an industry is not keeping up with the times when not going past the pretty picture. We're still doing things the way they were done 15 years ago and tried to tell the audience that this is what they like, as opposed to changing with the times, utilizing the analytics that are easily available to us. You know, things like likes, reach and shares are right right up front. They will let you know your audience, let us know they loved it.
So listen to that information, use it constructively. Use it as as a tool to put your hotel in front of the audience in a way that they want to receive it, not the way you think they need to receive it. Hey, quick question for you when was the last time your hotel social media actually brought someone through the door? If you can't answer that, it might be time to rethink your approach. At Rev PA media, we don't do marketing for the sake of marketing. Every strategy we build is designed to drive measurable results more bookings, more visibility, more revenue. We've been on the operations side and we know what matters. If that's something you're looking to solve right now, scan the QR code on screen or hit the link in the show notes.
Now back to today's conversation. So question number two, how do you measure whether your hotel's marketing is actually driving bookings? This is a good one. Marketing at the best of times is sometimes hard to get tangible metrics and tangible results. You know, it really depends on what part of the funnel you're, you're going after. When it comes to social media, primarily, you're getting people in that awareness phase. You're just getting your hotel and your product in front of people. Just let them know you're here. They may not be ready to book. That might not be the time for them to to, you know, go through and and click a reservation. However, what we do at rev pa media, utilizing the the hospitality and analytical background that we have, what we do is this twofold, we obviously look at reach engagement impressions.
These are things that let us know if the content is successful. Are we reaching people? Is this audience growing follower growth as well? But as it pertains to bookings, specifically, we look at clicks to your website. So we have a proprietary link in bio where we add to all of our accounts, and we'll put that on all of our posts on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook and we track that each month. How many clicks, have we generated? So what what we're basically able to tell from there is how is our social media strategy working as our strategy, doing what we intended to do, which is to drive people to your hotel, generate interest, drive traffic to your website. So each month we look at that and we're going to look at the click through rate.
So if 100 people, we have 100 clicks, how many of those actually clicked all the way through to an actual page on the site and didn't just jump off once they hit the link in bio. So click through rate. But most importantly, we're going to look at, clicks to your book now page will we'll create a page for a link for each page on your website. And how many people going directly to that book now, because we know those people, we've inspired them enough to say, you know what? I've already researched this hotel, what I saw here on this Instagram page or this Facebook page or TikTok or LinkedIn makes me feel like this was the right choice. So they're going to book now. And if we're doing your digital marketing, we'll have your conversion rate.
So if we take that conversion rate, out of how many clicks have gone to that book now page, then we know ultimately how many people with a good estimate have actually booked a reservation. Then if we get your your ADR, which we typically acquire at the end of the month, we multiply those bookings by the ADR, and then we can, come up with a very good estimate of how much revenue was driven through our social media efforts each month. Question number three. What is one marketing tactic that sounds great in theory but rarely works for hotels? This one is going to sound like a bit of a hot take for me, but I will say paying for influencers now with the caveat that this depends on your market. A lot of our properties are in bigger cities New York City, LA, Miami.
So we don't really struggle with inbound leads. For influencers. There is the occasional time where if you're in a market where you really need to to drive some traffic, and the influencers that are reaching out to you are not of quality, you may need to reach out to someone, of course. And if they're not planning a trip to your destination, you're going to have to pay for them to show up. However, I would question why an influencer as opposed to a photoshoot? A lot of these influencers who have large followings, they're charging you a few thousand dollars, three, 4 or $5000 just for them to come out. That's in addition to the money you're spending on providing them a complimentary room. Any fab that's provided you may have to pay for their travel.
The 3 to $5000 is just their fee, and for that amount of money, you could get a full on photoshoot at your hotel. That's going to give you a year, year and a half worth of content. Including models. This is something we provide, but there are also plenty of other people, photographers that you can get locally that will come in and go get you hundreds of, of visual pieces, between reels, videos, still shots, of course. Lifestyle shots, seasonal shots, you know, decorate your hotel or give them props for your different events Thanksgiving, Halloween, etcetera. Valentine's day, get all those things staged now in one shoot and do that. So my personal opinion and you know, I know not everyone agrees with me on this one or around the industry, but, paying for influencers is probably not the best use of your money.
I think if you're going to if you have that budget to spend, spend it on a photo shoot, spend it on something where you can control, you can control the narrative. Because, again, the majority of influencers are promoting themselves. That's the real key to take away from this. Most influencers, the best way to leverage them is you're leveraging their reach and their audience. And of course, these need to be travel centric, hotel centric, influencers or fab, if that's your goal for your property. But they're accustomed to promoting themselves. That's what their pages are about. They're, they're they're going to be posing in in your room or at your restaurant. They're taking pictures of themselves in your city and things like that, which can be great.
And it's a great supplement to everything that you're doing. But ultimately they're promoting themselves, not your hotel, and they're very few influencers that know how to do that properly. They're very few influencers that come into your hotel and think, how am I going to use my presence and my audience, but promote this product, which is your hotel or restaurant? The more cost effective way for you to go and more strategic way for you to go is to invest that money in a photo shoot. You can you can direct that from start to finish. You can come up with a shot list with your photographer for your lifestyle shots, shots of your of your spaces, the rooms, the public space, and all these different things.
And again, we can shoot things that are seasonal and do that all in one shot and get a year to year and a half worth of content that now you can supplement with influencer partnerships along the way and stretch that out. But for me, a marketing tactic that sounds great in theory but really works to its most effectiveness is paying for influencer partnerships. All right. Question number four. How do you get your revenue team and marketing team to actually work together? And that is a fantastic question. It's something that we've discussed in this industry for years about working in silos and about getting teams to work together. A good revenue team and a good revenue manager will already have an idea of the importance of marketing.
As I said at the top of this episode, revenue managers nowadays, especially now you hear, you'll hear the term commercial direct. They're a commercial revenue management that means you're in charge of marketing as well. You least need to be aware of it. And it's been like this for years. It's just now becoming, I think, in hindsight of Covid, where people officially got these titles of doing both, then it's it's become something that's more normalized. But a good revenue manager has always been doing that. I mean, you need to be aware of where all of these bookings are coming from, where you're all of these different platforms, where your hotel is present. So how do you get this to work together as to have a singular vision of what your hotel is? And this is something that we we as at the core of our media is number one, is understanding your product and understanding your guest.
Who is that guest that's coming to your hotel? People say, oh, we do business midweek and then leisure on the weekend, but what does that actually mean? And is that actually accurate? You know, you may be getting people that are, that are coming in for concerts more often. Maybe you're at you're in that type of a market. Now Nashville comes to mind, right? People that are coming in for events, that is not necessarily business travel, but maybe they come in midweek because concert is on a Wednesday night. I think a lot of times people make these blanket statements about who their guest is without understanding that. So understand your CRM, spend time in the lobby, understand who's coming in.
We had something we used to call Lobby Lizard when I worked in hotels where you'd have to work in the lobby in the morning, just kind of floating around, helping people, asking questions. But I always use that as an opportunity to ask guests where they were coming from, trying to understand who these people are. And you would gain so much insight for, hey, what brings you to our hotel? What brings you into the city? Oh, I'm here for a vacation. I'm here for a concert. I'm here for a meeting. I'm visiting a friend or family. And this helps you understand who your guest is. And then simultaneous to that is understanding, your hotel, understanding your product. The people. So we have a luxury hotel. We have a business hotel, we have this or that.
But that might not be what it looks like to your guest. It's not simply a business hotel, or something like that. It's, really positioning. Maybe you have a hotel that is historic. Maybe you have a hotel. It's trendy. Maybe they pick the hotel because it's near to all of the transportation, the public transportation. And understanding what it is about your property that's unique. What is it about your property that is making the guests choose you over the people in your competitive set? That's the key. And that all has to work together with your revenue and your marketing team. So the marketing side is understanding your hotel, understanding your product, your brand. And then what? How are we positioning that in front of our in front of our guests.
And we always say in revenue management is revenue management is putting the right price in front of the right person at the right time. And marketing and content is very similar. But in order to do that, you need to know who the right person is and what the right time is and what is the right piece of content to put in front of them. When seasonality is a big thing that, we do well in revenue management, but that doesn't always cross over into marketing. For example, I always talk about the Thanksgiving posts, pull up any social media feed for a hotel on Thanksgiving. You'll see. Happy Thanksgiving post if you're lucky, a good one might even show some of the team or something like that.
We're thankful for our guests. We're thankful for our team. However, what does that doing for the user, for the audience? With a person who saw that, what does that doing for them? Because they were already with their family, or they were already at the hotel that they chose to stay, chose to stay at during Thanksgiving. During the holiday, they needed to see that something about Thanksgiving, 2 to 3 months ahead of time, because people are booking for those things during the booking window, which is, you know, one of our, hospitality terms during that booking window is when you need to capture their attention for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, 4th of July, whatever it is, knowing and understanding. When are these people looking to book those rooms? That's when you want to post about it. So that's how the revenue and the marketing can work together is understanding that seasonality on both sides, and having a person who might be on that commercial roll commercial strategy, that's how that comes about, is understanding both and using that strategy on both sides of that coin.
All right. In the fifth and final question is what data should a hotel GM be looking at every week to understand if the marketing is working? That is a great question, and I would ask a question back, is what is the goal of the marketing? That's number one. And if we are talking about either your overall marketing approach, social media marketing and influencer partnership, what's the goal of that particular campaign? Is it just awareness? Are you looking to drive bookings because then you're looking at two different metrics. So whenever you're talking about trying to quantify marketing to see if it's working, understanding the goal is paramount to everything. Let's just say your goal is going to be exposure. You've partnered with an influencer because we they have 100,000 followers. And you want you want to leverage that.
You want to bring some people to your page, raise the profile and tap into a new audience. So if you're partnering with an influencer like that, number one, you want to look at the reach. Now reach is how many accounts saw a piece of content. So if we post a reel of this person, post a collaborative reel with the hotel and it reaches 50,000 people, that's your reach. That's the number of individual accounts that, have seen that piece of content. Next would be impressions. Impressions are going to be how many times that piece of content was seen, because an individual person may see it more than once. So that's, those are the two big ones for exposure and things like that. As you're looking into, say, for example, website traffic, we we talked about that.
And one of the, the earlier questions, website traffic. A big thing to look through is your Ctrl click through rate. Because just because someone clicks on that link in your bio doesn't mean they've gone all the way through to the website and finished that transaction. So out of every 100, how many people it's typically measured as a percentage. What percentage of your clicks are actually going through that, a site and spending time on the website? Another one is open rates. If you're talking about email marketing, many of us are still sending emails weekly, which is still a tangible strategy. People are checking emails and they are you need to catch them when they're shopping for what what you're looking for.
Again, going back to that seasonality and making sure that we're sending out and putting out content when the guests need to see it at the right time. So but you want to look at an open rate if the emails you're sending out aren't being opened at a regular rate, then either you've got to switch up your style. All right. Maybe it's maybe you don't have clever enough or engaging enough subjects. Maybe your your offer isn't isn't thrilling enough for them to open it. Those are things that you want to look at, but that starts to that's digging a little deeper once you identify, hey, is this open rate good or not? Are people even engaging with this email that they were sending out, or that you've been opening it to read it?
So that's something you want to look at as well. All right. Thank you all for sending in your questions. That was an awesome, Q&A episode. First one of these that I've done. So that was really exciting. I do like being able to answer what you guys are asking for. So please leave us some comments. Reach out to me on LinkedIn, engage with any of our posts and leave. Leave some questions. Happy to answer those in future episodes. So thank you. Get out there and, make the most of your marketing and of course, catch you in the next episode.
