Author: Stephanie Smith

Are Sub-Optimal Reviews Sabotaging Your Hotel Marketing ROI?

Adele Gutman and Stephanie Smith on Get Great Reviews podcast discuss how your hotel reviews can either work to improve your ROI or sabotage it. Stephanie introduces a 30-point checklist audit to assess a hotel’s total online presence, where reviews are considered a foundational part for understanding their impact on conversion rates and the customer […]

Guide to Setup your Hotel’s Online Presence For Exposure

Your hotel’s digital presence is more than just your website. Studies show that people check between 7 and 35 sites before booking a hotel. Therefore, potential guests need to see you multiple times before your hotel is a part of their consideration set. Your hotel needs both exposure to the right target audience as well […]

To Drive Top Line Revenue, Hotel Sales Must Think Like Marketing

Stephanie Smith from Cogwheel Marketing & Analytics and Trevor Grant from Revenue Hub joined together for a discussion, where they explore how hotel sales and marketing can seem disconnected when looking at how to drive topline revenue. With the continual change in traveller behaviour, and how they go about researching, and subsequently booking their travel, […]

How Companies Can Use Big Data to Make Better Action Plans for Their Digital Marketing

In today’s digital age, businesses inside and outside the hospitality industry are generating more data than ever before. This data is a valuable asset, and should be used to gain insights into customer behavior and make better decisions about marketing campaigns and the customer journey. Owners regularly receive digital marketing performance reports or reports from […]

Hotel Marketing KPIs Must Change to Achieve Commercial Strategy

If you are measuring your marketing success today the same way you did last year, you are not providing the value that your external stakeholders and ownership expect and that your internal business partners, like sales and revenue strategy, deserve.  It is not enough anymore to measure how many guest rooms are booked per dollar […]

HSMAI Marketing Strategy Conference 2023 Highlights

“HSMAI Marketing Strategy Conference is my favorite conference of the year! It’s not only a reunion of the best and brightest advancing digital marketing for hotels, but I also love the lightning rounds and jam-packed sessions,” said Stephanie Smith, CEO at Cogwheel Marketing & Analytics. While it was impossible to attend all the sessions, here […]

Navigating Traveler Behaviors: Key Insights for Hotel Marketing Pros

Stephanie Smith, CHDM, CEO and Digital Matriarch, Cogwheel Marketing, HSMAI Marketing Advisory Board Member Recently Expedia Group released their 2023 Q1 Traveler Insights Report. I brought this interesting piece of research to the great minds at the HSMAI Marketing Advisory Board to discuss the trends and explore if they align with what we are seeing […]

Hotel Digital Marketing: Is Data Helping You Ask the Right Questions?

In June 2023, Stephanie Smith, Founder & Digital Matriarch at Cogwheel Marketing, the company behind Cogwheel Analytics spoke with Trevor Grant of Revenue Hub. They discuss the impact to hotels of combining multiple digital marketing datasets. Hotels face challenges when trying to pull different information from multiple sources and the value of aggregating data from your website marketing, paid […]

Isn’t It Time We Were More Direct?! [Video Replay with Revenue Hub]

Are you struggling to win the direct booking “war”? Wondering if it’s even possible for non-branded properties without massive marketing budgets to beat the OTAs at their own game, and drive more bookings to their website? Watch this discussion involving top Direct Booking experts to discover the answers to those questions and more – and […]

Hospitality Marketing Show with Loren Gray: Revenue Management and Marketing

Cogwheel Marketing’s CEO, Stephanie Smith, and Loren Gray, Founder of Hospitality Digital Marketing, discuss the innovations in revenue management in August 2022. Podcast Highlights: More about Loren Gray and Hospitality Digital Marketing Loren Gray is the Founder of Hospitality Digital Marketing and Podcast & Live Video Show Host / Keynote Speaker / Published Author / […]