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Five Design Tips to Deliver a Seamless Embedded Analytics Experience

June 26, 2020 Sisense

In Managing Up, we give product managers and their teams actionable guidance on how to build, test, and release programs that will delight users and stand the test of time. From development to execution, our industry experts and seasoned pros can help you work smarter, not harder.

Delivering additional value to your customers by providing data-driven insights is a sure-shot way to improve your competitive advantage and monetize your data. It’s not a question of if but when this functionality becomes basic table stakes.

Several steps are required to turn data into revenue and go even further — including creating the right data strategy and identifying data opportunities, building your profit and loss statement and use cases, getting buy-in, finding a partner, implementing and launching, and finally growing post-launch through an iterative innovation process.

Zooming in on design and implementation: Delivering value means combining the right features, KPIs that drive action, and visualizations that tell a compelling story.

In addition, there is an important but oft-overlooked aspect to successful data monetization: user interface (UI) design (or visual design). While UI design is a vast topic, a common challenge when delivering analytics to customers is to create a consistent and seamless experience, since you are embedding a third-party application in your product.

packages CTA banners Product Teams Five Design Tips to Deliver a Seamless Embedded Analytics Experience

Simple UI is good UI

Consistent design is intuitive design. It should be immediately obvious to the user how to accomplish whatever they want to do. Expectations of users today are higher, so you also need a beautiful design that intuitively directs a user to take action.

From a branding standpoint, it should also always be clear to the user that the product is unified: Typography, logo, image styles, brand color schemes, etc., should be reflected across the application (in the core offering and the analytics), just like the rest of the brand’s properties.

When embedding analytics, you are bringing two different applications into one space, so it is critical that your end-user seamlessly experiences both the core product and analytics.

Let’s take a deeper look.

Simple UI Acme Finance Hub 1540x911 1 Five Design Tips to Deliver a Seamless Embedded Analytics Experience

Tip 1: Maintain consistent branding elements

Your brand matters! Consistent visuals resonate more effectively with your audience.

This is no different when you are delivering analytics to your customer. Remove any trace of third-party applications by changing any external logo or text to align to your organization’s brand. Leveraging a drag-and-drop UI-based interface to change the settings makes this process faster and will allow you to get to market rapidly without worrying about custom development.

TIP 1 Sisense Login Screen 1540x839 1 Five Design Tips to Deliver a Seamless Embedded Analytics Experience

Five Design Tips to Deliver a Seamless Embedded Analytics Experience

Tip 2: Consider visual hierarchy

Colors can convey powerful messages, so it’s crucial they be used mindfully and consistently. It can be unharmonious to have your brand colors be teal and black, for example, and part of your application or the analytics you deliver be yellow and white.

Leverage your corporate brand guidelines, if they exist, to customize the analytic application’s primary brand colors, primary and secondary text colors, etc.

If brand guidelines don’t exist, use easily available color palette selectors (there are tons of options to choose from) to select a color palette. Build your palette with a primary color in mind (usually your main brand color). Most products that are well designed use a visual hierarchy of fonts and color palettes to help ignite the experience.

In the palette, make sure to have a couple of options:

Primary brand color
Highlight or accent color for banners or toolbars
At least two light and two dark colors for contrast between background and texts (dark background, light texts or vice versa)

Once you have the colors, you can add them to “favorites” and make it easier to pick and choose.

TIP 2 SaveColorPaletteToFavorites 1540x677 1 Five Design Tips to Deliver a Seamless Embedded Analytics Experience

In addition to the application colors, also make sure to change the visualization color palette to match the application brand color palette. You can either use one of the several out-of-the-box color palette options or create a custom visualization palette. Again, you can customize your palette to match your brand colors.

Tip 3: Build branding with typography

Typography is a crucial element that uplifts a design and gives it a personality. Typography is also an important element that should be part of your brand. Typography conveys personality and grabs a user’s attention while establishing the tone of your brand. Certain fonts can also improve scannability, legibility, readability, and even navigation. It’s important that the font or fonts you use are consistent throughout your digital experiences.

Tip 4: Minimize the steps to insights

It’s a fundamental tenet of UI/UX design that the fewer clicks a given action takes, the better. When embedding analytics, be sure to keep actions like filtering, exporting, etc., in one place in the host application so users don’t have to repeat the actions twice.

Think like a user: Would you want to first filter on the host application and then repeat the action again in the embedded analytics? Of course not. A seamless user experience (UX) means that when you do something once, it affects the entire application without you having to repeat steps.

Explore how you can implement these experiences and get inspired in the Sisense Embedded Playground.

Tip 5: Focus on ease of implementation

While good UI design makes a difference, it’s also important to be mindful of the cost, effort, and complexities of implementing seamless and consistent experiences.

Customizations that require developer skills and coding take considerable effort and increase time to market. These are also difficult to maintain over time. For example, upgrades can become a hassle due to backward compatibility issues. Changes to underlying infrastructure can break the code, requiring complex updates.

To avoid such hassles, find an analytics solution that makes rebranding and customization quick and easy. Using a solution that allows you to implement your changes via drag-and-drop, out-of-the-box capabilities that are always up to date with newly released versions helps you avoid some of these larger issues down the line. It also allows you to focus your efforts on data insights and application functionality instead of worrying about code, maintenance, or changes that can break your code.

Delivering standalone analytics solutions

Whether you choose to deliver analytics as a standalone product or service, or you embed them into your application, your analytics product should be an extension of your brand and visual story, and all the tips above remain true.

By white-labeling and customizing the look and feel of your analytic application, you deliver a consistent and great user experience! Sisense is equipped to allow you to put analytics where you need them and make them look and work the way you want. Whether you are creating your own solution from scratch or using ours, keeping these design tenets in mind will help you build an awesome product.

Shruthi Panicker is a Sr. Technical Product Marketing Manager with Sisense. She focuses on how Sisense can be leveraged to build successful embedded analytics solutions covering Sisense’s embedding and customization capabilities, developer experience initiative and cloud-native architecture. She holds a BS in Computer Science as well as an MBA and has over a decade of experience in the technology world.

Blog – Sisense

COVID-19: Let us not forget hopeful news, part five

May 12, 2020 CRM News and Info

I took a week hiatus from writing LUNFHN (again with the totally awkward acronym), because honestly, it takes me a long period of time to find what I need to find and then to write it and link it. But there is no dearth of hopeful news. Just a dearth of writing. So, for your visceral, emotional, and intellectual pleasure, here is my fifth installment of hopeful news around COVID-19.

Treatments, Vaccines, and All…That…Jaaaaazz.

Featured stories

There is a stem cell treatment developed in Abu Dhabi that was tested on 73 patients and they ALL recovered. The Abu Dhabi Stem Cell Centre developed the treatment and said if the results continue to hold up it could be a “game changer.” My original source was the London Mirror but, thank god, I found it in several Abu Dhabi based news sources and Arab news bureaus and press so I am willing to vouch for the reality of the story.
Looking forward to Winter? The llama, not the season. Apparently, there is some promise in llama antibodies for staving off COVID-19, as they were able to stave off SARS and MERS. The research supports that. Here’s a paragraph from the NY Times on this: “Winter was simply the lucky llama chosen by researchers in Belgium, where she lives, to participate in a series of virus studies involving both SARS and MERS. Finding that her antibodies staved off those infections, the scientists posited that those same antibodies could also neutralize the new virus that causes Covid-19. They were right, and published their results Tuesday in the journal Cell.” And Winter is just so CUTE!!
Blood thinners are a promising treatment for the prevention of blood clots in COVID-19 patients. Turns out clots are one of the causes of COVID-19 deaths and the studies that have been released show a dramatic decline in deaths with patients treated with the blood thinners.

The Good the Tech Industry Does…

Salesforce seems to be in this every week. Much as I like Salesforce – it’s not because of that. Its effort in this crisis is not just laudable, it’s heroic, epic really. As of May 4, it was announcing Salesforce Work.com, a portal for literally everything you need to manage your workforce in any time of crisis. The reason I word it that way, is that Salesforce Care is, I have to presume, not going away when the pandemic does. It will be permanent. Among the offerings of expert advice, management technology tools and access to best practices, one stands out to me in particular. It has developed emergency response management tools with Accenture to help you handle everything from crisis intervention to business continuity. The full press release can be read here.

The Good that People(s) Do

In 1847 The Choctaw Nation, impoverished and suffering, donated $ 170.00 of their very limited funds to support the starving people of Ireland. That great deed was never forgotten. Now 173 years later, the Irish people are returning the favor to the Native American population of the U.S. and are major donors to a GoFundMe effort to support the Navajo and Hopi nations who are struggling with Covid-19. The statement from the Choctaw says it all: The Choctaw and Irish had become kindred spirits since the potato famine, the tribe said. “We hope the Irish, Navajo and Hopi peoples develop lasting friendships, as we have. Sharing our cultures makes the world grow smaller.”
Guy Fieri, noted chef and all around raconteur, has raised $ 20 million in relief for out of work restaurant employees. I find it amazing how much people — famous or otherwise — are doing for each other in the midst of this crisis. Amazing, but expected. The good in people, the empathetic nature of the species shows up when it has to.
The Reform Alliance, headed by Twitter magnate Jack Dorsey, Meek Mill and the inimitable Jay Z are sending 10 million masks and other PPEs to correctional institutions across the country. I say no more.

Useful Information

Sometimes it comes from strange places. Of all companies, Kroger came out with a playbook really called “Sharing What We Learned: A Blueprint for Businesses.” It is actually a really good retailer’s (and applicable other ways) guide to handling the store during the lockdowns.
Finally. Someone who likes working from home — and is not just accommodating it. This article in Fast Company by Doug Aamoth outlines some things you can do that will make it not just a burden to be shouldered but be something that you will actually enjoy. Even beyond the pandemic. And there will be a “beyond the pandemic.” Hang in there.

Best PowerPoint of the Week

Of course, this is the only PowerPoint of the entire pandemic…outside of the 10 million generated by the tech industry. This is once again a Ryan Reynolds tour de force. Takes PowerPoint to a new level – though the level is sideways. Or down…

[embedded content]

Best Corona Cover of…What day is this?

This week, we reach back to Ariel and Under the Sea. Why wouldn’t we? This one is SO well done.

[embedded content]

Best Professional Effort of the…More than a Week

I’m cheating. This wasn’t a specifically produced effort for SIP and COVID-19. This is the Prayer of St. Francis as it was sung in Come from Away. If you are unacquainted with Come from Away, it is a major hit Broadway musical about the response of the citizens of Gander, Newfoundland to closing of the U.S. airspace during 9-11. Seven thousand airline passengers were grounded in Gander and all of them, ALL OF THEM, were taken in and taken care of by the Gander citizens — 9000 total citizens in the town. There is a book about this and of course, the musical. This is the Prayer of St. Francis (one of the versions) sung and the beauty of the sentiment and song and the arrangement just should be listened to. By the way, not only am I married to a Newfoundlander, but the character Beulah (whose name you will hear in the beginning) is based on my mother-in-law’s cousin, who was a hero and named…Beulah IRL. Listen and do what I do each time. Cry and also recognize the beauty in the human spirit. I’m not religious but….

[embedded content]

Cheating again…

You’ve probably figured out that I love Broadway. That I miss Broadway — though have only walked down it and gone to theatres in its district. So once again, this was the incredibly well produced Broadway tribute to Moms on Mother’s Day done from homes everywhere as a fundraiser for the COVID-19 Emergency Assistance Fund. I can’t get over how the lighting is perfect, the sound outstanding and the production of choral voices flawless. By the way, when you get to the “Come from Away” segment and the “real Beulah Cooper” – that’s my mother in law’s cousin. She’s family.

[embedded content]

And once again…SGN with John Krasinki

Who am I kidding? This blows away all the competition. This guy has built a monument to how to handle a crisis with humor and empathy. This week he presides over graduation so that those who didn’t get to go to theirs can be part of one.

[embedded content]

I’m just gonna end this post with an SGN/JK trademark ending, something he says at the end of every show.

“Just remember, no matter how hard things get, there is always good in the world.”

You go, everyone.

____________________________________________________

Once again, remember the CRM Playaz Happy Hours on Wednesdays at 3:30pm EDT to 4:30pm EDT(ish). It really ends closer to five but it can’t be a happy hour if it ends in 90 minutes now can it? These have been great – completely booked (free to register) for the entirety of their existence. Next available: May 20. Here’s the link if you’re interested. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/crm-playaz-happy-hour-tickets-101830929050.

ZDNet | crm RSS

Top Five Finance Blogs Of April 2020

May 6, 2020 SAP

Top Five Finance Blogs Of April 2020

About Jean Loh

Jean Loh is the director, Global Audience Marketing at SAP. She is an experienced marketing and communication professional, currently responsible for developing thought leadership content that is unbiased and audience-led while addressing market challenges to illuminate and solve the unmet needs of CFOs, CIOs, and the wider global finance and IT audience.

Five Steps To A More Resilient Consumer Goods Supply Chain

April 23, 2020 SAP

With some parts of the world starting to open up and others still shut down, now is the time to evaluate the steps to manage your supply chain going forward. While many industries can leverage these steps, here we will focus on consumer goods.

Over the past 20+ years, many organizations have built brittle supply chains; the goal should be to build resilient supply chains. A resilient supply chain should help an organization manage through uncertainty and disruptions in ways that yield higher performance than their competitors – through good times and bad. Our current disruption is much larger in scale than we have seen in our lifetimes, but we have seen disruptions of different sizes, different levels of regionality and globality, and many other attributes.

How can we build resilience into our business and supply chains to fare better for the next disruption?

Step 1: What are your highest at-risk components, materials, or ingredients?

Some industries call these critical components, critical supply, or strategic ingredients. Most organizations know very well what these are, but how critical can be a source of debate – not just on cost or volume; criticality may involve location, single/sole-source strategies, and a variety of other attributes. Packaging and labeling for your co-packers may be an interesting place to look. Quickly knowing what these at-risk components are and how they impact your business is a key step to take.

Step 2: How agile is your supply chain?

Here you need to understand your suppliers’ ability to serve your business based on their capabilities, capacities, sources of supply, and ability to find alternatives. One challenge is that this is usually tribal knowledge – in your experts’ heads, emails, and notes. This information needs to be made accessible in a systematic mechanism where your organization can quickly understand the sensitive spots in your supply chain.

For example, if the organization decides to offer one form of a specific product (e.g., one size box of breakfast cereal), is there enough packaging to meet demand? Can your packaging suppliers provide this one size in the volumes needed over time? Trading partners who take longer to acquire new supply represent limited agility, thus downgrading the agility of your supply chain.

Step 3: What is your level of visibility?

This is just not visibility to your key trading partners (suppliers/co-manufacturers/co-packers – tier 1), but to your next tier – visibility to their trading partners (their tier 1, which is your tier 2). Hopefully, there is solid visibility to your tier 1, but how good is your tier 2+ visibility? How do events around the world impact your business and your trading partners’ capabilities to meet your needs? Trading partners with limited visibility exhibit a potential soft spot in your supply strategy.

Step 4: What is your supply chain’s workforce strategy?

Many supply chains have come under fire for less-than-desirable labor practices such as forced labor and other harsh conditions. This is one example, but we also need to know if the supply base’s workforce is still intact.

If a factory was shut down for one month, will its labor force return? Can your trading partners still serve your needs based on workforce uncertainty? How quickly can these trading partners ramp-up a new workforce – does their workforce require special skills and/or special training/certification to be able to meet your needs? Understanding workforce issues pertaining to resilience across your entire supply base is a key lever to ensure continuity and assurance of supply.

Step 5: What is your supply chain’s potential for more disruption?

This seems obvious given current events, however, organizations need to understand what disruptions are possible – this can be based on location of trading partners, regulatory issues, geo-political concerns, and a variety of other possibilities. One key item is that no organization can prevent some disruptions (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, Brexit), but all can define strategies for how to manage through them and realize better outcomes than competitors. Understanding how disruptions might affect your supply base and therefore impact your business is a key to improving your resiliency.

Summary

The key to building a resilient supply chain is to understand your level of capabilities of your suppliers across five dimensions:

Risk
Agility
Visibility
Workforce
Disruption

The big challenge will occur over the next year – or even two years as markets and capacities open up: there will be much supply/demand uncertainty and some supply/demand shocks (sudden, quick shifts).

For example, if your competitor locks in a high price for specific commodities and causes commodity inflation or shortages, how quickly can your business adapt? Will you reduce the number of end-products you sell to reduce variability? Should you lock in supply at a higher price, increasing costs? Do you exit that business for a short time until commodity price re-balancing occurs?

The answers to these questions lie in the detailed assessment of the five dimensions of a resilient supply chain.

Interested in learning how to build resilience into your business and supply chains? Join our webinar series, where some of our customers share best practices in using SAP Ariba Solutions for Direct Spend to achieve these goals.

The Intelligent Industrial Manufacturing Enterprise: Five Ways Forward

March 11, 2020 SAP

Gone are the days when the industrial manufacturing value proposition was relatively simple: industrial manufacturers made products and delivered them.

Now, the industrial manufacturer’s job does not end with delivery. Driven by ever-more-demanding customers and supported by the widespread uptake of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the emerging power of machine learning and artificial intelligence, industrial manufacturers are developing new capabilities to track huge volumes of data generated by thousands of devices and are adjusting their service depending on the circumstances.

The goal is to be more responsive, always-on, and highly adaptable. Industrial manufacturers seek to collaborate more fully with their customers from discovery through design, service, and beyond. Wherever possible, they aim to deliver the kind of experiences and outcomes that customers reward with loyalty and ongoing business.

But how do companies move forward? Successful ones are focusing on the following five strategic priorities:

Be customer-centric

Industrial manufacturers are looking for ways to maintain customer-for-life relationships based on a 360-degree understanding of their customers. The starting point is a holistic view of their customers’ business processes – ending with the knowledge of how those customers use the products in their daily operations.

To get there, industrial manufacturers are moving toward omnichannel models for managing customers’ interactions across channels (Web, direct sales, IoT, and more). The goal is seamless interactions with customers, the ability to quickly see all products bought, and real-time visibility into how products are performing. This will help companies position the customer’s point of view at the center of every decision.

Serve the segment of one

Increasingly, industrial manufacturers will be able to deliver completely customized products, services, and solutions that precisely fit the needs of individual customers based on sophisticated platform, configuration, and mass-customization strategies.

Industrial manufacturers are moving toward this goal by rationalizing existing product options using machine learning to understand what really sells and what doesn’t. In addition, organizations are pulling in customer experience data to better understand requirements – and then using this data to inform requirements in product configurators that let customers define their own products on the fly.

Embrace digital smart products and solutions

Industrial manufacturers are shifting to products with more digital functionality, allowing even more flexible configuration of products. Thus, software-based features are on the rise with connectivity to enable remote access and monitoring.

Industrial manufacturers are extending original (physical) products with digital services that augment and extend product functionality. Combining insights into the end-user experience and the relevance and value of digital capabilities, manufacturers will extend the lifecycle of the product and increase lifetime revenue. With a direct feedback loop from the product back to the manufacturer, product enhancements and future developments will be based on the actual usage and experience of the product, from first interaction to product retirement.

Implement the digital supply chain and smart factory

Supply chains and manufacturing networks are becoming modular and flexible to allow the seamless execution of different manufacturing strategies. Industrial manufacturers, accordingly, are using Industry 4.0 philosophies and new digital technologies to implement “shop-floor-to-top-floor” connectivity for real-time visibility.

Subsequent steps will increase machine-to-machine connectivity and collaboration, allowing autonomous decisions based on sensor data and machine learning algorithms. Industrial manufacturers will combine feedback from connected stakeholders (customers, workers, suppliers) and associated processes to further improve overall manufacturing and supply chain performance. Intelligently connecting manufacturing, logistics, and supply chains enables companies to quickly address short-term demand impulses, supply fluctuations, and changes to customer orders, allowing a truly modular production process. This production flexibility enables industrial manufacturers to produce higher-quality individualized goods at lower costs.

Develop service-based business models

As revenues are increasingly linked to services that are based on and built around smart products, more industrial manufacturers will offer products as a service based on the value delivered to the end customer.

Remote condition monitoring of assets is critical to success with such models – enabling manufacturers to identify and provide additional value-added services. Based on the data collected, organizations can get better insight into how products are used. This enables them to offer pay-for-outcome models where the risk and long-term value of each customer is clearly understood.

The future is bright

Ultimately, the winners in the industrial manufacturing industry will be those companies that successfully transform themselves into fully customer-centric companies. Ahead for the industry is unprecedented change at unprecedented speed – but our industry is positioned to be a driver of progress. Together, we can lead the way.

Join our virtual event to learn more

Want to find out more about the latest trends and innovations in today’s global industrial manufacturing business? Register t oday to join our flagship 60-minute virtual industry event:

SAP Industries Forum 2020: Industrial Manufacturing
Experience the Intelligent Enterprise
Thursday, March 26, 2020, 8 a.m. PDT, 11 a.m. EDT, 4 p.m. CET
Register Now

Top Five CIO Blogs Of February 2020

March 8, 2020 BI News and Info

Top Five CIO Blogs Of February 2020

Thanks to our contributors who submitted excellent content about cybersecurity, conversational AI, and best practices for IT project management. There’s a lot of good reading here if you missed any of these popular articles.

SASE: The Next Frontier In Cybersecurity

Accelerating Customer Experience With Conversational AI

Team Member Selection Criteria: Look For Stars And Sponges

Insight To Action: Top 5 Best Practices Of Best-In-Class Digitalists, Part 5

Concentrate On Tangible Innovation: Top 5 Best Practices Of Best-In-Class Digitalists, Part 4

Explore the mindset and methods leading to a successful journey to the digital enterprise in the “Top 5 Best Practices” series.

About Jean Loh

Top Five CIO Blogs Of January 2020

February 7, 2020 BI News and Info

Top Five CIO Blogs Of January 2020

About Jean Loh

Top Five CIO Blogs Of December 2019

January 12, 2020 BI News and Info

Top Five CIO Blogs Of December 2019

Happy 2020! As we rang out the old year, our readers were looking ahead at different perspectives on data management – and how to better manage their ERP software to take best advantage of that data. Evolving toward becoming an intelligent enterprise demands no less.

Why Your Data Should Have Empathy

Why SMBs Should Upgrade Their ERP To Transform Their Business

All You Need To Know About Master Data Governance

What Would An X-Ray Reveal About Your ERP System?

Recessions, Big Data, Data Science, And The Liberating Power Of “Own It”

Follow CIO Knowledge on The Digitalist to keep on top of the most important issues and trends facing IT leaders today.

About Jean Loh

Five Marketing Technologies Transforming The Hotel Business

January 1, 2020 BI News and Info

You cannot have a successful business without marketing, including in the hotel business. Fortunately, there have never been more opportunities to use marketing to build and grow your hotel business.

Hotel Tech Report reports that more than 500 million new international trips are expected over the next decade. Therefore, if you want to attract people from all over the globe to your property, you need to employ as many resources as you can get.

Hotel marketing encompasses a wide variety of topics, and if you want to leverage marketing successfully, you need to stay on top of the latest trends. The following are some of the technologies that are transforming the world of hotel marketing in front of our eyes.

Voice search

Most people type a question into Google on their smartphone when they need some information. But the times are changing. The next generation of Internet users prefers to ask their devices directly. In fact, a third of the US population – roughly 112 million people – use voice search every month. These people represent a good chunk of your target demographic, so you need to cater to their needs. By optimizing your website for voice search, you can get more exposure. When a person takes out their phone and makes an inquiry, your voice-search optimized website will pop up as one of the first results. What’s more, with this technology, you can also allow your guests to book their rooms using voice control.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence may have seemed like a sci-fi concept just a few decades ago; however, today it’s a reality. The technology has the ability to provide valuable, actionable insights into your customers’ wishes and needs. It can also help you keep your customers satisfied without hiring additional employees. What can you do with such a high-tech concept? Well, you can use a chatbot on your website to ensure that your visitors can consistently get answers to all of their questions. Most modern websites use chatbots, which is why the global chatbot market is expected to exceed $ 994 million in the next five years, according to Market Watch.

Augmented reality

Augmented reality may be the most interesting marketing tactic you have available today. According to Statista, the augmented reality market will reach $ 18.8 billion by 2020. The technology alters a person’s perception of their surroundings through the use of technology, and it allows hotel owners to change the way their visitors see and experience their environment. For example, you can use the technology to sell more rooms online by enhancing their features, and some hotels allow their guests to see depictions of their favorite actors and singers in their rooms. You can also use this technology to give your visitors virtual keys that allow them to open their rooms using their smartphones.

Virtual reality

Some people may use the terms interchangeably, but virtual reality should not be confused with augmented reality. Virtual reality allows you to enhance the guest experience by allowing them to see their rooms first-hand in the virtual world before they even set foot in your hotel. Considering that roughly 80% of consumers feel positively about branded VR tactics, it’s likely that your customers will appreciate this. Other ways to use VR include enabling your staff to show guests local attractions to encourage them to stay a few extra days or return for a future visit.

Remarketing

Remarketing allows you to market your business to people who have already shown interest in it. If a person previously visited your website without booking anything, you can use specific tools to reconnect with them and make the sale. Here’s a quick example of a successful remarketing operation from outside the travel industry: the global leader in paper products, Kimberly-Clark, has used remarketing tactics to improve its conversion rates between 50% and 60%. You can use Google Analytics to see which demographics visit your website the most, then use a tool like Google Ads or AdRoll that will target your key demographics and show them ads and banners for your business on the sites they visit.

Final thoughts

This has just scratched the surface of hotel marketing. The main takeaway is to recognize that digital marketing is the way to go. Although old forms of marketing can still work, you need to use digital marketing to successfully advertise your hotel. If you fail to do so, you will fall further behind your competitors.

Explore another hot technology: Blockchain And The Future Of The Travel Industry.