Top 10 Challenging Questions to Ask Your Internet Marketing Vendor | By Max Starkov and Jason Price

Working in the travel industry you sometimes come across some very good articles about how to measure a supplier and types of questions to ask.

This article is very interesting and raises some very tough questions to Hospitality industry on-line marketeers. However, there's nothing in the article about benchmarking the answers.

For example:

4. Industry Recognitions and Awards
Awards of merit, and invitations to speak at conferences and serve on panels recognize the expertise of the individual and the credibility of the firm.

Questions to ask:

• Have experts from your company ever been invited to serve as panelists and guest speakers at internet and hospitality marketing conferences?
• Has your company won any awards or recognitions?

Sure... but unless you really know on-line marketing, if I win a web award, will the hotel really know it's value?

Additionally, these questions are a bit fallacious as you ought to be asking, has this person paid to speak - indirectly through offering sponsorship.

These questions are valid, but they need to be benchmarked against other through the back door marketing practices for recognition.

Another part goes on:

6. Best Practices
"The first step is to identify best practices in the online hospitality marketplace, and the second is to educate the client base on these practices."

"A good Internet marketing company has conducted extensive market research and testing capabilities.....".

Okay..... if you're a hotel that can afford Weber Shandwick.. please step forward.

There's leading practitioners of SEO in the UK who do not need to do this? Why, conferencing with ISPs or even Search Engines. The article starts to fall down from here.
Questions to ask:

• Does your company identify and adopt best practices in hospitality?

Answer: yes.... but how would they know how to measure the answer?

• What Internet market research and analysis in hospitality does your company perform? How do you keep up with all the changes in the industry?

Answer: surely this is client lead? It's what your clients and prospective clients want/need.

• "Does your company test its recommendations?"

Answer: This is a case on case answer. If you recommend to try something in email marketing for example it is done on past experience from another state of affairs. Even brand imaging for one hotel to another with the sexiest of offers might deter people from acting to a tried and tested method.

• How are your recommendations for my hotel different, when compared with a major hotel brand, hotel management company, franchisee, or independent?"

The article ends..

"When you are looking for the Internet marketing vendor who will manage one of your most important revenue channels, make sure to ask these challenging questions so you can find an experienced, transparent, and accountable firm"

Also, come up with some benchmarking questions to these answers!