Good marketing starts with paying attention

One of my most useful pieces of market research involved driving through hotel parking lots.

I was managing a Ramada Limited Suites and looking for opportunities to bring in more business. Other hotels had company vehicles in their parking lots. Those vehicles told me which organizations already needed rooms in the area. I wrote down the companies and contacted them.

It was a practical starting point. I had identified businesses with a reason to buy what we offered. The next part was finding out what would make our hotel a better choice.

The useful details were different for every account

PG&E wanted a certain number of rooms guaranteed each week. That gave me a specific requirement I could meet.

The corrections account valued gas cards and hard-boiled eggs at breakfast. Those details might sound small in a marketing presentation. They mattered to the people making the decision.

Red Lobster had a management team staying in the area while opening a restaurant. They also needed somewhere to conduct hiring interviews. Before the walkthrough, I cleared out a storage room and brought in a conference table. The room already existed. It needed a different purpose.

I won those accounts by understanding the need and making an offer that addressed it. There was direct outreach involved, and there was follow-through. The work did not end when someone agreed to stay.

Research should change the offer

I think about that experience when discussing marketing strategy now. We can collect a great deal of information about customers and still deliver a generic message if we never ask what the information should change.

If people repeatedly ask whether a product fits a particular situation, that question belongs in the product information. If prospects hesitate because they do not understand the process, the process needs to be explained. If a business can solve an adjacent problem with a resource it already has, that may be part of the offer.

The useful question is: what have we learned that should affect what we do next?

Delivery belongs in the marketing conversation

An offer becomes a promise as soon as someone accepts it. Weekly room availability has to be managed. The interview space has to be ready. The details that helped win the account need to survive the handoff into daily operations.

That is one reason my experience in management, sales, and events informs my marketing work. I am interested in what a business can deliver consistently, because that affects the offer I am comfortable making.

The tools have changed considerably since those hotel visits. The habit is still useful: observe what is happening, ask specific questions, and act on what you learn. Sometimes the opportunity is a new campaign. Sometimes it is a room full of boxes that could be doing something more useful.