Recently Stacy Hamilton of Alys Beach spoke with Destination Marketing Today about her data-informed marketing strategy fueled by RMG’s insights. Watch the full 8-minute interview, or jump ahead to hear Stacy’s key takeaways:
- 00:30 How Stacy first met Jim Harenchar, President and CEO of RMG, and knew she wanted to partner with him for Alys Beach’s next chapter, “[Jim] was a keynote speaker at a tourism conference… and his information was fantastic.”
- 03:04 The impact RMG has as a valuable partner for Alys Beach, “It’s always a better meeting when RMG’s in the meeting”
- 03:56 How RMG’s helped Alys Beach build a proprietary data platform to show ongoing value-adds through their work, “It’s been a lot of fun because the results and the analytics that come back to us truly show that what we’re doing is making an impact and that we’re not just throwing things out there in the wind”
- 04:53 Hear about the value of RMG’s SmartPixl deanonymization service in Stacy’s own words, “of the million plus visitors that visit the Alice Beach website each year… about 55–60% … can actually be deanonymized and return back to us their full name, their primary household residence and an email address.”
- 06:18 RMG’s SmartPixl allows for powerful data analysis and tracking, and targeted marketing to “hot prospects” with the right message at the right time, “if a particular person has visited our vacation rental or real estate section of the website more than three times in one week, we have a report generated and we’re going to send them … general Alys Beach information, and we track that activity from there.”
- 07:47 SmartPixl unlocks A–Z analytics for Alys Beach, “So now Smart Pixel has added that extra layer of deanonymizing you and giving us real data that we can then track all the way to a vacation rental booking or ultimately a home sale.”
- 09:06 Hear how Stacy plans to scale insight from RMG’s SmartPixl to maximize her marketing opportunities, “if you and your wife are thinking about Alys Beach for August 1–8, and you’ve looked at three Alys Beach homes for that I don’t need to wait till July 31st to reach out to you. I want to make sure that we’re getting the information you need in real time. That would mean having an associate managing that activity every 24 hours. We’re not there yet, but ultimately it would be something like that.”
- 10:01 Stacy describes life before RMG, “Unless you directly inquire to our reservations department or send an email through the contact form, we would have no idea that you were looking for that date. So having that data available to us [now] is pretty mind blowing.”
- 12:04 The biggest sales & marketing painpoint RMG has solved for Alys Beach includes data centralization, “Connecting the dots between the, the customers and the various databases. That’s number one. If we’ve got 10,000 names sitting in a vacation rental database from the last five years, and we’ve got 8,000 names sales prospects sitting in our Salesforce database, none of these databases have talked or been integrated together. We don’t know who’s converting, what actions they’re taking. So being able to pull that into one was the primary goal of that [project].”
- 13:32 Hear Stacy share the competitive edge RMG’s SmartPixl provides, “Just having access to the data that we can capture through SmartPixl alone puts us ahead. You know, I’ve been doing this for a very long time, mostly in tourism, and I’ve never had the access to the type of data that we have through SmartPixl and being able to establish relationships with those people and then track their customer journey.”
- 15:43 Internal advocacy is key for a marketing organization to thrive, and support for RMG’s services is an important first step. Stacy thanks Jim for his ability to make RMG’s value ring loud and clear, “Jim does such a great job of presenting in such a digestible way. I mean, if you could hold 500 people’s attention for 40 minutes at a conference, you know your delivery is good. I would definitely recommend bringing Jim in at the beginning to help pitch the story.”
- 16:33 One of Alys Beach’s recent marketing wins was their article in the Wall Street Journal, “We were able to track increased visitation website traffic–it increased about three times–in the days following the digital version and the printed version. From that, we tracked website visitors for about five days after the article, we were able to gather 1100 email addresses.”
- 19:57 Stacy shares how RMG’s ability to be “hyper collaborative, always there, willing to participate, share ideas, hear ideas, and offer insights” helped her with the data analysis following the Wall Street Journal’s article, “I asked him to help me look at the data that we were able to collect over the last week. Jim was able to come back to me within a day and say, yes, we see some real opportunity here in this type of activity–Jim and his team have been so helpful in making that information digestible to people like me and to the people that I need to convince that our marketing is working.”
RMG is “invaluable” for Stacy Hamilton and Alys Beach’s marketing. If it’s time to expand your marketing with the power of RMG, schedule a free 30-minute consultation to get started.