Karen Stephens
Chief Marketing Officer
Karen Stephens drives long-term growth by building Revinate’s brand equity, product marketing, and customer acquisition strategies. With more than 25 years of expertise in global hospitality technology and online distribution, her deep connections with hospitality industry leaders play a key role in crafting strategic partnerships. She is also the host of The Hotel Moment Podcast, where she interviews top players in the hospitality industry.
Featured articles
How to Prepare Your Hotel for Marketing Automation
In hospitality, marketing automation is on the leading edge of industry technology. Despite years of 50 percent annual growth, marketing automation is still the new new thing for almost all companies in the United States. "We see only about 3 percent penetration in non-technology midmarket companies,” Act-On CEO Raghu Raghavan told VentureBeat. The good news is, it's unlikely your competitors are leveraging their guest data with marketing automation. There is a huge opportunity at this [...]
Unique Challenges and Opportunities for Independent Hotels
It’s an exciting time for independent hotels. While they face more competitive pressure than they ever have, independents now have a wealth of technology solutions and analytics at their fingertips, if they’re willing to invest strategically. Independents are also in a unique position versus larger brands to deliver outstanding service levels as they continue to build up their guest databases. OTAs dominate online sales When you look at the market by room supply, according to [...]
7 Social Media Habits of Highly Effective Hotel Marketers
Here's a tried and true way to dramatically increase content success on social media: Post engaging content! Easier said than done, of course... But the starting point is your overall approach to content. Many social media managers start the content creation process from their hotel's perspective, with a goal to share their story and their message. Because the hotel's message is the most important thing, it seems the logical place for beginning the creative process. [...]
The Untapped Hotel Asset: Your Guests
Hoteliers traditionally consider room inventory to be their primary assets. However, in other industries, companies look at their customers as assets. Where a hotel might say, “We’re a full-service resort with 200 rooms,” a consumer-goods company might say, “We have 10,000 customers.” When you think about your business, are you thinking about the right assets? Are you thinking about your property, or are you thinking about your hotel’s best asset -- your guests? Among growing [...]
5 Best Practices to Increase Direct Hotel Bookings
Online travel agencies (OTAs) such as Expedia and Priceline as well as meta-search engines like Kayak and Google Hotel Finder have become crucial to many hotels’ overall advertising mix – especially during low booking seasons or to fill rooms at the last minute. But property owners should be careful not to neglect other hotel marketing strategies and let these channels consume too large a percentage of their revenue.Rate parity clauses in agreements with OTAs make it [...]
Driving Social Media Engagement- Lessons from Loyalty Programs
In the back house of many hotels, discussion of social media interaction often turns to questions of ROI and staffing. While ROI should drive decisions in marketing, there is also a strong case to be made for using social media to drive community. As hoteliers, how do we focus on the common characteristics and interests of our social media community? Any discussion of success in the social media space should also focus on ways to [...]