Hey, everybody. Small Business Stacy here with my friend Sammy, who's working hard or, as we really know, hardly working. She does that really well.
Okay, we are on part three of Marketing Lessons learned from the Big City. I was only there for a few hours, but there were so many valuable marketing lessons learned that I'm going to be sharing those with you. If you haven't seen number one and number two, I'll leave the links below so you can check those out.
When Digital Dave and I got into the city, the first thing we did was check into our hotel. Now, since we knew that we were only going to be in the city for one night, we didn't want to spend all this money on a big fancy hotel. When I was online searching for hotels near the train station, a Holiday Inn popped up for 100 bucks. I was like, wow, what a great deal. Their ratings were 8.8 stars out of ten. I was like, wow, that's pretty impressive. We booked at the Holiday Inn. When we got there, the service was absolutely phenomenal. We went up into our room and on the desk was this: a nice little gift basket. When I first saw it, I thought, oh, the previous guest must have left this. Maybe it was from a wedding or from the last guest who was here. Then I opened the letter and it was actually from housekeeping, just a nice little welcome gift saying, look, we really want you to enjoy your stay here at the hotel. Here's some little snacks because you know you're going to be out and about checking things out in the city. If you need anything, let us know." Phenomenal marketing.
See, here's the thing. Little things matter. This gift basket, in reality, it wasn't expensive to put together. It probably cost them maybe two dollars. But the value that this hotel is going to get from that … here I am on video giving the accolades and people obviously are loving it as well as they're leaving reviews. I never saw anybody mention the little gift basket. I had no idea that that was going to be there.
Now, they did mess up a little bit because I was just so wowed by this simple little gesture of gift basket … the whole stay was phenomenal. The room was clean. We actually had a little jacuzzi in our room. The breakfast was excellent. They had coffee and cookies and little treats to give you all day long. When we checked out, in my opinion, at that moment the hotel should have asked us right then and there to leave a review. I would have absolutely left them a ten-star review. Even to this day, they've never asked me to leave any feedback. I found that a little bit interesting. While they did great on the front end, they kind of dropped the ball on the back end.
As you're crafting your marketing, make sure that you are remembering that the little things do matter, but once you create that wow moment make sure you ask your customers, clients, and patients to leave you a review. It's so important. Because remember, it's not what you say about yourself that matters. It's what other say about you that matters. They will check you out online.
Kudos to the Holiday Inn Express in Chelsea by Penn Station. Digital Dave and I had a fantastic time. Thank you for the little gift basket. It really made our stay that much more memorable.
How are you going to incorporate little wow moments into your marketing? Leave me a comment below and make sure you tune in tomorrow for lesson four of Marketing Lessons Learned in the Big City.