Tambourine Meetings Amplifier [Review]

Meetings Amplifier by Tambourine: What Is It?

Tambourine offers all-inclusive hotel digital marketing services aimed at increasing revenue in distinct hotel segments, including Leisure Transient, Groups & Meetings, Spa & Wellness, Weddings & Events, Golf, and F&B.

In this review, we’ll be focusing on Tambourine’s Meetings Amplifier, their Groups & Meetings solution. The solution was built for busy, budget-conscious hoteliers who struggle with meetings and group business. It allows hotel marketers to target meeting planners directly, reduce reliance on expensive third parties, and generate more leads directly through their hotel website.

Main Feature Categories

B2B Lead Gen Websites. The cornerstone of Tambourine’s Meetings Amplifier is a dedicated meetings website. Currently, many hotels house all of their various segments on the same website; to that end, the CTA, navigation, and storytelling tends to be geared towards leisure customers only. What happens inadvertently, is that the hotel website largely ignores their most lucrative segments—groups and meetings, weddings, etc.

Tambourine’s meetings and events websites build a seperate user experience entirely for meeting planners, combining traditional B2B lead generation best practices with professional, contemporary design. This gives hotel sales teams a multi-page website with galleries, room diagrams, event spaces, layouts, packages, etc. that they can use to convey the appeal of their spaces to planners.

Multi-Channel Media Campaign Management. Part of Tambourine’s services includes the deployment and management of multi-channel marketing campaigns targeted at meeting planners. They include search optimization, a host of third party channels, and programmatic media/advertising.

Marketing Automation. Tambourine supports hotel sales staff in tracking and responding to inbound leads. One way it does this is through its marketing automation capabilities, which includes targeted multi-email marketing campaigns based on user behavior.

Website Visitor Identification. In addition to helping hotels generate more traffic to their meetings website, Tambourine also identifies companies researching on hotel websites, providing hotel sales and marketing teams with a list of targets who have visited their website, but may not have taken action.

Reporting. Tambourine provides comprehensive reporting by segment to clients on a monthly basis, including RFP and attribution reporting. This allows hotels to view how their campaigns are performing, which channels are driving the most leads, etc. within a single report.

White-Glove Account Service. Tambourine offers two-person account support teams for every hotel. They handle the strategy, provide day-to-day support, oversee campaign implementation, and summarize everything in monthly reports.

Review

Tambourine’s Meetings Amplifier solution aims to increase hotel meetings and groups performance by focusing their efforts on the hotel’s direct channel: their website. Tambourine’s turnkey service is designed to complement, not overlap with, the hotels’ legacy marketing efforts. In other words, this program can be run separately or in conjunction with the hotel’s existing leisure transient strategy.

Their approach is unique in that the solution applies B2B lead generation best practices to the meetings and groups segment. What does that mean?

Take their approach to hotel website design, for instance. Hotels typically build websites focused on their Leisure Transient segment as it targets the average customer shopping for room nights. The Meetings Amplifier program builds on top of that a second experience specifically for meeting planners, which centers everything from the ads they click on to the web experience they shop on around them.

The planner-centered experience is intended to make it easier for meeting planners to go through the sales flow on hotel websites. Forms are designed to be easy to use, accessible, and mobile-friendly. The website design blends galleries and full screen images with information like capacity charts, room diagrams, etc. to help planners make informed decisions.

The website not only serves as a lead generation portal, but as a sales tool for the sales and marketing teams as well.

In addition to the website, Tambourine offers RFP generating media options to suit the hotel’s needs and budget. They manage all campaigns, develop creative, ensure brand consistency across channels, negotiate vendor rates, and provide centralized reporting, taking all the pressure of lead generation off the on-property marketing team. The hotel can then hold one party accountable for its marketing performance and can focus on what they do best—responding to RFPs and nurturing relationships.

During our demo, Tambourine reported that one of its recent clients, a hotel in Orlando — which is a very competitive market — saw a five-fold increase in average monthly leads from their website in a six-month period using Tambourine’s services. In this case, the hotel already had marketing channels in place. This program ran separately from their existing Cvent campaigns, as well as the efforts of their national sales team.

Unlike many products in the groups and meetings space, Tambourine’s services are priced with hotel budgets in mind. Meetings Amplifier by Tambourine requires no contracts or commitments, so the program is very low risk. If the hotel is dissatisfied with performance, they can cancel at any time.

Who’s it for?

Tambourine’s Meetings Amplifier is geared towards both independent and branded hotels that are looking to increase meeting and group bookings. Independent hotels in particular may have an easier time working with Tambourine, given that they have complete control over their branding and marketing, but branded hotels can also benefit from the service.

Who’s it not for?

Hotels that do not cater to groups and/or do not have meeting or event spaces will not find Tambourine’s Meetings Amplifier useful. That said, they may benefit from one of Tambourine’s other segments: F&B, Leisure, Weddings, Spa & Golf.

In addition, Tambourine’s services may not be a good fit for hotels that already have a successful dedicated B2B strategy in place for meetings and groups, and do not need additional lead generation assistance.

Features

Custom designs: One of Tambourine’s main features is its custom design. Rather than use templates when building websites for clients, it aims to create high-end hotel website designs tailored to each hotel or event space to showcase any meeting and event products or offerings.

Content management system: Tambourine’s services include its proprietary content management system, which hotels can access to make changes to their website on their own if needed.

Lead nurturing: With Tambourine, hotel sales teams can leverage email nurturing campaigns post-sale to reduce the burden of  having to manually follow up and stay in touch with potential leads.

Retargeting campaigns: Among Tambourine’s marketing services are retargeting campaigns on sites like Facebook and Google, which allows hotels to remarket to leads who have visited their website and increase the chances that they’ll eventually convert.

Shopper ID: Tambourine provides hotels with specific details on the companies shopping their meetings website in order to identify potential leads. This includes information such as company name, the website pages visited, the campaign that led them there, and potential people from the company that viewed the site.

White glove account service: Tambourine’s services are intended to streamline hotel marketing activities and reduce the burden on a hotel’s staff, so its teams handle all aspects of its programs, including website design and creation, marketing campaigns, and vendor management.

RFP reporting: Tambourine includes monthly automated RFP reporting so that hotels can keep track of their campaign results.

Pricing and Plans

Overall, Tambourine’s services are cost-effective relative to other hotel marketing tools in the B2B space.

Schedule a demo to learn more about specific plans and pricing.

Pros and Cons

In Conclusion

Tambourine provides comprehensive digital marketing services specifically for hotels.

For the groups and meetings segment, this includes setting up a B2B marketing strategy with a dedicated meetings website and media campaigns.

The entire program is managed by Tambourine, so it doesn’t involve any additional work for hotels, and the pricing is designed to fit within hotels’ marketing budgets. Both independent and larger franchised hotels that are looking to increase their direct B2B lead generation will benefit from Tambourine’s Meetings Amplifier solution.

Disclaimer: Reviews are paid for placements. While Event Manager Blog receives a fee to extensively look at the tool and review it in detail, the content of the review is independent and by no means influenced by the company. If you have any questions please use the contact us section.