An improved content distribution system has helped InterContinental Hotels Group deploy a more effective content marketing strategy worldwide.
The IHG family of brands includes Intercontinental, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, Hotel Indigo and Candlewood Suites. Digital sales for the brand passed $5 billion last year, and about 20% of IHG sales are made through direct bookings on the web or via mobile, noted Chad Westfall, director, web delivery, IHG, speaking at the Adobe Summit on Thursday.
Travelers make over 360 million visits to IHG’s websites and apps annually. The brand saw a 76% growth in mobile app use last year, 62% growth in mobile web usage and 26% growth in tablet use. Desktop visits showed only eight percent growth.
Delivering meaningful digital content worldwide is a major challenge for the brand, which reaches 200 countries, speaking 16 languages. As there was significant IT involvement in most digital initiatives, production time was also a hurdle, said Westfall.
There’s also the fact that each of IHG’s diverse hotel brands has its own distinct experience it is trying to create for guests, he noted. “The challenge is finding operational efficiencies, but still talking in the language of each brand.”
IHG needed to look at how it delivered digital content and reinvent the system architecture, looking at how the content delivery systems interact with other systems and tackling issues such as localization and translation.
The brand realized the best way to do this would be to separate the ecommerce portion of the equation from content. For a CMS, it wanted a Java-based, cloud-deployed or SaaS system with a comprehensive workflow that would interact seamlessly with other products in the IHG tech ecosystem.
It selected Adobe Experience Manager, and is currently in the process of a global rollout. The results so far are promising: page performance has improved 30% to 60% globally, and there has been a 65% reduction in time to production for content initiatives.
The next step will be to implement the delivery of contextual hotel content, delivering content to users based on the context of where they are on the hotel property, using location awareness via wi-fi and beacons.
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