It seems no industry or business sector is immune from the growing impact of influencer marketing. Our guest today, Kevin Scholl of Red Roof Inn can share with us the how the hospitality industry has been influenced and how Red Roof has sought to incorporate influencer marketing into its current and future planning.

Welcome Kevin.

Kevin Scholl: Hello, great to be here.

Sherri Langburt: It is great to have you here. So I know we share a friend or a colleague in common, and he told me that you have a passion for storytelling. And I would love to start off with understanding, because I do too. I wanted to be a writer my whole life.

What sparked your interest in storytelling and how has it shaped your career?

Kevin Scholl: So I think being a kid of the late seventies and the eighties, I grew up on movies that were directed by guys named George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. And there was something about sitting in a dark room with a bunch of strangers, but having a shared experience that intrigued me, and really gave me this idea of what it must be like to be able to have that kind of ability to take a bunch of strangers that don’t know each other, and give them something, if only for an hour and a half or two hours, that they can have a shared invested interest in. And that’s where my love for the power of story developed. And I sought out every opportunity I could to figure out how to tell a story. And I, at a young age, started to write my first novel.

And I realized that they were really long and that’s a lot of words. So I went back to my love of film and realized that I could write a screenplay about in about 100 pages. And I went to film school, which further ignited my passion and my understanding of what it meant to engage an audience, what it meant to tell a story, what it meant to understand the audience, what it meant to have a message, and something that you wanted them to take away.

And how you had to understand how to deliver that to them in the best way possible so that the most people can understand or relate to what you were trying to say. And that was where I thought I was going to end up.

I thought I was going to be a director of bad movies, not a director of marketing.

And Hollywood being the way that it is, I realized that maybe I better have a plan B. And my plan B found me one day turning in a marketing department. And 20 something years later, I’m still here.

Sherri Langburt: That sounds very similar. My trajectory. I ended up writing technical manuals for a software company while creating scripts to TV shows. So it’s amazing how the world has opened up opportunities for creatives in marketing.

Kevin Scholl: Oh absolutely. And the fun thing was, is that when you think where we are today and why we’re on this podcast today, is it that, when I got into and probably yourself, we were still in this very traditional marketing mindset where it was very much focused on the message but not really as worried about having a conversation around that message or even how the message was received. And that this idea in the last 10, 15 years of really understanding what is marketing?

Marketing is ultimately now very collaborative… It’s community building, it’s engaging an audience.

But more importantly is when you engage the audience, it’s actually paying attention to their feedback, paying attention to the idea of it’s not just the being creative, but it’s also understanding how we deliver the message.

So the skillset of working in film is something that I didn’t really get to apply in the marketing aspect till maybe a decade ago went with the advent of digital marketing and social media, where it’s such a collaborative environment now that you have to have all these different pieces to really be effective.

And that’s, I think I one of those opportunities, and perhaps I was born 20 years too soon because I didn’t have YouTube and all these fun things when I was in film school. But a skillset that I developed as a teenager is now something that I get to play with every day.

Sherri Langburt: I say that Sesame Street taught me my creativity. So I’m there with you.

What’s your role like at Red Roof?

Kevin Scholl: So I am the director of digital marketing and marketing technologies. We are a brand that although we have over 700 locations in multiple countries, we’re unique in our space because we are still privately owned. And the reason I bring that up is because we have a different kind of set of tools that we get to play with because we are not owned by a large corporate entity.

I don’t have the budgets that our competitors have. So that has really allowed us to have to think outside of the box, have to be very cognizant of how we’re growing and building community around travel, and really focusing on what, what are the opportunities that we can leverage within the digital space. And to be completely on point, how do we leverage our guests and community of content creators and influencers to help spread the message and spread the word as it is?

Sherri Langburt: Yeah. So then I guess that brings up the next question, which is the whole focus of what we’re doing.

How and where does influencer marketing reside within your organization?

Kevin Scholl: It’s very important. It’s fun because when we look at it really is the basis of part of our success in social media was the idea and the recognition of we have to build a community. And we are very good at being transparent. I’ve had conversations about the reality of who Red Roof is. But it’s also this idea and recognition that in today’s age consumers are given much more authority in the transactional relationship that we have with them. They want a say, they want to have input, they want to have a feeling about their purchase.

And a brand saying, “No, trust me. No, trust me.” I think it’s a little easier for them to trust us but still at the same time you’re always going to get back to this idea of we are now community purchasers, and we like input from those around us to help us justify or understand that we’re making the right decision with our purchase no matter what it is. From a vacuum to a hotel room. Building out a social community really opened up this idea for us that user generated content, user generated influence was extremely important to our brand, and finding the right people to do that ultimately is the challenge.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah, definitely. So let me ask this. As you talk about building this community and getting their feedback.

What does your community look like? Is it just influencers or it’s fans of the brand?

Kevin Scholl: As a hospitality brand and as a budget brand, if I can toot our horn, right? Our social community on Facebook is really where we started eight years ago when I started with the brand. We went from having no social presence to over a million and a half people who follow us on a daily basis within Facebook.

The opportunity to engage with who those people are really showed us that we had an initial following of brand advocates who had been with the brand since 1973, when we were founded, who were the first and the quickest to engage and to respond and to be interactive. And then as we figured out opportunity to build out other segments within that space of pet owners, we do a lot of business with people traveling with pets. Because pets get to stay free at Red Roof. We’re the only brand that has that now.

Sherri Langburt: I saw that.

Kevin Scholl: We reached out to geek travelers. We looked at what are the opportunities for us to really engage with people who aren’t necessarily being engaged with by brands right now? And that led to this idea of influencer. It was recognizing that our brand advocates are awesome and they have a sphere of influence within their network. It’s the telephone game of social media.

The irony of something that I learned from my mother as a child, my mother was the one of those who she’s the best customer, the worst customer. Because my mother had this line that to this day I still use, if she would have a bad experience at McDonald’s, let’s say, she would go to the manager and say, “Hey, I’m a school teacher and I have 25 people I work with. And tomorrow morning I’m going to go in and I’m going to tell them a story about my experience here. And it’s up to you on how that story ends.”

And at the time I was like, “Wow, that’s very impressive.” And it was 25 people, there’s a sphere of influence. And my mom was doing social media call outs before social media existed. But what we recognized with this advent of this idea of quote unquote influencer, is that at the end of the day, …

everybody has a sphere of influence, whether it’s the two people that they’re connected to on Facebook or the 200,000 people.

As a brand, what we looked at understanding was that the people who are in our networks currently and had influence amongst their peers were great for us. But as we began to grow and as we wanted to grow the awareness for the brand, we recognize that it was a good opportunity for us to leverage somebody who perhaps wasn’t a brand advocate initially, but had a network that was large enough that we could say, “Okay. What is really the difference between a brand advocate and an influencer?”

It’s the opportunity of reach. It’s that we know that in partnering with an influencer that we have a preset idea of what kind of network they have built. It’s a preexisting network that we can vet and look at, and see how they fit in line with who we are as a brand. The challenge initially, through a lot of it was that we didn’t get into influencers really until the last year or two.

When this idea of influencer became popular among not only our culture but among brands it was mostly people who had a large amount of followers approaching you and saying,

“I’ve got 100,000 people on my Instagram or my Facebook. And for a $20,000 I will say something about your brand.”

For us, that didn’t make a lot of sense, because if Joe had a sneaker following and he talked about sneakers 99% of the time, it didn’t make any sense that there’d be any kind of genuine sincerity to pay him a lot of the money to talk about the brand.

So we actually turned down influencers who were just coming after us and saying, “Hey, you pay us a lot of money and we’ll say something about you.” Because we didn’t think that there was a value of just being in front of an audience. It’s this idea of if you’re in a room with a million people and they all have their backs to you, what’s the point in talking to them? So we really wanted to figure out how do we leverage influencers who are in line with who our existing advocates are, who our existing consumers are, who are existing guests are. And that’s what led us to you.

Sherri Langburt: And within your organization, sounds like you’re very focused on influencer marketing.

Have you taken away other pieces of marketing to focus more on influencer marketing?

Kevin Scholl: We’ve seen successful results with influencer as a franchise organization within the hospitality space. The idea of being able to talk about what influencer marketing is, there’s much more awareness among our franchisees.

They all understand the concept. Having successful results, building genuine relationships within the influencer space has allowed us to grow it. So we haven’t taken away, what we’ve really done is just said, “Okay. These things we know are all working. This is something that we know worked.”

It took us a minute or two to figure out what our voice and what the right fit for us was going to be. And now I think we have a good understanding of how we utilize that. It’s moving forward with a heavier focus on how do we continue to build these relationships within the influencer space?

Because now we’re able to tie conversions, we’re able to tie ROI. We’re getting the opportunity to do something that a lot of people may just do for the optics of it, we can do and say,

“Not only are we getting the optics from creating these relationships, but here’s the proven return on our investment for it.”

Sherri Langburt: How are you tracking that return? Because a lot of it, yeah, you can track, but a lot of it… with influencer marketing is not so trackable. You see a post, you see a beautiful hotel, because I know you launched two beautiful new hotels. But six months later someone might be coming and saying I saw that once upon a time ago.

How do you track back those numbers?

Kevin Scholl: That is a great question. It’s one of the questions that we always get, and you face anytime you work in social, especially in the hotel space. If I was selling a widget and I could put the widget on sale for $5 I would have an immediate return on my investment. When you’re selling a travel experience, you track in two forms.

So number one, is there an opportunity [inaudible 00:14:01] some immediacy, whether it’s through providing trackable linking, through understanding where our traffic is coming from. So if an influencer has a blog or from social we look at, “Okay. We’re running a campaign with an influencer, is there an uptick that we can attribute?” And how do we follow that attribution all the way through conversion? And it’s not huge in the grand scheme of things.

What we do is also it’s the long tail to your point of how do we stay top of mind for that consumer who six months from now comes in and books and says, “Oh, you know what? I remember this guy that I follow, I really liked, and he made a post or a thing about Red Roof. And I’m going to book there.” The short term, what are the immediate analytics we can do, which are the clickables and the click throughs, ultimately it’s an assumption of where do we stand in the social space?

How are impressions doing? How is our traffic being driven from the social space and through organic search? And as long as we continue to see an uptick, we can tie that back because we had this conversation today, I can tell you how many bookings we had, but six months from now, the trend of our booking flow is that we are consistent or we’re up. So the conversations that we’re having are still driving that business to us even if it’s six months from now.

Sherri Langburt: And what about the shared content? I feel that there’s a lot of beautiful imagery and content pieces which can be leveraged for so many other channels.

Is that something that you see value in?

Kevin Scholl: Oh yeah, absolutely. The fun part about shared imagery is that you know we are a branded hotel and it’s one of those opportunities where the reason people like us is because we are a brand. They get this similar experience, so just kind of get into this cycle of you’ve seen one picture of a red roof room, you’ve probably seen them all because that’s part of the shared experience of staying at a brand.

What’s been great for us is really digging into the opportunity to work with influencers who are doing more experiential type of exploration of the markets that our hotels are in. The shared stories of I stayed at the red roof and here’s some pictures of the place we ate and the things that we did. And that’s the stuff that’s really driving internal and external awareness for our travel experience.

And the great thing about us and why influencers are important is that as a brand, we are not a destination brand. I do not sell my property based upon the fact that I’ve got a spa, and a restaurant, and a gym, and all of these kinds of things that a guest may be looking for, and that I’m going to go lock myself away in a hotel for a weekend and just turn myself off from the world.

As a brand. Our story is that we’re a part of our guest experience and the reason they stay with us is because more than likely they are doing something within the market that they’re staying in that’s driving them to that market.

And the last thing that they want to do necessarily is spend a lot of money on the hotel. They want safe, they want clean, they want comfortable. Those are all things that we provide to them. So we’re really as a marketer, it behooves me, and I should be at the top of being able to not only tell the story about my hotel experience, but about the overall travel experiences the guest is going to have, and what part Red Roof plays in that. And influencers are great for doing that.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah. I just had a call with someone yesterday who’s an influencer, and we were talking about that. She’s going, I guess overseas. And we were talking about her trip and I’m like, “You just went to Paris and I looked at your whole itinerary, you should be doing these trips like city visits and tell us everywhere, and every hotel you’re staying at, and every tour you’re doing.” I think particularly when you’re talking about such local based marketing and information, it’s important.

Kevin Scholl: Oh no. Absolutely. The beauty of working in the travel space is that everyone loves to talk about their travel. I’ve had a couple of stories that I won’t share. But most of the 15 years of being in the hospitality industry, it’s not hard to get people to share their travel experience.

And most people don’t just want to hear a story of, “Oh, they had good coffee and the pillow was nice.” And those are all good things and they’re important things. But it’s really the shared story that you’re going to tell us is your experience. “We went and did this and it was great. And the part of that… And Oh yeah, by the way, they had free wifi and pets stayed free.”

As a hotel guy. And I’ve stayed in more hotels than I can even keep track of. But the one thing that I will always say that if you’re in an interesting and exciting market and the best thing that you can talk about is your room, then you’re not doing it right. And that’s where influencers have been really great for us because having an influencer to just walk into a room and say, “Well, they had free coffee and free wifi. And my pet stayed for free and I got really soft pillows.” That’s a minute long story.

Being able to leverage influencers to really get a full picture of what is the travel experience. Because ultimately at the end of the day, for me, the idea of influencers is it’s inspirational and aspirational. That’s what I want a potential guest to take away.

Because the odds that we’re going to catch somebody in a, “I am getting ready to make a decision on a hotel purchase. But before I do that I’m going to go check out my favorite influencer to see what they say,” is probably slim to none.

To your point of if I read a post or I read a story that one of my people I follow on Instagram was in Chicago. And they posted a bunch of pictures of all these really fun and exciting things. That is something that I think I want to do and I’m going to look at where they went. “Oh, where’d they stay?” That’s another question I’m going to have. So that brings us into the conversation.

And the marketing and why I think we’ve been successful is because we always remember that we’re a part of the travel experience. We are okay with focusing on the travel experience and just knowing where our place is in that story. Having a singular focus on just wanting to talk about us in the story is, it’s not quite as exciting and it can quite frankly not be as interesting to some of our consumers. So it’s always …

recognizing and understanding that the only way we’re going to get people to stay with us as if we could somehow help to create content that’s going to inspire them to want to travel in the first place.

Sherri Langburt: So I guess does, and maybe I’m wrong, but does it become more complicated? There are four brands under one umbrella for Red Roof.

Kevin Scholl: Yes.

How do you explain the different types of influencers? Or are they different?

Kevin Scholl: This has been part of the great part of working with a great partner is that when we started the influencer path, we had a single brand of Red Roof Inn. And we have Red Roof Inn, Red Roof Plus+, The Red Collection, and Hometown Studios by Red Roof. And how does any brand figure out what the overall brand voice is? And then if you’ve got these little sub stories that you can tell within that you’ve got to do the same.

So you have to come up with what is the voice of this location? How is that reflected in the overall brand voice? Because at the end of the day, our overall brand consumer is the same. They are a budget focused traveler. Now how do we then translate that down to our soft brands?

There is going to be a little bit of a difference between a guest who staying at a Red Roof Inn, and a guest who’s staying at Red Roof Plus+. There’s going to be a little bit of a difference between the guest who’s staying at a Red Roof Inn, and Red Roof Plus+, who’s staying in a Red Collection. So where that came time for us was really to figure out,

“Okay. How do we understand our audience?”

We know the core audience, how do we approach an influencer that is right for a Red Roof Plus+? That’s probably going to be somebody who’s traveling to Orlando and their family. Okay, that’s the type of influencer that we want to speak on our behalf.

Now we’ve got a property on Michigan Avenue, we’ve got a property in Times Square. That’s probably going to be somebody who skews younger, an international traveler, somebody who’s looking for a weekend out on the town. That’s the type of story and the type of storyteller we want to find to align, to speak on our behalf for those brands.

Once you understand your audience, it’s just finding the right opportunity and the right influencer to correctly speak to that brand.

And really that comes back to a core philosophy of this idea of we always want to be transparent in how we’re talking to our guests. But more importantly, back to kind of my original thing, that you have to understand your audience before you talk to them. You could have a great message, but if it’s not delivered by the right messenger, it could go unheard.

Sherri Langburt: You spoke before and I’m thinking about, and all these ideas are coming to my mind. You said, “Okay.” I know that there’s pet influencers, because pets stay free.

But what were you talking about geeks?

Kevin Scholl: So I’m a geek, if that isn’t readily apparent by now. When we looked at what are the opportunities for us to continue to grow our community, grow our influencers, grow who we’re creating content for, this one was an opportunity for introspection because at the end of the day, I’m a consumer myself. Can’t be a good marketer without being a good consumer, that’s what I tell my wife.

So I looked at how are hotel brands marketing to people who are traveling to geek or pop culture related things? And 20 years ago you didn’t see anything in the news about the San Diego Comic-Con or New York Comic-Con or all these big conventions, but there’s been a cultural shift of being a geek is now cool. And everybody’s a geek. Everybody loves watching the Marvel movies and Star Wars and all these things are back, and very extremely popular.

People are now traveling to these things who, it’s not just their core audience anymore, it’s a huge subset of people who are looking for new and interesting travel experiences. And they’re like, “It’d be fun to go to one of those comic book shows. It’d be fun to dress up as a storm trooper for the weekend and get outside of my space.” And I don’t collect comic books or I’m not collecting action figures. But I like those movies and it’s a fun thing and they become more about pop culture and the media that drives those things with Netflix and all these streaming services. So we looked at how do companies communicate to that audience?

Because at the end of the day, they’re all around hotels. And the unique thing to make real quick is that if I’m a hotel across from a convention center that has a comic book convention, I don’t market to those people, because they’re going to stay with me because of where I am, location, location, location. So I don’t have to market to them. So they just kind of ignore that. Like they’re going to come to us whether or not they want to stay with us.

But the thing that I discovered both in my personal existence and just in being a part of that culture, a lot of these people were driving to these events. And no one was marketing to the, “Hey, while you’re driving, if you need a place to stay on your way, stay at our hotel.” And that was driven through very low marketing spends because it’s a community that’s a huge preexisting community that’s driven through and has been driven through, bringing it back around, influencers.

Sherri Langburt: That is brilliant.

Kevin Scholl: And if you look at the influencers within the geek space, they’re the ones who started this idea of influencer. They may not be the Kardashians, but if you go back in the history of influencers, it’s cos-players, it’s people doing reviews on geeky things. And they’ve been doing it for much longer than any of the trendy folks that are doing it now.

They have these, “Oh gee” idea of what an influencer is. But more importantly, these are influencers who are extremely passionate about what they’re doing. They didn’t just set it up as a means to become popular and earn some income. So we leveraged cos-players and convention goer influencers. And they don’t have five million followers, but they’re sincere, they’re genuine. And they spoke to what we were trying to speak to.

And so you still do that now as an ongoing initiative?

Kevin Scholl: Yep. So kind of our sphere of influencers was started with pet travel because pet travelers, they love to talk about pets and it’s a across the board opportunity to have conversation about the brand as a whole because we’re all pet friendly. And then we started to drill down into, “Okay. What are the other voices that we want to represent the brand?” It’s family travel, it’s a little bit of business travel, it’s geek travel, it’s passion travel.

Where you guys came into play to really help us was with our Red Collection. The Red Collection was totally unique for us and it’s totally unique in the space because it is this idea that we created of trying to figure out …

how do we launch a budget boutique experience that’s not a branded experience with each location being unique?

And we had ideas, and we had some thoughts on how we were going to talk to those guests, but finding a partner to allow us to really help explore how we get across to that audience is why we took the call from Babbleboxx. And we’re glad that we did.

Sherri Langburt: Thank you. No, it’s definitely interesting. There’s just so many different ways in which, because there are four properties under one umbrella, in which you could think about it. We’re coming onto a new year and a new decade.

What are you plans for next year and what trends do you see for 2020?

Kevin Scholl: So I think, obviously we’re going to continue. We’ll continue to work with the relationships that we have because as a brand, that’s part of what we think makes sense for… It’s not just developing a single serving opportunity with an influencer. And there are cases for that certainly.

Part of what we think works and what we’ve seen work is building up a relationship with our influencers that take it more into a partnership than just being kind of a, “Well, this one time we did this one thing.” We’re really looking at leaning into influencers within the touring musician space. Because we get a lot of bands who stay with us who are on the road. They’re not signed. But they have a social following. They understand that they don’t have a marketing budget either. So the best thing for them to do is get as many people talking about them.

It’s looking at how do we attract new influencers and how do we approach them with unique experiences from the beginning? And that’s what intrigued me about the partnership with Babbleboxx, and I’m not being paid for this by the way, I just want to throw this out there to anybody that’s listening. This is all genuine and sincere.

What was interesting about working with you guys that helped shift our planning for 2020, was not the quality of the influencers that you were able to get for us, but how you approach them. Before it was really us approaching somebody and saying, “Hey, we can give you some VIP passes and a couple of dollars.” Or them approaching us and saying, “Hey, can we have free stays?”

That was the transactional experience with influencers. There was not a lot of buy in and some of it was, you could tell was not real genuine. It was, “Oh, I’m going to get a free night out of these guys. So I’ll post something for them on their behalf.”

Being able to provide influencers with an upfront experience before they even have an experience with the brand, to me, was setting us up for success because the story started from minute one.

Sherri Langburt: That’s great feedback. I’m glad we’re doing something right on our end. So thank you.

Kevin Scholl: You’re very welcome. I’m just relaying my thoughts on the experience.

Sherri Langburt: Thank you. So this is my closing final question, which I always ask. Name an influencer you love to follow but hate to admit that you do? Mine is Snoopy. So I follow everything, anything on Instagram that has to do with Snoopy.

Kevin Scholl: I’m proud of everybody that I follow.

Sherri Langburt: Okay. Well, thank you so much. This has been… I know there’s a lot going on in the travel industry, some good, some not so good with influencer marketing, so this has been really helpful. And we really appreciate your feedback and your insights.

Kevin Scholl: You’re very welcome.

Sherri Langburt: Thank you so much, Kevin.

Kevin Scholl: Have a great day.

Sherri Langburt: You too. Bye.