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Market Summary – Content Distribution

Market Overview

What exactly is Content Distribution in managing a hotel, restaurant, or a group of these businesses? Suppose your property wants to maximize exposure and ECommerce opportunities. In that case, it will distribute its rooms or food through other businesses, such as Online Travel Agencies (i.e., Expedia or Orbitz) or Food Delivery Solutions (i.e., UberEats or Postmates), respectively. Doing this provides access to a broader market for any given location and often leads to new customer acquisition.

However, to participate in the sites that have access to these prospective customers, your business needs to be able to choose what sites to partner with and how best to distribute products with them. Many people familiar with this concept call it Channel Management. Traditional channel management accounts for the distribution of pricing and product availability to third parties that have a license to redistribute your products. When distributing hotel rooms or purchasing food and beverage online, content for these products is key when consumers research or buy. This is where Content Distribution comes into play when successfully distributing your products with the additional reach and marketing prowess of OTAs and FDSs. These solutions automate text and image distribution systems for hotels, restaurants, and golf courses across other marketing channels to not only raise brand awareness but also merchandise products to entice the consumer.

Capsolve has identified 19 solutions that either provide products in this category or contain selected functionality to facilitate content distribution across online distribution channels. While this category is not one of the larger categories Capsolve covers, it has multiple solution paths when considering how the solutions may be combined for eventual implementation.

Many of the solutions in this category are sold by companies headquartered in the United States, but the most comprehensive and industry-specific solutions are headquartered in several cities worldwide.

Marketplace Context

Distributing product content into the marketplace to support ecommerce partnerships creates both marketing and revenue potential for restaurants and hotels. The primary business need is to present an attractive visual representation of your products and entice consumers to buy through these channels. As a result, Hotels and Restaurants should consider the following:

Furthermore, when dealing with significant amounts of content for a location or across multiple locations, having tools to manage all of this content becomes vital to maintaining your brand and communicating its essence to prospective buyers. This category solves this pain point with many different types of solutions and from various perspectives.

The diversity of these solutions extends beyond the geographic headquarters of their owning companies and well into the functionality of their respective feature sets. Depending on your business needs, you will find almost any combination of functionality within this marketplace. However, sifting through numerous vendors to perform proper due diligence may become an exasperating experience whether you are a technology novice or an aficionado.

Sales & Marketing Considerations

Distributing content to facilitate ECommerce supports sales and marketing programs. However, many considerations exist regarding how to interact with most channel sites. Ultimately, you are positioning your products in front of your prospective customers with the services of partner sites within one or more channels. Your products and their positioning may need to be adapted to each partner site based on how they approach the marketplace. History taught us this when comparing how to sell on Expedia versus Priceline. While differences across most OTAs and FDSs are more subtle, they are essential when developing and implementing your distribution strategy and staying competitive.

Regarding content marketing, the key is getting high-quality content to visually represent the key consumer benefits to your prospective markets. However, as the number of sites you partner with increases, the complexity of getting your content, pricing, and property information may also increase. Therefore, having channel management capabilities that can efficiently play this role is extraordinarily valuable and is usually a better option than putting an unwieldy number of human resources behind the effort.

The key to simplifying this type of implementation is finding a solution that addresses the maturity and sophistication level of your location or group of properties. Solutions exist that provide comprehensive, simplified approaches for individual locations, eliminating the inherent complexity of distributing numerous content elements to multiple channels and sites. If your team manages content for multiple hotels or restaurants, then solutions exist that simplify this rather different level of intricacy.

The simplification effort for your marketing and ecommerce programs originates from your core systems. Your product and pricing information resides in your POS for a restaurant or restaurant group, your PMS for a hotel, and possibly your CRS for a hotel group. Supplementing this source data with content and its storage creates the opportunity to distribute it to partners. The other major puzzle piece is connecting these core systems to some form of channel management and each partner site. Designing how this works for one or more locations will dramatically influence the effectiveness and efficiency of your programs and leads us to interconnectivity.

Current Trends

1. Online Ordering: Restaurants now rely on Digital Ordering Solutions as an essential source of business.
2. Online Travel Agencies: Hotels continue to rely on OTAs but have sought greater control over the distribution of their products on these sites. This has led to a deeper understanding of each site’s preferred business terms and needed features from Channel Management solutions in collaboration with Content Distribution.
3. Food Delivery Services (FDS): Restaurants continue to make tactical decisions about which services to partner with and in what form, not to mention the technological considerations associated with these services.
4. Increased Changes in Menu: The marketplace is reintroducing menu items as the demand stability improves.
5. Restaurant FDS Management: Restaurants now manage orders from multiple channels, including Websites and FDSs. They interact with these channels in multiple forms, such as Browsers, Phones, Tablets, Text Messages, Social Media, and FDS sites connected to the POS.
6. Hotel OTA Management: Hotels continue to distribute across a wide array of partner sites, increasing the complexity of online distribution unless automation supports these crucial business processes.
7. Partner Ecosystem Race: The importance for vendors to have a mature set of functionality bolstered in part by partnerships that are pre-integrated into their solution continues to be a point of differentiation for leading solutions in the marketplace.

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About this Report

This document reviews the marketing information and capabilities associated with this category’s solutions and the surrounding technology ecosystem. It contains original content written by Capsolve to provide a perspective of current trends affecting one or more of the hotel, restaurant, golf course, and country club industries. The analysis covers a statistically significant portion of the previously defined category marketplace.