Your CRM is full of data your website never uses
Destinations and hotels keep their partner records in a CRM, then update the website, the maps and the brochures by hand. Here is what we found when we looked at nearly 2,750 of those records, and what changes when you sync them once and publish them everywhere.
Every destination marketing team we work with has the same quiet problem. The partner records are in the CRM: hotels, restaurants, venues, attractions, each with an address, a phone number, a website, some photos. Then the same details are typed again into the website. And again into the map. And again into the visitor guide, the kiosk in the welcome center and the email to meeting planners.
Every copy drifts a little further from the truth. A restaurant changes its hours, a venue moves its entrance, a hotel adds a rooftop bar, and the change reaches one place out of five.
What we found in nearly 2,750 records
When clients connect their CRM to Tera, we sync their partner listings and check every one. Across the destinations we run today that is about 2,750 listings, and the picture is remarkably consistent:
- 1 in 5 map pins was in the wrong place. For 541 listings, the address in the CRM pointed more than 100 meters away from where the business actually is. On a walking map, that is the difference between finding the door and giving up.
- Only 11% of records had opening hours. It is the first thing a visitor wants to know, and the field most often left empty.
- About half had a description. The rest were a name, an address and a phone number.
- Only 1 in 5 listed amenities such as parking, accessibility or meeting space, the details that decide where a planner books.
None of this means the CRM is badly kept. A CRM is built for membership, invoices and contacts. It was never meant to be the shop window. The problem starts when the shop window is built by copying from it by hand.
The data is already there. It just never reaches the places where people decide where to go.
Sync once, publish everywhere
The fix is not another spreadsheet. It is one connection, run in three steps.
1. Connect. Tera syncs with the CRM you already use. Your team keeps working where it always has; nobody retypes a record.
2. Enrich. Each record is checked against the map and matched with public sources such as Google, Yelp and Foursquare. Wrong pins are corrected, duplicates are merged, missing hours, photos and details are filled in, and every listing gets a health score so you can see at a glance which ones need attention.
3. Serve. The same enriched record feeds every channel at once: the interactive map, the 360° tours, the microsites, the kiosks, the emails, and your own website through the API. Change it once, and it changes everywhere.
Where the hours come back
The time saved is not in any single update. It is in all the updates that no longer happen five times:
- no copying partner details into the website, the map and the guide separately;
- no hunting for the one brochure that still lists a closed restaurant;
- no emailing partners to ask for photos you already have;
- no arguing over which version of an address is the right one.
And because every channel reads from the same record, every view and every click can be counted against it. You can finally see which partners, places and pages bring visitors in.
Richer pages, not just correct ones
Correct data is the floor. The real gain comes when the same record carries more: better descriptions, written for the different people who read them, from leisure visitors to meeting planners and sports organizers; more photos and video; a 360° view of the venue; the walking entrance on the map. This is where we spend a lot of our time with clients: helping them decide how to position each place, then enriching its page with the data and media that make it stand out.
Five questions to ask about your own data
- How many places do your partner details live in today?
- When a partner changes their hours, how many of those places get updated, and by whom?
- How many of your map pins have you actually checked?
- Can you tell which partner listings bring in visits or leads?
- Could a new campaign page go live this week using data you already have?
If the answers make you wince, you are in good company. It is one of the most common problems we see, and one of the fastest to fix.