The Virtual Strategist
Jay Bowen
I am a Virtual Strategist with over 20 years of experience in strategic hotel and travel marketing, encompassing marketing, strategy, and booking engine management.
I bring a wealth of knowledge, innovative strategies, and a positive approach to each project. My focus is on offering solutions that truly benefit your business—I won’t recommend something you don’t need or that won’t support your growth.
My goal is to drive results that are in your best interest because that’s what’s in my best interest too.
Marketing & Support Services
Marketing Strategy
Research, design and build your long term marketing strategy. Understanding what is happening in the marketing place, understand what your organizations KPI’s are and how to deliver on those effectively with a solid marketing strategy. That’s what I am good at. Understand who your right customer is and how to get them to convert. And to keep them converting over and over again.
Hotel Booking Engine Support
Owning and running my own hotel has allowed me to gain extensive experience in hotel booking engine support and management. I've honed my skills in optimizing booking platforms to enhance operational efficiency and guest satisfaction. My background includes troubleshooting and streamlining booking processes, ensuring seamless integration with property management systems, and staying updated on industry best practices to maximize direct bookings. I am adept at training staff on booking tools, refining workflows, and analyzing booking trends to support revenue goals and enhance the overall guest experience. This expertise has been crucial in aligning the technical aspects of booking engines with the operational needs of hotels, driving both efficiency and profitability.
CRM & Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation and AI have been around for a long time. I have been lucky to work on most of them and roll them out. HubSpot, Act-On, SalesForce Marketing Cloud, ActOn and even Mail Chimp are platforms I have implemented, managed and optimized for my brands to improve customer engagement and increase the Lifetime Value of the database. Lead acquisition and nurturing as well as mapping out a Customer Journey to identify all touch points to improve and optimize the funnel is central to my work in supporting marketing, sales or customer support teams.
Project Management
Big website builds, large marketing campaign project deployment or SAAS Scrum management. I have worked in large advertising agencies and small tech start up’s. I have lived through it all and come through the other side as a pretty solid project manager. Now is this my top skill? Probably not, but identifying what is needed to roll out a project and sourcing the right team to do it. I am really good at that.
Content Strategy & Execution
Defining the Content Roadmap and Plan is part of a strategic initiative to drive engagement and conversion for any brand. Defining the goals/KPI’s then mapping out the initiatives that align with SEO goals is part of the service I deliver for my clients. The execution of this content, defined by audience segment acquisition goals, could be across social media, websites, emails, podcasts or text messages. I have built and executed across all of these channels to increase brand awareness of grow inbound leads.