2354 - Essential Insights for Hospitality Businesses with Formula Digital's Adam Hamadache

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0:46Josh Elledge:Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, Adam Hamadash. You are the CEO and founder of Formula Digital. Adam, you're found on the web at thisisformula.com and also scoreplan.ai, which we'll talk about in a little bit. Adam, it's great to have you.

1:11Adam Hamadache:Thanks for having me, Josh. Great to be here.

1:14Josh Elledge:Absolutely. Hey, before we get going, I understand you're going to be going to a pretty cool event here shortly. You mind telling us what you do when you're not at work and this event that you have coming up?

1:27Adam Hamadache:Yeah, sure. So on Friday, I'm going to Dublin. So I live in just outside of London in the UK. I'm going to Dublin to do High Rocks. So if you're unfamiliar with High Rocks, it's like a fitness competition. Basically, it's just torture for 90 minutes and then you have a beer afterwards. So, yeah, that's that's what I'll be doing this weekend.

1:44Josh Elledge:so it's kind of like a uh and i'm trying to think of the uh equivalent uh that we'll have uh you know kind of these um i know i think the one that i volunteered at was like it's called a tough mutter and but there's just they have a bunch of just ridiculous obstacles during the course is

2:00Adam Hamadache:that right yeah kind of similar so it's more kind of functional fitness so you'll you'll be pushing a sled you'll be throwing more balls you'll be doing 80 meters of burpees which is uh about as disastrous as it sounds um but um yeah it's uh it's good fun at least when you finish why did you get into this uh just through through my gym just started uh saw some guys doing it and uh it's got really popular now i think you know like you have to like join a wait list to get tickets so uh managed to grab some for dublin so flying over there on on friday did you have uh i remember one

2:33Josh Elledge:of the greatest weeks in in elementary school is when we had obstacle course week in gym class and just how fun that, I mean, it really was fun. And it's fun for kids, it's fun for adults as well. Well, good luck on your torture.

2:50Adam Hamadache:Thank you.

2:52Josh Elledge:Adam, talk about the work that you do. What is Formula?

2:55Adam Hamadache:Yeah, sure. So Formula, we're a digital growth agency based in the UK. We work specifically in the hospitality sector. We've been trading now for just coming up to 13 years. So we've sort of been an addict for a long time. and really what we do is to help hotel brands mainly to drive growth so that might be driving accommodation growth our occupancy might be about driving more direct booking so they don't have to pay 18 20 to booking.com and Expedia which is obviously a big chunk of their of their costs or it could be more wedding inquiries so we do that through primarily around SEO or search engine optimization and it's most typically known but obviously today AI search is growing in enormous volumes.

3:37Adam Hamadache:So what we do is really help brands get visible and get recommended by AI tools.

3:44Josh Elledge:Yeah. All right. So lots to unpack here. How does one optimize for AI versus SEO strategy in the past? Now, can I just share with you two an observation? I'll be honest, I don't think we've really never dominated from an SEO perspective. It was okay. But I'll tell you what, for whatever reason, I get way more booked calls from AI recommending us. So I'm like, I don't know whatever we did we were doing historically was working was right, but whatever we did was right. So I'm curious for you to let me know what we were probably doing.

4:30Adam Hamadache:Well, I mean, I can't say exactly, but certainly what's changed is, so first of all, let's unpack this. SEO, as it's sort of most traditionally known, stands for obviously search engine optimization. And I think that that phrase in itself is almost becoming like the Kleenex of the genericization of that term. So it's not really SEO is the kind of catch-all term now, but it sort of goes beyond search engines now to include ChatGPT, uh google's ai mode perplexity cloud all of these things um so so seo is kind of used first and foremost as a as a very broad term there's about sort of um i always like liking it to a um like a recording studio and um if you sort of sat there behind the glass and you've got about 200 different dials that you can twizzle to to make it make the music sound great seo is a bit like that so understanding which dials to to um to to to actually twizzle so that you can get the best best result put more simply really it's it's kind of the basics making sure that you've got total consistency in terms of your name um your address your phone number across all manner of directory listings uh reputation is becoming increasingly important so how you are perceived online so obviously in in the world of hotels that's quite simple with sites like trip advisor or google making sure you've got a really solid online reputation um but also more increasingly now it's the technical stuff so it's the technical um you can run a simple technical site audit on your own website and identify things like you know some of the jargon that you perhaps might not be familiar with like your meta descriptions your meta titles your h1 header tags all of these things sort of not particularly well known beyond the the sort of the technical industry but these things are now incredibly important at whether or not ai tools like chat gpt will actually recommend your business.

6:21Adam Hamadache:So I would suspect in your case, I think you've probably got a really solid foundation if AI is picking you up now. Sounds like you're doing a lot right.

6:29Josh Elledge:We've been around for a while. And I think that that is also helpful, that we have a legitimate reputation, even though maybe we didn't really master some of the SEO games as it was. So this is probably good news for those who have just been really good stewards within their industry. But Adam, what other things couldn't we be doing so that we could be, and again, whether it's hospitality, you know, or maybe a consultancy or an agency owner that might be listening, what are other best practices to maybe get more inbound recommendations from the various AI platforms? Sure.

7:04Adam Hamadache:So I would say have a look at your structured data. So schema is a sort of a way of basically structuring the coding of the website so it can be easily read by machines. so you know you in in my world where we work in hospitality you can have beautiful imagery you can have a really high converting website but actually um if the if the website's a bit of a dog's dinner in the back end in terms of how it's coded um it's not going to get picked up so structured data is really really important uh way of uh of making sure that you're getting picked up by those those ai tools um and obviously you know the the the phrase you know content is king has been around for for some some time now and that's particularly true in in in the world of seo um now it's it used to be a case of you know you used to you used to pick your keywords hey i want to i want to rank for that particular keyword and i'm going to create a blog about that particular um topic now it's much that you know so it used to be sort of very kind of okay here's my focus let's create some content and and publish that on a website and over time you might see your visibility in your traffic rise.

8:10Adam Hamadache:Now, kind of Google and the other AI tools are kind of far wiser to that. So it's now much more about topical authority. So if you take every conceivable concept around your topic and creating content that's interlinked across your website, that's really going to make a big difference and will impact whether or not AI recommends you or not. Yeah.

8:35Josh Elledge:So you work specifically in hospitality. Tell me more about some of the trends that you've been observing over the past year in particular. I mean, obviously, AI is a huge one. Anything else that's notable in the hospitality and hotel industry?

8:50Adam Hamadache:So I think probably the big news only a couple of weeks ago was that ChatGPT has sort of opened, become sort of open source for, it's now going to become a sort of an app store, if you like. And they've allowed 10 apps as a starting point to be kind of frowning apps. And two of those are Expedia and Booking.com. And what that means is that customers, when they're searching for their hotels, it will mean that they can book directly within the interface of ChatGPT. So we know that these platforms are being used for inspiration, you know, hey, find me a hotel that has this. I need parking. I need spa.

9:27Adam Hamadache:I need a gym. I'd like it to be overlooking something or whatever it is. You can put all these things into, you know, in a conversational prompt. Now it's going to give you the ability to actually book directly through that platform. So that's a big shift. I would say probably the biggest shift that we are seeing is the usage of AI in actually, you know, finding their hotel. So traditionally, we would expect customers would or, you know, the guests would start Googling. And then, you know, Expedia's Path to Purchase report, which they released admittedly a couple of years ago, said that on average, customers visit 141 pages of content in the 45 days before making a purchase decision.

10:11Adam Hamadache:Oh my gosh. I know, right? There's a lot of content, a lot of work to actually book your stay. And that makes sense if you're booking like a holiday or a vacation or a honeymoon, for example, not necessarily for a one night stay. But certainly what we are seeing is that people are taking their sweet time in finding the right property and the right hotel that's right for them, understandably so, AI just reduces that time. It's going to give you the inspiration that you need. And you think about Google's AI mode, for example, if you use Chrome, if you have a Gmail account, it now knows your purchase behavior, it now knows your browsing behavior.

10:54Adam Hamadache:So it's going to make recommendations that are best suited to your preferences and your behaviors. So I think that process of actually finding and choosing hotels is is the biggest trend that we're seeing at the moment.

11:09Josh Elledge:All right, Adam, let's share what what what is it that so what you do specifically and let's encourage someone who might be listening to us right now, if they could benefit, you know, and like who you work with in hospitality, like who your typical point person is, and then what that engagement looks like.

11:28Adam Hamadache:Yeah, so we tend to work with independent hotel brands. We've got a thing around our business being working with independent brands, not global corporations like Marriott or Hilton. We want to work with the smaller guys that are doing some really interesting and exciting things in the business. But I think probably most notably about my business is we made the decision earlier this year to limit our capacity. We only work with 20 clients at a time, and that allows us to be super selective about who we work with and make sure that we do the best possible work. And actually, recently, we just launched our new software plan called Score Plan, which ultimately gives customers the ability for free to see their own AI visibility score and get a whole recommendation list.

12:14Adam Hamadache:Basically, one score, one plan to improve their visibility on AI. So we're getting some great, great feedback from that. Yeah.

12:23Josh Elledge:Your website. So you go to Scoreplan. What happens at scoreplan.ai? And again, when this is publishing now, just so you know, I know you're making working on some evolutions as we are recording this right now. But as this airs now toward the end of December, someone goes to scoreplan.ai. What do they see?

12:42Adam Hamadache:Yeah. So they see a quick sort of landing page that explains how it all works. you punch in your website URL and then you can get a free score. So it basically crawls your website, takes a couple of minutes because it's really in-depth. But then from there, you'll get one score that assesses all manner, about 13 different points that ultimately impact your visibility on traditional search, but also AI tools. And then a sort of one plan list of recommendations that you can see. And that's all completely free. And it also provides a whole load of sort of summaries, de-jargoning some of the technical stuff, you know, very sort of layman's terms explainers on how they can actually go ahead and implement those recommendations.

13:28Josh Elledge:Yeah. The website, scoreplan.ai. And then when someone goes to thisisformula.com, how do they connect with you?

13:36Adam Hamadache:Yeah, you can use a contact form there or by all means, drop me an email at adam.thisisformula.com or I'm very active on LinkedIn too, which you can contact me that way.

13:47Josh Elledge:Yeah, you're a great follow on LinkedIn. Adam Hamadash, again, your website is thisisformula.com and scoreplan.ai, of which you are the founder and CEO. Adam, it's been a great conversation. Thank you for joining us.

14:01Adam Hamadache:Thanks, Josh. Appreciate it.

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