When I joined my first corporate job at the age of 32, I found myself learning about this concept called “setting the right expectation”. Once that is done, the rest of the journey with clients become a lot smoother. It was a great learning experience for me. I was learning client handling from a very different perspective.
Althroughout my entreprenurial and business journey, I had a very different understanding on how to work with clients. Help them. If I can help them, they will see me as a person they can trust. Once that is done, the rest of the journey with a client becomes very smooth.
In my first job, I also got to know about a new term. “Churn”. It is the term used for identifying the revenue that is lost because of losing a client. Before this, I was unaware of the term churn in business context. The only content I knew churn being used -> churning butter from milk. Ha ha ha ha.
I never had to knew the term for losing clients, since I had never lost any client. During my business journey of 10 years, I had never had a client who came forward and told us they don’t want to work with us anymore. It was always me going to the client, stating that once we had set up the system for your marketing efforts, it is wise that they hire an inhouse team and continue on the activities. It would be cheaper for them, from a financial perspective and better for us because I wanted to work with bigger, more revenue heavy accounts.
The system worked great that way, clients always trusted me, since I was always helping them out. We as a team got chance to work with more reputable brands, national brands with larger revenue gains. That’s how I could scale to a 8 member team, more than 1CR in annual revenue.
When I hear hoteliers asking, “I rank well in our local area search term, its that we would want to focus on the city/state wide searches”, I always advice them, think of going to your next phase of growth through branding. I always ask them one question, SEO/GEO/AEO is demand capture, what is your strategy for demand generation?
A detailed example can help elaborate better by an example given by a client. “We capture a lot of audience when the search intent is “family friendly luxury resorts in Morroy Bay California”. How do we go ahead and work on the website, such that for searches like “family friendly luxury resorts in california” is where we show up. We want to capture that demand. She explained, “for someone to come to Morro Bay, they need to know about Morro Bay. There’s a huge audience set who may not be knowing about Morro Bay but still searching for “family friendly luxury resorts in california”. “How can we show up when people are searching with that intent?”
The above gave a very interesting problem to me. The client wants to capture demand. That’s great. They want to grow. Capture more marketshare so to speak. Yet, is she aware of the already existing demand? i.e. how many people even know about the location, Morro Bay?
If someone doesn’t know about a particular location, why and how would they end up doing a booking?
I will take help of the above problem posed by the client, illustrate on the points of demand generation and demand capture and how hoteliers should set the right expectations when they choose which tool to use for their GEO/SEO/AEO strategy.
What can we learn from the above 2 charts?
The demand for the users searching about “California” far outweighs the demand for people searching for “Morro Bay” or “Mission Bay”.
You may say, that is exactly the demand we want to capture. Yes, I hear you. Lets look at the below image.
When you want to capture the enhanced demand, lets try to set the correct expectations. Lets look how much of an increase in compset that needs to be accommodated in the equation. The overall strategy, budget and roadmap would need to be very different as we are now going to compete with all “family frtiendly luxury resots in California”. The competition set increases exponentially.
Could I set the right expectations? Tell me honestly.
Once that is done, like I had mentioned before, the client opens to your suggestions. They start trusting you, because you could educate the client on the nuances of demand capture through the internet. You could help understand how they need to rethink everything, if they need to go head to head against every large “family friendly luxury resort in california”.
We’ve still got the missing piece of the puzzle yet to be solved. What would I still need to do, if I want to capture the demand for users searching for “family friendly luxury resorts in California”. I will elaborate on that on my next article. The answer to the problem is brand marketing.
Till next time, here’s your host DB(digital buddy) signing off.
Thanks
DB
30th April, 2026
1 thought on “Expectation Setting”