Have you heard of the nature vs. nurture debate? It's a psychological debate on whether human behavior is contributed from genetic inheritance, acquired, or environmental influences. In part 3, we investigate how this debate is influencing the digital marketing transition in the Hospitality Industry.
In digital marketing, we adopted technology to manipulate actions and decisions using a nurturing process. We all have been nurtured online from automated, retargeting messages to follow up inquiries to other responsive actions.
The hospitality industry's nurturing process allows hotels to maintain communication with potential guests from the early stages of their booking journey to the end. While keeping this process in mind, how can the hospitality business comprehensively adopt digital marketing strategies that drive access, amplified customer engagement, personalized connections, and leverages data and analytics?
Identifying the hotel's target market and how they perceive your campaign is a successful marketing campaign.
In a competitive industry like the hospitality industry, a consistent and robust digital marketing strategy is essential for the business to inform existing and potential customers who you are, what you do, and how you stand out from your rivals and competitors. Developing long-term recognition and loyalty is part of creating your brand.
As we enter the online world, the traditional service of greeting guests and making them feel a special need to be replicated online. As hoteliers, we need to interact with guests as we know them. Aside from this, guests want relevant content that meets their needs and desires from your hotel. Customized responses and messages offer unique ways to reward guest loyalty.
Every hotel website has a user-tracking tool embedded that can track an individual guest's searches from dates, number of guests, room type, and number of rooms required. With these data, the hotel has the ability to launch and implement marketing campaigns around those dates and can include various promotions or add-on services closer to the guest's travel dates. Data on guest's special requests, preferences, and other guest information from restaurants, spas, and reservations are inputted to a CRM system, where marketing opportunities come to play when fulfilling customer requirements.
User-tracking tools are embedded on the hotel's social media platforms where images of rooms, prices, and hotel events during the specific dates searched. Social media help provide the right information to the right information to a guest at the right time. Social media is a great marketing platform to build customer bonds and highlight the hotel's unique selling points. Similarly, email marketing campaigns have updated prices, or other incentive offers on specific dates are usually linked to a booking code within the email. Hoteliers can send discounts and loyalty to loyal customers and potential customers on hotel websites or email campaigns. This will increase the value of guests and attract new customers.
With the current pandemic, business and international leisure traveling have reduced. Hoteliers are re-structuring their marketing strategy on the domestic market. To maximize the local customer base and increase brand awareness, Hoteliers should maximize local SEO.
The hotel revenue management audit will provide insights into a digital marketing strategy. The audit report can segment the market from demographics, length of stay, the purpose of booking, and more. With this, marketing tactics are in place to target specific customer behaviors and motives. Revenue management data and maintaining an online presence by having effective content, videos, and more are the backbone of any hotel marketing strategy developed through various digital marketing channels.
The cross-pollination of revenue management and digital marketing will produce brand awareness, right customers, and generate bookings. Customers may struggle to make a decision by the choices available to them. By analyzing data, hotels maintaining their content presence, personalization of service, and easy connectivity are what makes a customer confidently choose to stay at your hotel.
Rev-Mantra management consulting services focus on our clients' most critical issues and opportunities: strategy, marketing (offline/online), distribution, sales representation, and analytics across the service industry and geographies. We bring deep, functional expertise, but are known for our holistic perspective: we capture value across boundaries and between the silos of any organization. We have proven a multiplier effect from optimizing the sum of the parts, not just the individual pieces.
