Hospitality

Understanding The Need For Hotel Digital Marketing

Here are the main reasons why do you need digital marketing for the hotel industry.

• Firstly, it will increase awareness of your brand.
• Digital marketing for the hotel industry will also increase the visibility of your brand across all digital channels.
• Secondly, since your reach will improve, you’ll be able to get more bookings.
• Moreover, with online reviews and pictures that you or your customers will post, will shape your reputation.
• Also, it will make your audience prefer your hotel over your competitors and help you provide good hospitality and customer service.
• This is not exhaustive. The list goes on. Digital marketing for hotels can solve so many business problems and boost your sales.

Digital marketing is the lifeblood of the lodging business.

• In the lodging business, being constantly responsive and engaged with the market and the customers is of great significance.
• Not only you have to strive to keep in touch with the existing guests, but you also have to constantly reach out to new potential customers for business growth.
• You have to send out a message that is authentic, relatable, and resonates with the segment you operate with.
• Moreover, it is also important to ensure there is a website in place.
• With a website, the brand will be at an advantage by implementing marketing strategies that increase reach, rankings, and conversions.

Know Your Audience
A good marketing strategy is the one that matches the right type of hotel with the right type of traveler. The kind of hotel you own can be a boutique hotel, luxury hotel, hostel, b&b hotel, motel, resort hotel, casino hotel, garden hotel, etc.

Similarly, the kind of travelers can be many, what Millennials prefer in their hotel is not the same as what baby boomers prefer. And what people visiting Vegas prefer is not the same as what people visiting Denver prefer. If you fail to figure this out, it can prove disastrous for your hotel and lodging business.

Understanding Segmentation For Digital Marketing In The Hotel And Lodging Industry

• If your segment based on economic status, you will have value-seekers and luxury-seekers.
• Similarly, if you segment your travelers based on their family size, you will have single, couples, single parents, small family, and big family; and they will all have different needs and requirements.
• For instance, parents may prefer a hotel where there are options for kids to learn and play.
• Singles may be more interested in exploring the culture and experiencing the nightlife.
• That’s why you have to invest your time in doing proper research.
• Good market research will define the success of your hotel marketing campaign.

Promote Convenience

• When people are traveling, they seek comfort over any other thing.
  They are not taking a long flight to a city just to find that the bed is hard, there is some kind of smell in the room, the manager doesn’t respond, the neighborhood is extremely noisy and they have no vegan food options available.
• So, you should make a list of all the amenities your hotel provides and use that in your marketing campaigns.
• If you are an owner of a luxury hotel, tell your audience what all luxury elements your hotel has got.
• Do you have an infinity pool? Great spa? 24 X7 food service? Whatever you have got, you have to tell your audience.
• Tell your audience why your hotel should be their destination, why it should be worth traveling for

> Would You Need To Redesign Your Hotel Or Lodge Website?

• With changing trends, competitors’ approach, and technological advancements.
• Constantly updating and redesigning the website is important.
• For instance, if a lodging business has a website in place but it’s heavy-duty, not mobile-friendly, and takes a while to load, It will put the customers off and they will leave.
• End result? Negative image and a lot of loss.
• Hence, redesigning this website to a more efficient, easy, and mobile-friendly website will be the way to go.
• Moreover, if your lodging brand has new services in place. You’ll need to put those too on the website. The more the merrier.

Hotel And Lodging Social Media Marketing
40% of people under 30 prioritize the ‘Instagrammable’ potential when choosing their destinations The hotel industry is highly visual. Similarly Lodging industry too is into social media marketing.

Social media provides an amazing opportunity for Hotels and lodges to capture the attention of potential guests and convince them to make bookings.

Unlike other industries that struggle with images and videos for social media, hotels and lodges never run out of content.

You can show the insides of your hotel or lodge, you can show outside of it as well. And what better way to showcase your property than using social media.

Claim Your Hotel
Claim your hotel on all the review and booking websites, so you can make sure that no review goes unanswered. Some of the important review channels include –

• TripAdvisor
• Google

Google Reviews And TripAdvisor

• Most potential customers looking for a place to stay will depend largely on google reviews and TripAdvisor for planning their trips and making bookings at a specific lodging service.
• It is imperative that both these elements have complete and numerous positive aspects of the lodging brand attached to it.
• Google should have a minimum rating of 4 in order to be considered.
• Coming to TripAdvisor, statistics suggest that 80% of travellers read 6-12 reviews before making a booking.
• This makes it one of the most important tools for promoting the lodging business.
• Every lodger must understand the importance of TripAdvisor.
• A good and established TripAdvisor listing will do wonders for the lodging business.
• It will encourage more and more guests to book your lodge against others.
• Cultivating and timely responding to each and every google or trip advisor review shows a moral compass.
• This will give the potential customers an assurance that the hotel and lodging service is aimed at serving its customers in the best way possible. Even if things go south sometime.

Hotel And Lodging Email Marketing

• As your customer has moved to digital media, so should your mailing practices.
• There is no point in printing pamphlets, mailing it to a long list of your old customers, and spending money and hurting the environment to accomplish this.
• Tell you a secret? There is a better way to do it.
• And it is email marketing for hotels and lodges, another element of digital marketing for hotel and lodging industry.
This way you don’t have to cut down trees, print pamphlets, go to a post office, mail those things and then live in the dark after that.
• Did people open my pamphlet or throw it away? And if they did open, did they like the message?
• There is a long list of such questions that traditional direct mail marketing fails to answer.
• Gladly, email marketing gives us access to tons of data related to this.
• From knowing how our audience responded to the email to how they received the message, we get data about everything.
And this data is what can help you to strategize your entire business.