Sergio Alvarez is a performance marketing expert, digital attribution leader and CEO and founder of Ai Media Group.
Marketing in hospitality is different from other industries. More than ever, brands must wisely allocate their marketing dollars to secure a slice of the booming hospitality pie. Leaders in the hospitality industry should be aware of the principles that guide the most successful businesses and keep them booked out year after year.
1. Understand your customer’s journey.
A hyper-focus on booking can be blinding. It is more enlightening to understand how your customer got to that point. The hospitality customer’s journey is more emotional, complex and generally longer than other industries. Customers in this space are buying a memorable experience, not just a product. As such, there are more touchpoints along the way.
Most customers won’t convert through the first piece of digital media they see—and if they do, you’ve likely missed some offline touchpoints. By understanding each point at which your customer paused, you’ll know exactly where to pull the right levers.
2. Pinpoint your place in the industry.
The hospitality industry isn’t just hotels. Restaurants, cruise liners and tour guides all fit into this space, but the customer journey for each is different. Restaurants have a far shorter customer journey than cruise liners. The emotional buy-in for a meal is nowhere near as invested as the property at which a family will spend ten days of their valuable time.
Destinations higher on the customer investment ladder will naturally have more touchpoints in the journey to booking. Understanding your place in the hospitality industry is vital to ensuring you are marketing and tracking correctly.
3. Identify your audience bucket.
Every hospitality business will have a different customer base depending on where on the spectrum they operate. Some will attract more business travelers while others service families and honeymooners. The customer journey and touchpoints in marketing mediums will differ according to your audience. There is far more emotion involved in a family trip than one for business, so the former will be a longer decision-making process.
To ensure that you aren’t wasting your marketing budget, you need to know which audience bucket you’re marketing to and how each bucket makes decisions based on the data you glean from holistic attribution strategies.
4. Use reviews to your benefit.
Authentic reviews—those posted organically by customers on their social media profiles—are absolute gold. No marketing copy can match the excitement and gratitude of a mom whose children are having the time of their lives at a resort.
Your team can track and harness these types of reviews: Follow hashtags and location tags to ensure you catch these as they’re happening, and engage when possible. Formal reviews on sites like Google are also important. If sites provide the option for the business to respond, use that to your advantage on reviews—even the bad ones.
Bad reviews are typically more damaging when no context is provided and the business in question seems unconcerned that their customer was unhappy. Simply responding by affirming the customer’s experience and indicating the desire to do better can make a bad review far less harmful.
5. Harness personalization in creative ways.
Personalizing trips and experiences is becoming popular in the hospitality industry, which can make it difficult for businesses that may not have many on-site offerings that make them stand out. Businesses need to get creative and render the power of local connections with others in the hospitality industry around them. Local spas, golf courses and sports facilities can be used to personalize the customer experience and create packages specific audiences feel are made just for them.
6. Have a flexible marketing mix.
Rigid monthly budgets for various platforms will probably not bring you the return on your marketing investment that you should be getting. Allocating specific percentages of your budget to certain media without understanding the role that medium plays in your customer’s journey is wasteful.
Flexibility is key, and if you have a holistic attribution strategy in place, you’ll know exactly which levers need to be pulled and where your dollars need to go. The biggest marketing success is seen when customers know what their ultimate goal is and have an overall budget to reach that goal. Then, the mix of where that money goes can ebb and flow based on data-driven results.
7. Track customer phone calls.
Phone calls are often forgotten in the attribution mix, and it’s a serious misstep. The average value of an order placed on a phone call can be far higher than online bookings in my experience. When customers are looking to book long stays, it is often a significant financial (and emotional) investment. Therefore, they may want to speak directly with a business representative to hash out the details.
This is not only an opportunity to upsell additional services but also an important point to connect with your ideal customer. Often, a phone call can be the final piece of the attribution puzzle, and if you aren’t tracking, the final stop could be missed.
8. Optimize your mobile platforms.
Some hospitality businesses crash and burn when their customers attempt to make bookings, check services or inquire online using their mobile devices. Having the most user-friendly website for PC is of value, but your customers may well be completing most of their journey on mobile devices. A website that is not mobile-friendly could cause you to miss out on customers who may well make an impulse booking while sitting with their feet up on the couch on a Saturday night.
Despite challenges, hospitality can be a huge growth space.
Despite the challenges inherent in marketing in the hospitality industry, it is also a space with great growth potential. Travelers are coming out of restrictions and looking back at a time when they could not enjoy the freedom of travel. They are ready to make up for lost time—and if you market correctly, holistically attribute conversions and understand their journey, your business could be part of that experience, too.
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