Today more than 70% of travellers worldwide use the Internet to plan a trip. More and more people use digital channels to research, compare, get inspired, read reports on other travellers' experiences and ultimately decide where to invest their money and their expectations.
This shift has also affected the way we think and market to hotels, especially with regard to internet marketing.
This is because, in order to stay competitive in today's market, they need tourism marketing strategies that focus on delivering positive experiences to people, rather than focusing on conventional and ineffective invasive advertising.
What is hotel marketing?
When we talk about marketing, we generally refer to the set of strategies that can be used to promote a certain product or service, as well as to consolidate the image of the brand in the market. Therefore, we can define hotel marketing as a set of techniques that help to consolidate the hotel in the market.
The objective of hotel marketing is to satisfy the needs of the clients by offering a good service, with the right quality, with guarantees and above all, with a price that can be adjusted to the real situation of the market.
what does hotel marketing do?
In the context of tourism, users have at their fingertips on their mobile device information about the entire hotel offer in each country. With just a search on Google or on social networks, people can compare prices, locations, services and even comments from other users about different hotels.
That is why, as a hotel brand, your online presence is crucial to guarantee your survival in the market. To do so, you must take into account a series of activities that you must carry out:
- Generate ideas: this is crucial, which is why in the vast majority of hotels you can find specialised departments that are in charge of working on them.
It is not just a matter of launching any idea, but also of carrying out an exhaustive study on its viability, on whether it meets the need we want to solve, as well as any other important detail.
- Analyse the market: Of course, analysing the market is also crucial. The idea is to segment it on the basis of different ages, tastes, sex, hobbies... In this way, at the moment a certain idea is launched, we know which sector we can target it at. There is a mistaken belief that if we target our advertising at any type of customer, it will be easier for someone to be tempted.
- Study the competition: Another of the fundamental points of hotel marketing is to study the patterns and movements of your main competitors. That said, it is not a question of copying their strategies, but of knowing them and improving them in order to surpass them. It is just as important, if not more, to know what your competition does and what services or products work for them than, for example, to study your own accounts, as you will draw far fewer conclusions.
- Choosing the best channel: Knowing the channels through which we are going to advertise is also very important: for example, a good channel to consider at this time would be the Internet. In fact, we can already find many hotels that have a real impact on social networks.
Not only have they created their own profile with the hotel's information, but they also share publications that interest the client, interact, share doubts, create contests... and any other type of detail that helps to make the hotel more attractive.
- Control costs: But none of the above makes sense if the costs are so high that the business is not profitable; one of the fundamental parts of hotel marketing is to analyse the overall viability of the hotel.
8 hotel marketing strategies
Some of the key things you should apply in your digital strategy to take your tourism marketing to the next level are:
- Offer valuable content: Valuable content refers to those contents created by the company that are of quality and of interest to users or potential customers. These contents can be downloaded or published as simple blog articles.
- Work your brand on social networks: According to the Digital 2020 report, 29 million Spaniards already actively use social networks and spend almost 2 hours a day connected to them. These data show us the importance of positioning yourself well on social networks and, above all, the importance of showing a good image on them, as they serve as a display and channel to show potential customers the culture and philosophy of the company.
- Improve your positioning: Improve the local positioning of your hotel to become an easy search for your target audience. Travellers today do not go to a travel agency, they are fully prepared to carry out their own research and therefore it is necessary that you make it easier for users to find you on search engines. To do this, work on the SEO of your website.
- Create ad campaigns on Hotel Ads: Hotel Ads is a platform available for hotels, but also for travel agencies. It is the new version of what used to be Google Hotel Finder. It used to be a mere hotel search engine and now, Google Hotel Ads allows you to make reservations without leaving the platform, just like Booking and many others.
- Use video marketing: Video marketing is becoming increasingly popular among users of social networks, in general, among internet users. It is therefore not surprising that it is included as one of the main digital marketing strategies to take into account. The percentage of clicks on presentation messages that include videos increases by 96%.
- Improve the user experience: Offering good experiences in these times also extends to the digital context and to any contact channel or point where the public interacts with the company. For this reason, your hotel's website has to offer a very pleasant user experience, an experience that can be achieved with a good web design, good navigability, guaranteeing the security of payment through the web, showing all the contact channels, quality information of interest to the user, etcetera.
- Take advantage of remarketing: Currently, the abandonment rate in hotel bookings is over 70%. Users get distracted and tend to abandon. This is where remarketing comes into play, a tool that greatly reduces this abandonment rate. Don't forget that in the hotel sector it is essential to carry out remarketing campaigns through Google Ads and even through social networks.
- Focus on customer loyalty: Customer loyalty serves to ensure that customers come back again and again. These loyalty programmes offer great discounts and advantages to all customers who have visited the hotel and come back again. They are necessary because loyal customers are a great source of income that, on many occasions, companies forget about.
how to achieve customer loyalty in the IT sector? Click here to find out how step by step.
The future of hotel marketing and the entire tourism sector is being shaped by the adoption of new technologies. Artificial intelligence, Big Data, augmented reality, the internet of things, 5G connectivity and other innovations are changing the priorities of the different players in the market.
For hotels and other tourism businesses, new technologies will be harnessed to deliver more personalised, surprising and exciting experiences. It is vital that you integrate and align the use of technology with your tourism marketing strategies. If you can deliver impactful experiences at all levels, your booking rates will increase.
