How to Adjust Your Hotel Marketing Strategy Throughout the Year
So you’ve defined your 2020 hotel marketing strategy — now what? Well, you’ve got to take action, of course. Get busy executing those marketing ideas, but while you’re at it, remember that your strategy is a living, breathing document. There’s always room for improvement.
Technology and trends change constantly. The five steps I’ve outlined below are key to ensuring that your hotel sales and marketing strategy stays agile.
Use these tips to stay ahead of the curve and you’ll be able to fine-tune your strategy throughout the year.
P.S. To help you put your hotel marketing strategies into action, I created a free hotel marketing plan template.
1. Stay curious
What do the most influential leaders and marketers have in common? Contrary to what some will have you believe, it’s not starting every day at 4:00 a.m.
It’s that they never stop learning.
Digital marketing moves fast. In the time it takes you to read this article, Google probably updated their algorithm again and some new meme challenge has taken over social media. How on earth does anyone keep up??
The trick is curiosity, plain and simple. Having a healthy curiosity is essential to both developing and continuing to improve solid marketing strategies.
There are actually a lot of easy ways to flex that muscle:
Follow someone you admire on Twitter or Facebook; or subscribe to their emails
Attend a professional conference, workshop, or skillshare
Listen to a podcast
Subscribe to a reputable newspaper or magazine
Read different hotel and hospitality blogs
Meet a colleague for coffee and exchange ideas
Just pick 1-2 that you can feasibly commit to, given your available time and resources.
The other point I want to add here is this: “learning” extends beyond marketing. What else is happening in the world?
The headlines can sometimes feel overwhelming, negative, and stressful, but don’t tune them out entirely.
Pay attention to what’s going on in global culture, politics, health, economics… Anything impacting potential customers or your competitors is worth learning about.
You may find that your hotel marketing strategies have to evolve as issues like climate change or economic recession come into play.
2. Look to other industries
When I talk about learning, I also don’t mean just learning about hospitality.
In fact, I’d argue the hotel industry is painfully slow to innovate and hoteliers can learn a lot by looking outside our little bubble!
Take FastCompany’s annual list of the most innovative companies in the world.
Some of the most exciting innovations in technology and digital media are coming from other sectors, like fashion, beauty, retail, sports, entertainment, food, and transportation. These industries are bucking traditional ideas about marketing trends in favor of setting them.
That FastCompany list is pretty exhaustive, by the way — and there’s only one hotel co on it.
If you look at who’s making waves in the travel sector, the headlines are dominated by alternative accommodation providers like Sonder and socially-conscious tour operators like Intrepid Group. You hate to see it, but online travel agencies are also marketing and delivering the product our customers want.
Some of the most compelling and forward-thinking ideas that could shape your hotel marketing strategy actually come from industries like fashion and beauty.
Companies in this sector literally changed the way we use Instagram, moving consumer behavior from “liking” to buying. Retailers are killing in it in email marketing, too.
Sports marketers have also upped the ante in terms of online engagement. We can all learn a thing or two about customer loyalty by watching how sports teams interact with their fans over social media.
3. Understand data (and use it)
The data we use to power our best hotel marketing ideas can come in many different forms.
Our guests tell us what they like — and what they don’t like — in the form of reviews, social media posts, blog posts and surveys. Our booking engine or PMS keeps track of who booked what room, when they booked, and how they booked. We know what groups return every year and how much the spend on F&B. We also know what local events drive demand to our destination.
That’s a lot of data.
So what are you doing with it?
Hotels can use data to power their marketing efforts in a lot of valuable ways, from improving the experience for guests to filling their meeting space with the right group at the right time. Data is just that powerful.
Let’s start with improving the guest experience. Does your hotel actively gather feedback from guests?
The analog days of leaving comment cards in the room are long gone. Instead, hotels can automatically send out a post-stay email that includes a short feedback survey or asks the guest to share their experience on a review site like TripAdvisor.
Here’s the kicker: People are going to tell you what they think.
Crazy concept, I know. But understanding what potential customers want — and delivering it — is really the most basic tenet of good marketing.
Don’t let your guest feedback data just sit there on some server, gathering dust.
Look for patterns. Start by understanding review sentiment — is the feedback positive, negative, or neutral? How many times was your breakfast mentioned? Or room cleanliness? Reputation management tools like Revinate or ReviewPro can help you aggregate and analyze this data.
Armed with this knowledge, you’ll constantly improve your product and your marketing tactics.
Another important way hotels can use data is to increase occupancy.
You already know how important revenue management is to your hotel marketing strategy. Combined with innovative hotel technology, you can use data and artificial intelligence to streamline and power your business decision-making.
Start with your hotel’s historic occupancy numbers. You can use this data to predict demand in your market and adjust your pricing up or down.
Again, look for patterns.
Not to over-simplify things, but when it comes to using data to drive hotel bookings, that’s really what it comes down to. Understanding hotel data means recognizing patterns — and adjusting your marketing strategy accordingly.
4. Collaborate
One of my former general managers spoke a lot about the dangers of departments “working in silos.”
He recognized what’s actually a very common problem among properties, both chain-operated and independent hotels. I still hear this from hotels big and small all over the globe: departmental collaboration is a real pain point.
So how can it improve?
And what impact does collaboration have on your bottom line?
Real talk: sales and marketing for hotels with no input from other departments is not headed for success.
Marketing needs to drive the direct booking effort during periods of low groups occupancy. Sales needs to work with revenue on booking groups at the right rates. Your Operations team needs accurate forecasting data from revenue management to staff the hotel appropriately. Around and around it goes.
To improve collaboration in the hospitality industry, technology only gets us so far.
Yes, hotels can use any of the great project management systems available, like Trello or Asana. You can use messaging apps like Slack to cut down on emails. Or even an operations platform like ALICE.
But the key to better collaboration at hotels is actually pretty simple: You just have to communicate.
There is no instant fix to poor communication in the workplace — it requires commitment, effort, and practice.
Departments need to be aligned under a simple, common goal, like reaching and caring for potential guests.
When different departments come together and collaborate to make it happen, you’ll notice improvement in team satisfaction and a more sustainable long-term business strategy.
5. Outsource and automate
There are advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing in the hospitality industry.
And to be clear, I’m not making a case for replacing anyone on your team. (You already know how I feel about robots in hotels...)
I’m making a case for the opposite, actually.
For example, let’s look at the marketing role. In my experience, hotel marketers are pulled in many often-conflicting directions.
Most hotel marketing manager job descriptions are also overflowing with skill requirements. We’re expected to be just as proficient at social media marketing and public relations as we are at search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising.
📢 Those are all completely different skill sets! 📢
Yes, with the right training, hotel marketers can certainly pick up new skills and hone their craft over time. But every individual is unique. Even a marketing “generalist” will excel in some areas more than others.
Having a wide range of basic, overlapping knowledge but a deeper capability in 1-2 particular skills is called a T-Shaped Marketer. And in my experience, that’s what most of us in hotel marketing roles become, by necessity.
Still, your hotel marketing strategy will have a lot of moving parts.
You need a solid foundation in the form of an effective hotel website design. You need written content to support hotel SEO as well as visual content like photography and video for social media. You need to know how to reach the right influencers while also engaging with traditional media outlets.
So how do you fill in the gaps?
This is where I believe outsourcing and automation can help boost your hotel marketing strategies, freeing up your team to truly excel using the talents they bring to the table.
Find an online marketing agency to help you manage Facebook ads and/or paid search on Google. Work with a local PR pro or public relations firm on a project basis. Or talk to a friendly hospitality copywriter about improving the content on your hotel websites.
In terms of automation, I recently shared a few tips in my list of hotel marketing tools. That list includes some of the best social media schedulers, content planning tools, and the free automation tool I use to link up all my different web-based softwares.
So there you have it, just a few ideas to help you build on your strategy all year long. Let me know in the comments below if you’ve given any of these try!
If you’re starting to work on this now, you might want to download my sample hotel marketing plan presentation. Grab it below, then read my in-depth guide to presenting your hotel marketing strategies.
