Hospitality Marketing in 2022 – Part II
This week we are continuing our educational edition overview of Hospitality marketing, named Hospitality Marketing in 2022 -Part II with an overview of Hospitality Marketing Strategies.
Overview of Hospitality Marketing Strategies
In order to increase revenue and bookings, hospitality marketing strategies are available to drive growth. Due to its ease of use and cost-effectiveness, digital marketing is dominant in this sector. Television, radio, newspaper, magazine, or posters in cities can also be highly effective as an option for offline advertising but usually relatively more expensive.
Marketing strategies for hospitality businesses must consider several factors, including available resources, staff, target audience, location, seasonality, and more. You will likely use several strategies to penetrate a market and reach all segments of your target audience.
Digital Hospitality Marketing: Why It’s Important
Nowadays, hospitality marketing is mainly done online because of the prominence of digital media consumption. The number of clients you receive will be negatively affected if finding your business online is challenging. Make sure your business is listed on known and relevant online platforms so that customers/guests can locate and purchase your products/services in seconds. Search engines are used by over 75% of travellers/guests of restaurants, so make sure you are SEO-savvy, as ads dominate the search engine results page; set aside a budget for paid ads.
Explore website analytics, research where people are looking from, and then engage and create a competitive presence on those platforms. To increase your website traffic and conversion rate, invest in media such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and hospitality and travel content websites. Even if you don’t excel on every platform, your presence will make you visible to people using various forms of digital media.
Mobile Hospitality Marketing
With Google’s announcement that mobile searches are higher than desktop searches, mobile bookings/reservations or shopping have been a trend for a few years. For their websites to be successful globally, companies must adopt strategies to make them mobile-friendly. Hospitality mobile marketing requires a website that responds to smartphones. It would help if you considered the following factors to improve the mobile experience, mobile performance, and mobile appeal of your website:
- Mobile-friendly fonts and explicit content are essential.
- Don’t use pop-ups or Adobe Flash.
- Implement a click-to-call feature.
- Ensure that Google maps are active so people can find directions to and from the business.
- To make your business more recognizable, link the logo to the homepage.
- For returning visitors, enable auto-fill.
- Contrast the colours and photos on the site to make it more attractive.
- The search bar should be easily accessible and easy to use.
These steps contribute to a great user experience and a fast website loading speed, which Google values. Be proactive in displaying information to mobile users since 85% say it helps them make decisions. You should show all relevant information in simple terms on your mobile website to stay ahead of the competition. People first search for prices, photos, and nearby activities and read reviews on their mobile devices. Create a mobile-friendly booking /reservation engine and integrate it directly into the mobile-first website.
Email Hospitality Marketing
Boosting direct bookings, reservations, and sales with email marketing is a cost-effective and viable method of reaching your clients. It is crucial to optimize our mailing list, which should have many prospects. Analyzing past results should help determine whether they are quality leads. You can facilitate this process by providing easy-to-fill forms on your website and asking your customers during their stay. You can implement the following advice once you have a large pool of target audience members:
- The cost-effectiveness of targeting repeat guests is greater than forming new leads. According to Forbes, attracting new customers can cost 5 to 8 times more than retaining existing ones https://www.forbes.com/sites/jiawertz/2018/09/12/dont-spend-5-times-more-attracting-new-customers-nurture-the-existing-ones/. Increase revenue and build better customer relationships by offering special deals and packages to old customers.
- You can attract potential customers with holiday-themed emails during peak seasons. During peak periods, send targeted emails with discounts and incentives. Especially to high-spender customers and those open for upselling, you should address theme-based emails.
- Most people remember what they see, so you should appeal to them through visuals in your mail. You can increase engagement by showcasing your business/product/experience through attractive photos. To entice customers to open the mail, combine it with short, direct subject lines.
There is one problem that we have recently identified. And that is that the statistics coming in the form of opening rate are not entirely accurate. Be aware that the new smartphones do not require opening the email and marking it as reading while scrolling on it when you read it on your phone. So many who read newsletters from their phone emails are not registered in your CRM analytics.
So this would be all from our second part Hospitality Marketing Serious.
Next time we will continue with the Overview of Hospitality Marketing Strategies. Then, we will go into more detail covering Social Media with emphasis on Facebook and Instagram, SMS marketing, and some more topics.
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Photo by Elio Santos on Unsplash
