Marketing is a basic business need, one that can scale up or down depending on how much time and effort you give it. In current times there is no successful business that doesn’t focus some resources to this end. From your side, you can see marketing as the tool that gets you in front of your clients. The way you can get your message across and sell your hotel to potential guests.
The term marketing hasn’t been around for long, but it has always existed. Good salesmen have been marketing and creating demand for their products since commerce has existed. The only difference is you have a multitude of tools to do so, and a helpful guide to walk you through the basics.
How to create a marketing strategy for your hotel?
For your marketing to be successful you will need to have a strategy. This focuses your effort on the goals you want to achieve, making it easier to determine actions to take and messages to spread. Here’s how you get started.
- Do your market research and select a target audience that you want to reach.
- Check what your competitors are doing.
- Consider what methods of marketing have worked for you.
- Revisit your branding image and message to power what makes you stand out.
- Set goals and deadlines.
- Plan a campaign and go live!.
Standardizing service to stand out
One of the surest ways to stand out and provide your hotel with a great marketing foundation is to invest in standardizing. You can start the process with online tools like hosstinn and develop at your own pace. Making sure that service is the same at any time, in any location of your hotels, you are guaranteeing your marketing message.
Standardizing can help you create a marketing message and strategy by taking out variables. Meaning you know you can deliver what you are promising, you know what you are marketing and most importantly your clients know what they are getting. A hotel is only as good as its reputation, standardizing can help maintain yours at a high level.
Recognise and reward loyalty
Giving back to regular guests is an opportunity to create a loyalty marketing program. Repeat customers create a great network of organic advertising for your hotel. They know the in and outs of service, and could probably make a better sales pitch than you. It’s important to recognize and reward that type of loyalty. It increases the chances of getting these types of guests and helps spread the word about your hotel. Plus, the imagery attached to the loyalty program is great for marketing. Your guest will have loyalty cards, post about benefits, and review them. Essentially you have a whole other marketing force working for you.
Hotel staff training to power organic marketing
Guest’s experience is one of the pillars on which you will build great marketing strategies and messages. Like with the loyalty program, a good hotel experience travels and works for you for free. Training your hotel staff continuously keeps them on track to provide the type of service that gets talked about.
Hotel staff that meets or exceeds expectations will become a powerful marketing tool for your establishments. This is an unbeatable unique selling point. It does exactly what marketing is all about, creating a demand for a service or product. Better service that cannot be matched by your competitors and meets the needs of your target, puts you in the best position to meet your goals. That’s why training your staff is a priority, there’s no asset quite like it.
Focus on your digital tools
Marketing is now almost completely done on digital channels. Yes, physical ads can still bring revenue, but those tend to be more expensive and less controllable than their digital counterparts. Having a well-managed set of digital tools is the last foundation piece of your marketing success. To achieve that focus on three characteristics at first.
A smooth and fast website
Your website needs to be fast and friendly. Every second matters, literary. Conversion rates drop 4.42% with each second your page takes to load. To make sure this doesn’t happen, invest in a fast website, and if you don’t have the budget for a developer then keep it simple.
Pay attention to these key factors for your website:
- Loading speed.
- User friendly and simple.
- Clear message.
- Unified image and branding.
- Easy to do a booking.
Reviewing your hotel should be easy
Reviews are a marketing tool that has an unparalleled influence on your next customer. In the age of all things digital, people still trust people more than any other source of information. To harvest the full power of review you should make the process easy and organic for your guests.
Have a QR code on your checkout desk, a link on the email receipts, train staff to ask for a review from departing guests. Make leaving a review visible, easy, and rewarding for your guests.
Updated social media profiles
Social media profiles are free marketing tools. Yes, you can pay for a campaign on social media but you don’t have to. If you curate your image, content, and feed to make it appeal to your target, the growth will happen on its own.
Document the quality of your service, highlights of your location, introduce staff, etc. When it comes to social media it’s all about the images. Invest in quality for creating great photos and videos, make your profiles available to guests, and post regularly.
For more information on this and other topics, review our hotel training services at hostinn without obligation.