When it comes to marketing, there’s no standard guide that can help you to navigate your way to the top. As such, it can become difficult – especially if marketing isn’t naturally your forte. However, there are a few things that you can do that should help you to get better results from your marketing efforts. To start with though, if you don’t yet have a dedicated marketing team, you should certainly consider recruiting at least one marketing professional.
Having someone who is able to understand what it is that your audience wants really is invaluable, and it will be well worth the money you spend when you see the additional revenue that can be made from having a solid marketing strategy in place. This is one of the key areas that can really boost the success of your hotel. It’s not enough to just have a marketing strategy in place, but you need to be sure that it’s being executed well, and consistently reviewed and improved. Marketing isn’t a static industry – it moves so swiftly that you need to constantly be reviewing the work you’re doing and looking for improvements, or gaps in the market, that can really help you to get a step ahead of your competitors.
But what makes a solid marketing strategy? There’s no exact answer to this I’m afraid, but there’s definitely a few key things that you can do that will help you to establish the key aspects that need to be included in your strategy.
The first is to work out who it is that you’re actually marketing to. This means that you need to find out the personas of your target guests. These personas are groups of people that are usually of the same demographic and with similar interests, who you should be able to target as a group with your content and various marketing campaigns. You then need to make sure that what you’re putting in your marketing strategy is actually relevant. Information such as use of the logo and colours is obviously important, but not to your strategy. That’s the kind of information that needs to be included in your brand guidelines, but doesn’t actually have any bearing on your ongoing marketing efforts. Instead, you need to focus on what you can do that will really boost your business, make you known as a top-quality choice of hotel and place you as a thought leader in the industry. Think about different campaigns that you could create, events or local holidays that you could use as leverage for marketing activities.
Create data-led campaigns
Instead of just creating campaigns and marketing activities that might work though, you need to start to use data to your advantage. If you conduct social listening and really look into the type of content that your target personas are consuming, where they are online and the type of things they’re saying they want, you can find a gap in the market and create something completely new. You should also conduct a competitor analysis to see what other hotels are doing. Granted, you don’t want to just copy everyone else, but if there’s something that every hotel is ultimately expected by consumers to do, then you’ll be seen as inferior if you’re not. Their content can also give you ideas for your own, which can be hugely beneficial. You might even see something that a competitor is doing and it could help you to build a new campaign that’s even bigger and better.
Is your website up to scratch?
All of this is obviously getting you well on the way to a great marketing strategy – but what good is all of that hard work if your website is letting you down? In 2015, Google updated its algorithm to penalise companies if their websites weren’t mobile-optimised. This means that if you’ve not updated it for mobile devices, you won’t ever hit the top spots in the search engines results. Even if someone did make it to your website, if they’re on a mobile device then they’re likely to leave right away if it’s not optimised. So if you haven’t taken this vital step then this is your main priority.Just having it mobile-optimised isn’t enough though. You also need to make sure that it has high-quality usability, such as page speed and a good layout, as well as great content. Your content isn’t just the written copy on each page – it extends to the images you use, and videos and animation and even your social channels.
As Instagram becomes ever more popular, so too do images. For this reason, your images are actually one of the most important aspects. It only takes a second for a person to look at an image, so they’re actually likely to make their first judgement of your hotel based on the visuals that they see when they first enter your website. This doesn’t necessarily mean the image on your homepage either, as your website will have a number of landing pages that are linked through in various Google searches or from social channels. So make sure that every single image that you use online is of high quality and likely to impress your reader. You also want to make them unique, because if you use stock images then their significance will be much lower.
Use social
You’re probably on social media as basically every brand is, but you need to make sure that you’re using it and being seen. Try to update your social channels a few times a day with relevant content so that your potential guests really have the chance to see you in their feeds. This is another great opportunity to use those unique, stand-out images and graphics, as these are much more eye-catching than a sentence or two, that can easily be missed when someone is scrolling through their news feed. There’s so much that you need to consider when it comes to marketing, and there really is no absolute answer, but these few aspects can really get you going and help to make sure that you’re not being left behind in the world of marketing.
