Ringing in the new year is a wonderful time filled with hope and wonder as to what the next 12 months will offer. Within the hospitality industry, it is the ideal time to settle down after the busy and often hectic Christmas period and have a look at what marketing trends we are likely to see appearing in hotels within the year. Unsurprisingly, with the world becoming more and more digitally accessible, a lot of establishments will be integrating this into their business.
In fact, it is paramount that this does become a main focus of any marketing plans that you may be creating for the next quarter, or year as a whole. Net Affinity, which specialises in hotel marketing, has released the trends that it predicts will be the most popular and implemented in hotels in 2015. Mobile payments this one isn’t really of much surprise given that more and more people are using their smartphones to complete hotel reservations, and this trend is only going to get more popular over the next twelve months.
Paying through other methods such as PayPal are being used more often and if you haven’t already, it is perhaps time to think about putting some budget towards making your website mobile optimised so that customers can make bookings and payments easily.PersonalisationWhen looking at your hotel’s website, it is also well worth seeing how you can personalise the user’s experience. According to Net Affinity, 2015 will be the year in which hotels will start to use data in new ways to create content on their sites that are tailored towards a customer’s online behaviour and preferences.
Pay to play social media, social media is without a doubt one of the most effective tools when it comes to marketing. From Facebook to Twitter, with a dose of Instagram and Google+ in between, there are so many platforms that potential customers are a part of, meaning that the marketing opportunities are endless. Net Affinity says: “Social platforms will continue to make significant algorithm changes which will affect the social reach of promotional and sales driven content”.Ultimately this means that hotels will need to spend money to ensure that their content is seen on social media. Booking abandonment A customer not following through with a transaction on a website is undeniably frustrating – a missed conversion equates to missed monetary value.
There are, however, booking abandonment tools available which are very useful in bringing the potential customers back through as a conversion.Use the information to target the customer and regain their interest in you – let them see what you have to offer, but don’t make it too personalised as you don’t want to scare them. SEO search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is so important when it comes to digital marketing and ensuring that your website is seeing organic traffic coming through it is so important and much more valuable. Rather than just targeting potential customers with content that appears to solely advertise, you must ensure that an actual overall customer experience is focused upon.
By integrating this into your marketing campaign you will see more people genuinely interested in your website and product, resulting in more conversions.Audio-visual contentLet’s face it, when offered the option of reading a story or watching it unfold through a video, the latter can often be much more rewarding, fun and interesting. With this in mind, it’s time to think about creating some audio-visual content for your website, and to share across social media platforms.
Tell the story of your hotel, show the happiness, its luxury and relaxation that guests experience when staying the night – it is believed that people are more likely to remember the things they see than those that they read, so give it a try and see what happens! Baby Boomers Baby Boomers refers to those born between 1946 and 1964, in the years following the Second World War and while Net Affinity describes this demographic as being “the wealthiest generation”, they are becoming more and more savvy when it comes to modern technology.
In fact, Net Affinity states that “33 per cent of internet users are now falling under this demographic”. With this in mind, it is very important that hotels ensure they are including Baby Boomers in their digital marketing plans. Proximity TechnologyMore and more people live with their smartphones on their person practically 24 hours a day, and this is an opportunity which must not be wasted when looking at marketing trends within the travel industry.
Incorporate some proximity marketing into your strategy to locate where a potential customer is and send out relevant and rich content in a bid to draw their attention to your hotel.
