To save on extensive costs for online travel agencies (OTAs), you want to be sure that your hotel has a strong direct booking strategy. In order to create this strategy, you need to really make sure that you understand your guests. If done efficiently, this strategy can really strengthen your brand identity and can help you to create a more personal connection with your guests.
The best way to understand your audience and drive those direct bookings is by creating a customer persona. Once you know who your customer is, it’s much easier to market to them. Don’t base this on guesswork though. Do your research, because you don’t want to put time and money into a strategy for it to fall flat. So, what type of research do you need to do in order to create your customer persona?
Analyse your data
You probably already have a whole host of data from feedback forms and review websites such as TripAdvisor. This gives you plenty to get started. Take notes from these showing what guests like and dislike about your hotel, including any demographic information such as age and gender. Those that leave detailed comments are the ones you really want to take note of, as those customers who spend the time to write a detailed response are those that really have something to say, be it positive or negative. These are the people that are enthusiastic and therefore much more likely to book again based on loyalty – and to forgive you if they’ve had an issue during their visit. Once you’ve got this data, you want to look at the analytics of people visiting your website. Google Analytics is the most widely used tool, highlighting data like the gender, age and location of the people visiting your website. These specific demographics can be found in the audience option in Google Analytics. If you have goals set for your website, you can then compare these demographics to these specific goals. This could, for example, show you which age group is most likely to complete the booking process. You can also compare one demographic with another. So, for example, you can compare the age of visitors to where they enter your website from, or where they’re landing. In a similar manner, you can inspect your website visitors’ gender, language, location and interests. Compare these things with goals and other secondary dimensions to understand your hotel guests’ web behaviour. So that you can easily refer back to this information, you should compile it in a document such as an Excel spreadsheet. You can then much more swiftly access the information than if you had to search through Google Analytics every time.
Ask your guests
So you’ve already gathered information from feedback forms and review websites, but rather than helping you to steer your marketing strategy this is probably more useful for improving your hotel’s services. To be sure that you get the answers you really need, prepare a set of questions to ask your guests. Keep in mind throughout this process that you’re asking your guests to do you a favour by answering these questions. With this in mind, you also need to think about how you’re going to deliver these questions. If you’ve gathered the email addresses of past guests, then this can be a great place to start. You can also put it out on social media and include an option to fill out the questions on your website. To get as much information as possible, it can be a good idea to offer an incentive, such as a competition. You’ll be surprised how much more likely people are to respond if there’s something in it for them.
Create your persona
Once you feel like you have enough information, it’s time to create your customer persona. Don’t feel trapped by just creating one though, as you may have two or even three. This persona should include details like:
Name
Professional and personal background
Demographics
Goals
Challenges
Pains
Skills
Interests
Relationship with your hotel
An important part of creating the persona is to give them a name. If you tell yourself that you’re doing this for Brian, you feel closer to that persona than if it didn’t have a name. It may sound silly, but believe me it makes a difference. Now that you have these personas, you can really understand your guests and target them accordingly.
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