As a hotel you can often find yourself investing a lot of time, money and effort in your marketing processes. But what use is this if you’re not able to measure the success of these efforts?
Even if you are measuring your return on investment (ROI), are you using these results to boost your future marketing efforts? You’ll want to be able to say yes to this – but the reality is usually that there is a lack of time or knowledge when it comes to efficiently analysing marketing metrics. Well, this is something that needs to change. If you’re not tracking the results of your marketing spend, then how do you know if you’re investing in the right areas? The simple answer is that you don’t. So, what areas are going to be the easiest for you to implement ROI measures?
Trade shows
Not all hotels visit trade shows, but they’re certainly not a rarity in the industry. Unfortunately though, many hospitality businesses visit these shows and then just wait for the results to roll in. Instead, you need to gather leads at these types of events and follow them up. Don’t forget – the people that have come to these shows have done so for a reason, so these warm leads could turn into big moneymakers if you handle them well.
Your website
Your website is essentially the face of your hotel until guests actually make a booking. So, you need to align it with your business goals and measure revenue, visitation and costs. This is actually easy to do with Google Analytics. This tool is free, and easy to use to measure and track website statistics. When you’re building your Google Analytics dashboard, eHotelier suggests that you ensure it allows you to:
1. Determine your overall strategy with both long and short term goals
2. Establish a baseline by recording your data and statistics (take into account seasonal fluctuations and exceptional occurrences)
3. Proceed with tactical execution
4. Collect data over a period of time
5. Compare baseline data to the new data
6. Refine and adjust your campaign
Having these standards in place means that you are able to measure sales, leads, revenue, blog post hits and audience development. You can customise your dashboard to ensure that you’re measuring the areas which will be most beneficial to your business, which as a hotel will probably be online bookings and purchases, filled out contact forms, sign-ups to newsletters, PDF downloads, number of visitors to the site, traffic by keyword, search engine or mobile and geographic location.
Social media analytics
Much like Google Analytics, social media platforms have their own analytics services. These are hugely important for measuring the success of your posts. This data will allow you to adapt and refine your social media strategy, highlighting which posts have garnered the most engagement, the timings of the posts that have been most successful and where your audience has come from online to reach your social media profile. This means that you can really analyse what it is that makes certain posts more successful than others, allowing you to use this information to grow your social media capabilities.
Email marketing analysis
If you use email marketing, then it’s important that you again use the results to improve your strategies. Make sure that you’re using an email marketing program that shows you key statistics, such as the open rate, click-through rate on links and the customer journey following the email. Most of these programs also show you the demographics of people opening your email, including their location, gender and age range. Of course, getting this information depends on whether or not you collected this data upon sign-up to email alerts. However, you will find that it can be difficult to efficiently measure all ROI. A good idea is to ask customers where they’ve heard about your hotel during the booking process. This means that even if you’re not able to follow the customer journey in its entirety, you can gain an understanding of where you’re most visible. For example, if the majority of your sales have seen your hotel on Google, or through email alerts, it might become evident that your social media needs a boost.
With so many different social spaces online, it’s important that you know which ones are working for you the most, and which you need to work to improve or perhaps reduce investment in, if it’s clear that your target market aren’t active in that area.
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