The hotel industry’s customer acquisition strategy has been changed by digital marketing.
Customers may now take charge of their own experience thanks to new innovative technologies and tools. This has ramifications for hotels in terms of how they develop and maintain relationships with new and existing clients.
In the past, hotels were judged on their customer service and satisfaction ratings. And, thanks to online travel agents, they’ve become accustomed to comparing and comparing prices.Home-sharing has introduced a new level of competition to the mix.
How can hotels use new, inventive digital marketing methods to achieve a competitive advantage and attract more direct bookings?
Construct a micro-journey
Customers nowadays spend a lot of time arranging their next exciting trip. And they’re increasingly relying on their mobile gadgets to help them get through it. Customers are making booking decisions faster than ever before because to new superior mobile technology.
Hotels must adjust to changing customer habits and patterns. Digital marketing methods that listen, care, and connect at every micro-moment will be required for new inventive hotel marketing programmes.
To do this, responsive funnels must be created that reflect how each micro-moment of the client experience influences the booking choice. Hotels must understand the state of the client in both inbound and outbound marketing.
Think about it (perception, judgment, reasoning dictated by emotions) empathetic (influenced by emotions and rationale). The way you act (actions as results of rationale)
We employ content in the context of developing with inbound marketing:
Awareness / Attentions / Interest / Desire / Action
In outbound marketing, we employ content in conjunction with the following:
Community / Value / Quality / Experiences / Retention
We deploy digital marketing and social media marketing as drivers for visibility, attention, and interest through inbound marketing. We can go down the funnel with more precise aims of building social evidence that will encourage desire and action.
Improve the user experience
When it comes to responsive digital marketing, funnel optimization is what helps us get the most out of our efforts. Search engine and social media optimization are unquestionably important for every online brand’s success.
However, new digital technologies and data have placed hotels in a situation where they must now provide more personalised experiences and create strong client relationships. Every micro-moment of the customer experience may be accessed across all mediums available today.
Finding a hotel brand via search or social media is one thing, but if a customer finds it difficult to engage, they will most likely explore for other options. To improve the customer experience, hotels can use a variety of digital marketing platforms, including social media, mobile apps, IoT, SMS, email, and chatbots.
Hotels must begin to use machine learning to better identify and respond to valuable micro-moments throughout the customer journey as we move toward more Artificial Intelligence.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
For both business and leisure visitors, search engines are among the most popular research tools. Hotels must implement search engine optimization tactics that target their ideal clientele. The rivalry for many hotels on search engines like Google is now fierce. Furthermore, we can see that Google’s hotel marketplace, Google Hotels, plays an important part in client comparison shopping.
We now think of search engine optimization in terms of improving the customer eperience. Hotels must figure out who their ideal client is and what they value. For hotels that want to drive more direct bookings, relevant material in context with a high-value offer is a success factor today.
Hotels must recognise that today’s customers are looking for more than just the best experience; they’re also looking to see if the brand lives up to its promises. Search engine optimization is a long-term procedure that does not yield immediate benefits. That is why it is critical to begin by improving the customer experience.
The client has moved away from traditional one-word keyword searches and is now focusing on values. When looking for a hotel that best meets their needs, they look for qualities like trustworthiness, humanity, authenticity, relevance, and user-friendliness.
Social media optimization
With likes, followers, and connections, social media optimization is all about leveraging influence in a relevant context. The customer experience has transformed as a result of the digital transformation. To use and respond to the consumer journey, social media must be optimised.
Do you know who your customer is? their previous booking history, or a service option they’ve investigated in the past? Hotels that listen, care, and connect will collect this information alongside appropriate social evidence.
To enhance the booking experience, social media optimization makes use of the customer’s trusted network and peers. Data, connections, and social evidence will now be used to support and justify a well-informed booking decision.
Customers have faith in genuine peers, and this is reflected in their brand loyalty.
Create a website that is mobile-friendly
Today’s responsive website design adjusts to the customer’s wants as well as the digital device they’re utilising.
Hotels must now deliver a consistent, individualised experience across all channels. The website must become an integral part of the narrative.
Responsive website design has the advantage of adapting the layout to any digital device.
Hotel brands have only 8 seconds to persuade customers to make an informed reservation decision.
There isn’t enough time to make a high-value offer in this amount of time. This is why everything – customer experience optimization, search engine optimization, social media marketing, and social media optimization – must be viewed in context.
Hotels must catch the customer before they realise what has happened. Listening, caring, and connecting provide useful and relevant information.
The crucial values that drive direct bookings are trustworthiness, openness, humanity, authenticity, and the relationship.
The flexible website adapts to the customer’s digital devices, and their choices are based on hotel brands they are familiar with, trust, and enjoy.
Managing Your Reputation
It is commonly known that before making a purchase, online customers check reviews. Customers’ booking decisions have changed as a result of reviews. Customers now have more access to information because to digital gadgets and technology. And a great deal of this data is available right now.
In the hotel industry, reviews have always been crucial. And, from the customer’s perspective, the relevance of a review is often determined by the star ratings, the quantity of reviews, the price, and the source of the review. The network is seen as more reputable as a result of reviews from authorities, colleagues, and customers. In the past, reviews represented a linear road; now, with new digital technology and experience, reviews now reflect a continuous moving path.
Hotels must improve the customer experience, SEO, SMO, have a great website, and understand every micro-moment, as we’ve already established. However, if customers continue to leave bad reviews, this will not help to improve the company’s image.
Listening, caring, connecting, and creating connections are all important aspects of reputation management today. Hotels must keep an eye on social media, search engine results, the news, and pertinent review sites.
The information and data gathered will enable your hotel to take proactive activities that demonstrate that you are paying attention to and caring about your guests. This puts you in a position to communicate with the consumer and start building a new unique relationship, as well as start promoting positive ratings.
Digital technology and service automation
Customers may now peruse product and service alternatives on the move with their smartphones, speak with a live human, resolve difficulties with chatbots, interact with peers to review possibilities through Social Media channels, negotiate and make purchases, and even have products delivered directly to their doorstep.
Contextual, intuitive, and exploratory customer involvement across numerous micro-moments is what digital marketing is all about. Customers are becoming more savvy, and they expect service on demand.
Hotels now have a unique potential to keep clients in specialised built-in experience loops thanks to new creative service choices for Facebook and Google. Hotels allow customers and new uncontested market leaders the opportunity to share their ideas at every interaction with the built-in experience loop.
Real-time engagement with hotel guests is possible thanks to Service Automation. This gives your staff the opportunity to gather valuable feedback information before worries evolve into unfavourable evaluations, as well as to rejoice when customers describe great and unexpected experiences.
Because of the emergence of intelligent chatbots, your Hotel may now respond in real time to any inquiry posed by a potential consumer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. If a potential consumer wants to book a room, the same rules apply. A hotel experience chatbot can handle it at any time of day or night. . Customer loyalty is now built and maintained through real-time engagement and contextual dialogues.
Digital machine learning and artificial intelligence
Many hotels are now employing LinkedIn to recruit future employees. Bright, a startup that allows LinkedIn to provide better candidate matching for both employers and job seekers, was acquired by LinkedIn. It considers the user’s hiring habits, work experience, and job description similarities.
As a result of the combination of artificial intelligence and digital media, the accuracy of data and online hotel marketing has improved. Having AI programmes that understand customers’ specific interests and moods could assist improve the hotel’s online experience, as well as overall happiness with technology, from the perspective of online media providers such as Google and Facebook.
A connected customer network can provide hotels with a one-stop shop for managing their social media marketing, including community infrastructure, database, listening functionality, profile administration, collaboration, content marketing and management, and, of course, analytics.
Key performance indicators for digital S.M.A.R.T.E.R.
First and foremost, hotels must determine what they hope to gain from their digital marketing activities.
Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound, Exciting, and Risky goals are S.M.A.R.T.E.R. goals. Hotels that are unsure of what they want from their digital marketing initiatives are almost certain to miss out on one or more of these components.
Remember that the ultimate goal is to establish a system that allows hotels to listen to, care for, and connect with their customers.
Hotels that prioritise S.M.A.R.T.E.R. key performance indicators, value innovation, optimization, web design, content, automation, machine learning, digital marketing, and customer experience are well-positioned to enter new uncontested markets.
The key to digital marketing methods that generate more good reviews, recommendations, and testimonials is a satisfied consumer. Setting S.M.A.R.T.E.R. key performance indicators is a fantastic leadership tool for providing superior customer service and performance.
Conclusion
More reservations are generated through digital marketing strategies that work in conjunction with one another. Customers must be targeted at all phases of their journey as a result of digital marketing methods.
We want customers, their peers, to stay with us at the conclusion of the responsive digital marketing funnel. a network, a group, and a company’s contacts.
The digital marketing KPIs for a hotel will reveal how much value innovation has on the outcomes that matter. These strategies enable your hotel to create a high-value offer that converts by putting listen, care, and connect in a meaningful setting with social proofs.
It takes time and effort to create a responsive digital marketing funnel that converts. You may require the assistance of the right group at times. Smartphones now account for the majority of hotel reservations. Meeting the customer where they make their decisions is crucial.