Adapting your hotel marketing plan for 2018

Who is staying in your hotel? Why are they staying at your hotel? What led them to book your hotel over the one down the road?

It's a hotel marketer's job to know the answers to all of these questions, and now's the right time to be asking yourself them. As we all prepare and plan for 2018, making assumptions or asking your staff isn't the right way to get the answers. Your data is. And now is the right time to be looking at it. It will give you the intelligence you need to plan for and deliver targeted, relevant, personalized messages to your target guests, resulting in better conversions.

Josh Herman, Director of Marketing at Fontainebleau, Miami Beach shares his thoughts on targeting, "Fontainebleau has a young, hip, 'cool place to be' image in the marketplace. It's a true celebrity "see and be seen" destination, and an image we've worked extremely hard to build. I was surprised that our data told us that certain times of the year we do a significant amount of family business. Or, certain times of the year our customer base can really vary in age or geographic location. So, we adapted our marketing programs and messaging accordingly.

It's our job as marketers to make sure that we're appealing to the right types of customers and its data that helps us allocate our marketing budgets toward targeting the guests that have the highest propensity to book and have a great experience. Everyone has a target customer base, regardless of property size, image, etc. As a luxury property, if we attract customers that can't afford to be here or are not going to take advantage of all the great amenities then shame on us because we're not doing our job from a marketing perspective. The same applies to any property."

Our SVP Global Marketing & Business Development, Michael Bennett is the first to admit that achieving this level of targeting is not only necessary to stay competitive, it enables hoteliers to continually drive revenue and loyalty with the guests that really matter. "We like to think of a technology platform that complements digital marketing as a seamless customer relationship management (CRM) solution that resides in a hotel to manage what the human capabilities can simply not do:

• Communicating with guests online, on mobile, or email when they're considering booking
• Catering to guests while they're in residence at a property
• Delivering targeted and personalized marketing campaigns
• Encouraging guests to book again
• Ensuring data privacy across all technology systems

All in all, it plays a large role in completing the guest journey and making the unnecessary, clunky aspects of travel, seamless and a delight to experience. The sheer amount of data that can be collected on each guest, multiplied by the thousands of guests that may pass through the doors of a large hotel in a given year will always call for a CRM software system that can handle this huge number of unique records. What is important however, is to not only use the data captured to entice guests with seamless technology, but to also provide personalized human interaction at the right time, with the right information for every guest to create those unique, unforgettable moments."

If you'd like to read more about enhancing your hotel digital marketing strategy for 2018, download our most recent guide 'The definitive guide to hotel marketing'.

Mobile Marketing Email marketing Digital Marketing