Are you getting the best return from your hotel marketing efforts? If you don’t have a detailed marketing plan in place for your hotel, your marketing strategies are probably not achieving the best results. When you have an established marketing plan in place, all your marketing channels work together to achieve the same goal. This focused marketing effort can achieve incredible results for your hotel and gain you a better ROI than you thought possible. At Travel Tech Strategies, we’re dedicated to helping hoteliers improve their marketing strategies to ensure their hotel’s success. To help you market your hotel more effectively, we’ve identified the five steps you need to take to create a hotel marketing plan. We’ve even included key questions that will clarify what you need to know to complete each step. What are you waiting for? Better results for your hotel marketing efforts are just five small steps away!
Know your customers
What do your customers want?
The first step to creating an effective marketing plan for your hotel is to identify your target audience and their needs so you know how to focus your marketing efforts.
Are you trying to attract business travelers? You will need to develop a marketing plan that extolls your safe, clean accommodations and attractive conference facilities. Perhaps you are focusing your marketing efforts on family travelers? Your marketing plan will focus on establishing your hotel as a fun place to vacation, highlighting your recreation amenities and shuttle service to top vacation entertainments.
For the best results, complete an in-depth analysis of your customers, including income, travel preferences, demographics, etc. Use the information to create detailed buyer personas for each segment you will be targeting with your marketing strategies.
Ascertain your hotel’s strengths and weaknesses
What makes your hotel special?
Define the particular quality that sets your hotel apart from others and makes your brand unique (also known as USP, your unique selling proposition). Take a close look at how your competitors market their hotels and figure out how you can better fulfill your customers’ needs.
Be on the lookout for your hotel’s weakness, areas where other hotels may offer more to customers. Figure out how to overcome these difficulties and present your hotel in a better light.
Determine your marketing goals
What do you want your marketing plan to achieve?
Defining your marketing goals makes them much more achievable. Be specific; the more detailed you make your marketing goals, the more likely you are to achieve them. When you have nebulous marketing goals, like ‘build my brand’ or ‘get more customers,’ it is hard to enact strategies to achieve them.
When you delineate solid marketing goals with established benchmarks, i.e. ‘we need to get three guests to extend their stay this week,’ you will find plotting a marketing path to achieve them is much easier.
Put your hotel marketing strategies to work
Which marketing strategies will achieve your goals?
Once you establish your marketing goals, decide which marketing strategies offer the greatest chance of success and put them into effect. Coordinate your internet hotel marketing channels to create integrated, highly effective marketing strategies that get results.
For example, say your goal is to increase the length of your guests’ stays. You could offer discounts on longer stays through your social media strategies, use your hotel email newsletter to invite guests to take advantage of multiple-day VIP packages, and write blogs on local three-day excursions. Funnel guests to a custom landing page on your hotel website, and watch the responses soar!
Assess the results of your hotel marketing strategies and adjust as needed
How can you make your hotel marketing strategies more effective?
Whether you’re just learning how to market your hotel or you’re a long-time marketing pro, you will need hard data to truly assess the success of your marketing plan. Use an analytical program like Google Analytics to monitor the performance of your hotel marketing strategy. Trace your guests’ sales journeys to determine the success of your marketing plan.
If you’re not reaching the benchmarks you’ve set, figure out where your marketing efforts are falling short. Are travelers leaving your sales funnel once they reach your booking engine? Are they losing interest once they read your email newsletter, or leaving from your landing page?
When you pinpoint where guests are dis-engaging, you can make adjustments to your strategies to get your marketing efforts back on track.
As a full-service hotel marketing agency, Travel Tech Strategies can provide you with everything you need to ensure the success of your hotel marketing plan. We specialize in responsive hotel website design, social media strategies for hotels, hotel email marketing services, and more to meet all your hotel marketing needs.
Contact us at Travel Tech Strategies today at 954-779-2801 for help creating and implementing a hotel marketing plan that will help ensure your hotel’s success!
Travel Tech Strategies is a forward-thinking market leader providing the travel industry with in-depth Big Data analysis