Digital Marketing Strategies - Hospitality Industry must Learn in 2022

Are you still using only traditional marketing and losing out on new business opportunities?Do you want to increase the sales of your hotel?Do you want to get customer awareness?If yes, you should use digital marketing to get competitive advantages.

Table of contents

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is the advertising of products or services using digital technologies such as the internet, social media, mobile phones and other digital mediums. Using those online media channels, customers can easily be endorsed goods, services and brands.

Source from - Frankfurt School of Finance & Management

Why is digital marketing important for hospitality?

The hospitality industry tends to use digital marketing nowadays. Like other types of business, the hotel industry needs to use digital marketing to get competitive advantages. Here are three reasons for using digital marketing for your next campaign.

1. Increased Reach - Digital marketing makes your hotel get more awareness and engagement from customers. Nowadays, most users / guests/ customers are using digital platforms for entertainment, education or news, hence digital marketing platforms help hotels to reach them in faster and easier ways. This may be the key reason to use digital marketing for community and direct engagement engagement with your customers.
2. Cost Effective - Digital marketing saves cost less than traditional marketing. Digital marketing uses targeted research and analytics to quickly determine which approaches are working well and which aren’t worth the cost or resources. So, most digital marketing channels tend to be less costly from the start and prevent overspending on underperforming campaigns.
3. Global Reach - Digital marketing is not only for local but also for global reach. Global customers can find your hotel websites, offers, facilities, pages and channels and then can easily make bookings. Search engine optimization (SEO) puts your hotel brand where the audience can find it. When customers need to find a hotel, they usually search online. At that time, SEO helps you to reach more customers. By optimizing your site content for the search engines, and using relevant keywords, can help you bring more targeting customers.

How to do digital marketing and what are main activities in digital marketing.

There are three main pillars of digital marketing.

1. Content - It can be images, videos, blogs, articles, stories
2. Medium - Website, You tube Channel, Facebook
3. Channel - How we distribute -
   1. Audience finds us - SEO
   2. We find the audience - Social media, email marketing, direct messaging, advertisements.

Process of Digital Marketing - Sales Funnel 

Sales funnel can make your hotel grow by building a powerful conversion path. Sales funnel of a specific hotel may be different according to their strategies and target customers. The advantage of using a sales funnel when designing your digital marketing strategy is that you get a simple and straightforward set of goals that you need to hit.

1. Identify your target customers - You should choose the target customers of your hotel. For example, you can target couples who take a honeymoon, or families or students who require a quiet place to study, business people, meeting guests, and wedding couples.
2. Analyze those customers’ purchasing behavior. - You should analyze those targeted customers income level, geographic data, psychographic data and so you can create suitable packages and prices for them to get attraction.
3. Digital asset - After that, you should choose how to give your information to the customers. You can choose contents or blogs or videos.
4. Medium and channel - In digital marketing, you need to use different types of medium and channels to reach your customers. For example, Website, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn,
5. Optimization - You need to do to maximize the number of users who get your asset through the channel you picked. If you pick digital advertising to drive traffic to a landing page, optimization will include things like testing ad graphics, copy, placement, targeting, budget, etc.
6. Collect their contact information and trace back - This is the most important aspect of the framework to maintain and increase the sales of your hotel.
7. Lead Generation - Lead generation is the act of stimulating interest amongst your target audience for a particular product or service so you can draw them into your sales pipeline.
8. Conversion / Selling - You need to explore the customer’s needs and wants by making conversion and making sales.
9. Upselling / Make them Loyalty - Once a person becomes a customer you can make them loyal customers and can create upselling to them.

How to do digital marketing (Strategies)

1.Web Analytics 

 When you decided to use digital marketing, you should use mediums such as websites, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest ,etc. Web analytics is the process of tracking, understanding, and making data-driven decisions that generate business growth. It is also fundamental in digital marketing. It helps you to know data of your own websites by figuring out what works and what doesn’t so that you can develop new strategies for the growth of your hotel.

(Sources from Demand Jump)

2.Content marketing 

Content marketing is about becoming a publisher who creates content that drives results for the business. You should do content marketing and create a content strategy because it can generate a measurable and meaningful impact on your hotel. You can make your hotel grow by delivering the right message at the right time. To be a perfect content marketing, you should follow these steps1. Gain a deep understanding of who your target customers are (including their desires, wants, and needs) - Target persona. Target persona is a representation of your ideal customer. It’s a combination of demographics (age, gender, language, location, etc.) and psychographics (interests, desires, opinions, values, etc.) This information can help inform much more than your content. Here are the examples of developing a target persona.

After the first step, you can continue the following steps to become effective content marketing.

• Craft simple messages for each of your target customers at each stage of the funnel.
• Choose the suitable content types to deliver each message.
• Create content that people want to consume and helps you achieve your business goals.
• Make sure your target persona actually sees and consumes the content you create

4.Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) can grow your hotel on websites and social media by attracting massive traffic from search engines. To be successful in SEO, you just need to understand what users are looking for, and then create awesome, relevant content that answers their questions. If you know how to do it, you can simply follow these steps.

• Keyword research - Understand what users are searching for and create content.
• On-page optimization - Help search engines understand what your content is about what.
• Off-page optimization - Demonstrate to search engines that you have the authority to answer the users’ questions
• Technical optimization - Make sure search engines can easily find your content

Sources from - Search Engine Learn

5.Email marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most profitable marketing channels for many businesses. If you want to be one of the top email marketers in the world, you need to learn how to

• Use your data to send users extremely specific, relevant messages
• Find the right moment to send each message
• Build systems to segment users, track their actions, and automatically send messages Once you have those three things figured out, you’ll have a world-class email marketing strategy.

6.Digital Advertising

Digital Advertising makes your hotel grow by launching highly-profitable advertising campaigns. You can follow these steps if you have no idea for digital advertising.

1. Understand the advertising platforms
2. Plan campaigns for each stage of the funnel
3. Target the right audiences for each campaign
4. Create high-converting ads
5. Estimating a budget for your campaigns

Sources from - WebFx 

  7.Social media marketing

Social media marketing is the process of strategically using social channels to generate meaningful and measurable impact for a business. To create a powerful social media strategy, you need to follow a simple framework:

1. Understand and tackle the 3 components of social media marketing: Monitoring, engagement, and conversion.
2. Pick the right channels to participate in and learn how each channel fundamentally works.
   1. Facebook - for a general audience. The hotel can share news, videos about their customer's feedback, share pictures by customers, food menu, recipes
   2. Instagram - Instagram spots in the hotel, customers pictures.
   3. LinkedIn - is for business purposes. You can share hotel-related knowledge and your hotel information.
3. Create world-class content for social media that actually drives engagement and action
   1. It needs to high-quality images,
   2. Entertaining videos
   3. Be comprehensive, prolific, and brave

Learn About Branding - Learn about hotel branding here

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