Before you start a blog, open an Instagram account or start gathering email addresses for your luxury hotel, you need to choose the business goals for your digital marketing campaign.
NB: This is an article from ARO Digital
When you know what you want to accomplish, you’ll be able to direct your energy into the best performing hotel marketing campaigns.
It will also help you to understand whether you reached your goals when you’re reporting on your campaign’s performance.
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1. SET UP YOUR HOTEL CAMPAIGN GOALS
To set your campaign goals, you must:
• calculate the number of customers you’ll need to generate.
a. In what timeframe do you want to generate this estimate?
b. What’s your revenue goal for this timeframe?
c. How much does an average customer spend in this period?
d. Total number of customers needed (b/c)
• Now estimate the percentage of leads that become customers.
e. Number of new leads you generated in the last 6 months
f. Number of customers generated from those leads
g. Percentage of leads that become customers (f/e %)
• Project how many leads and impressions you’ll need from your campaigns in this period.
h. Number of leads you’ll need (d/g)
i. Average response rate you get from your campaigns (as a %)
j. Number of impressions you’ll need to generate (h/i)
2. CHOOSE YOUR CAMPAIGN CONCEPT
Now, you must choose the concept of your hotel marketing campaign.
What do I mean?
When you set up your campaigns with a focus on the result — customers & revenue — you’re in a better position to hit your goals.
Therefore, you must decide on several key factors which will make up your campaign. For instance, what offer are you going to promote?
The RIGHT hotel promotion ideas can help you to:
- Stand apart from the competition
- Attract more guests
- Grow your business and increase your revenue
Guest expectations and market trends keep changing all the time.
You need to keep yourself updated with insights and implement new strategies to advertise your property.
For example, luxury guests prefer a value add instead of a percentage discount.
3. DEFINE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
Understanding the customer mindset is vital in creating an effective hotel marketing campaign by:
- Developing adapted offers for your target audience
- Creating a content editorial calendar for social media
- Better ad placement to maximize conversion
- Coming up with a distinctive unique selling proposition (USP)
- Prioritising promotional channels.
HOW TO START RESEARCHING YOUR HOTEL TARGET AUDIENCE?
- Study statistics on your audience on social media networks. Use Facebook Audience Insights to see Facebook and Instagram users that interact with your business profile.
- Get a better idea of who visits your website with the help of Google Analytics reports.
- See what online reviews on Booking.com, Tripadvisor and Google say. There guests elaborate on why they chose your hotel and what they loved the most.
- Pull the data from your booking engine.
When you narrow down your target audience, it will make your message more focused and res a better performing digital marketing campaign.
If you have more than one target audience, you need to tailor your message differently for each of your audiences.
4. DECIDE ON YOUR MESSAGE
Your unique selling proposition (USP) is your key competitive advantage and the one thing that differentiates you in the marketplace.
A good USP will help customers quickly understand what your hotel has to offer and lets them know why they should choose you over the competition.
But before you determine that you need to figure out:
- What you want to market and sell?
- Who you’re marketing to?
- When do you want to sell it?
- Who are your guests? What kind of guests would you like to attract?
- What do your guests love about your hotel?
- What separates you from your competition?
If you really want to separate yourself from the competition you need to dig deep and find something you offer that your competitors don’t.
Perhaps the best way to start is to compare your hotel to five to ten of your biggest competitors and then create a list of anything you offer that’s different.
For example; “Stay at our luxurious bedroom with great sea view”, “Experience helicopter escape over London”, or “Experience luxury spa with luxury products”.
5. DETERMINE YOUR MARKETING PLATFORMS
After you clarify your target audience and what you are going to offer them, you must allocate your marketing campaign budget.
And then you must decide which platforms you’re going to use to promote your campaign.
A. YOUR INDEPENDENT HOTEL WEBSITE
All your marketing campaign activities across different platforms direct traffic to your website.
Your website is the most important channel and critical for a book direct strategy which effectively converts online bookings.
If you run a campaign on other platforms and drive traffic to your website, you need a specific landing page them which is relevant to your promotion.
To get the most out of your campaign and increase your conversions, the design and the calls to action on this page are very important.
The campaign message across all your platforms must be the same as the message on the landing page which you’re directing traffic to.
It should also be optimised to get the customer to take a specific action when they arrive on the page.
B. PAID SEARCH AND DISPLAY: GOOGLE
Hotel campaigns let you bid for hotel ads that appear when a traveler searches for a hotel on Search or Maps.
Your online display ads can appear on websites across the internet.
It is a powerful way to target travelers planning to visit your destination.
If you want to promote your campaign, you must:
- Use advert sitelinks to deep link searches directly into your offer page
- Use Google Remarketing on the Display network to promote your offer. Image ads work best for this.
- Video bumper ads allow you to reach a large audience with a relatively small budget.
- If your budget will stretch, display marketing can scale your reach to a much larger audience and can help to drive awareness of your promotion to a new audience.
C. PAID SEARCH: SOCIAL MEDIA
Facebook:
Facebook advertising is an important way to promoting a campaign or offer to a specific audience as it has 2.80 billion monthly active users.
Facebook ads are all about getting your message in front of the people who are most likely to want your products or services.
There are different Facebook ad types e.g. image, video and slideshow.
There are also alternative messaging and action buttons depending on what part of the sales funnel you are targeting – awareness, consideration or intent.
Instagram:
27% of users say they find new products and brands through paid social ads, and Instagram ads can reach over 1.2 billion people.
Instagram ads appear throughout the app, including in users’ feeds, stories, explore, and more.
As with Facebook, there are many different types of advertising formats on Instagram, including image, stories, video, carousel, collection and IGTV.
Instagram is a visual platform so make sure your posts are eye-catching!
Not only you can drive more awareness and bookings, but also you can check the data in your Google Analytics.
In this way you can understand how the traffic from the specific campaign has increased your revenue and optimize it for future campaigns.
