Digital marketing can feel like an elusive game. Just as you nail your strategy – something changes. By weaving data strategies into your digital marketing approach, you’ll facilitate short-term and long-term success with targeted high-value audiences.
NB: This is an article from Cendyn
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It’s a secure way to capture commercial growth at the Find, Book, and Grow stages of the customer journey.
The power of data is keenly understood in most industries nowadays. For airlines, data-driven insights have enabled route planning based on customer demand, predictive maintenance to reduce unexpected delays, and demand forecasting to optimize capacity on-board each flight. In retail, big data analysis looks at everything from weather patterns to localized shopping trends to optimize inventory levels in stores.
Whatever the industry, intelligent use of data will drive commercial and operational performance. A strategic data-driven approach generates the right demand, facilitates enhanced experiences, and builds customer loyalty. In fact, 82% of organizations with advanced data maturity benefit from positive year-on-year revenue growth.
The hotel industry challenge
To keep up in a data-forward world, hotels must collect and analyze data on guest preferences, booking patterns, and satisfaction levels. This data feeds into digital marketing efforts, ensuring a brand intersects with prospective guests at key moments in their booking journeys.
Yet gathering and using data is a challenge for hotels, especially where systems and technology do not fully integrate. Data silos are difficult to draw meaningful insights from, and most hotels often don’t have the resources or skillsets to capture data at the right moment.
We see regional differences in how hotels use data for digital marketing too:
- North American hoteliers are generally advanced in their digital marketing thinking, increasingly harnessing first-party data feeding substantial digital marketing budgets (Cendyn’s US customers’ average annual budget is $84K) focusing investment in metasearch, SEM, paid social and programmatic campaigns.
- Asia-Pacific hoteliers – forced to diversify their markets post-pandemic with the reduction in Chinese travelers – know the importance of a dynamic and adaptable data-informed digital marketing strategy. Hoteliers are thinking more about growth-oriented strategies, with larger hotel groups considering long-funnel marketing.
- European hoteliers focus more on short-term revenue goals using lower-funnel tactics to deliver quick returns. Cendyn’s European customers invest heavily in SEM and metasearch to ensure visibility at key consumer decision points. These tactics do not always drive awareness and rely less on audience modeling, but when our customers leverage their first-party data within these channels, they maximize the efficiency of their digital campaigns.
Hotels require a mix of data from across the business, covering demand, booking patterns, competition, consumer preferences, and online behaviors – to create a data-informed digital marketing strategy.
