It’s graduation time.
And as we sit on uncomfortable auditorium chairs watching our kids, nephews, nieces or grandkids beaming with eagerness for the road ahead… we can’t help think back to the good ol’ days of our own high school and college experiences.
Yet, the more our school days fade away in the rear-view mirror of life, the further we get from some of the critical lessons we learned back in the day.
No matter how much on-the-job experience you’ve amassed over the years, successful hotel marketers still need to crush the subjects they learned in high school and/or college.
Here are a few courses we can all use a refresher on:
1. English
One of the most vital weapons in any marketer’s arsenal—and a skill that’s often sorely lacking in the business world—is having a strong command of the English language, including a talent for narrative writing.
Successful hotel marketing efforts begin with simply having a compelling story to tell and being able to tell it cleanly and professionally. Whether you are crafting a newsletter, press release, blog, advertisement or website copy, all efforts hinge on your language skills. Not to mention the countless emails, phone calls and meetings happening in the background, where your language skills will also need to shine.
And that’s not all:
Marketers who excel in English may possess strong analytical abilities (used for picking apart all those words) and are usually great at empathizing, since appreciating literature (and its many characters) hinges upon this core ability. That translates well into understanding customers, who require marketers’ empathy, in order to truly understand their wants, needs, dreams and pain points.
2. Math
Now more than ever, it is hard, quantifiable numbers that drive marketing, especially when it comes to harnessing analytics and data for smarter campaigns and management/ROI reporting. You don’t need to be a trained mathematician, but you do need to view numbers as your friend and embrace them, in order to develop effective marketing plans, analyze results and craft meaningful reports.
