There are countless benefits to running digital marketing campaigns, and we’re guessing by now, you’re not only familiar with their benefits, but also their results!
Digital marketing campaigns can help you:
- Get in front of more potential guests during an off peak season
- Reward loyal customers
- Build awareness around your brand
Here are 10 easy steps to help you plan, launch and track your digital marketing campaign.
1. Set your campaign goals
Before anything else, take a breather and ask yourself: “What is my motivation for this digital marketing campaign?” Although you might have a rough idea of what your campaign goal is, outlining it in writing for yourself and your team is helpful. It will provide you with clarity and will also help later on when you are reporting on your campaign’s performance, to show whether you reached it or not.
To make sure you’ve got all your bases covered, make sure your goals are SMART: SMART is an acronym which is essential when setting any campaign objectives:
- Specific – Your goals should be clearly defined
- Measurable – your goals should be measurable so you know when you’ve reached them. And you should define the metrics you will use to measure them
- Achievable – you should be able to actually achieve your goals, don’t set unattainable hopes
- Relevant – your marketing goals should be relevant to your overall business goals and to your hotels sales and marketing plan
- Time-sensitive – your goals should be able to be achieved within a reasonable time period
2. Decide on a marketing campaign concept.
Once realistic goals have been set, deciding on and refining the marketing campaign concept becomes much easier.
This step requires you to decide on a number of key factors which will make up your campaign: for example, what offer and price point you are going to promote?
When offering discounts, try offering an add-on instead of a percentage discount. Research shows that people prefer getting something extra to getting something cheaper. Even though “Buy one get one free” or “50% off a bundle of items?” seem like the same thing to you, to most people, former is a better option.
Here’s a sample of a voucher that offers a bonus instead of a discount – try and be more creative than this, though!
Make sure you do some research and see what your competitors are doing. Make sure your offer is unique, but also priced competitively.
3. Define your target audience.
This step should be relatively easy if steps 1 and 2 have gone according to plan.
Data like that found within the ‘user demographics’ segment in your Google Analytics account can help define the demographics of customers who already engage with your website. You can also look to your booking engine data and, if you have them, your guest personas. How old are they? Where do they come from? Why are they staying with you?
Here’s a sample guest persona from Hubspot to show you the kind of detail you can strive for
However, you may want to reach a new audience with this offer, so do some research online to see how you can engage with your target audience – ask similar questions to the ones above to help get started.
Try and narrow your targeting as much as possible. This will make your message more focused and will result in a better performing digital marketing campaign. You’re not trying to talk to everyone– you’re trying to talk to the right people.
If you find you have more than 1 target audience, that’s okay. However, it’s more than likely that you’ll need to tailor your message differently for each audience.
We’ll go further into this later, in point number 5.
4. Choose your Timing
Depending on your offer and your target audience, the timing of your campaigns can make all the difference.
