A new calendar in every New Year comes with an opportunity. Hospitality industry is not an exception. The holiday era remains the same but trends changes every year and with changing trends there are always new challenges to deal with. 2020 was the year when COVID 19 pandemic creates the biggest challenge for the hospitality industry. It changes the complete story and now the needs and priorities of hoteliers also changed as client’s demands are different in context to COVID pandemic. It’s time for hotels need to update with the latest trends to stand and succeed in this competitive and struggling era.
In 2021, online presence of your brand is not enough but implementation of effective and functional hotel marketing strategies in right way and adopting the latest emerging trends is crucial. Do you have any idea about emerging marketing trends? Are you having a right marketing plan that helps you to generate more bookings, attract more customers and optimize revenue? In this article you can learn about basic marketing strategies preparation as well as its execution with the context of CORONA Pandemic.
- Understand where you are:
Just accept it, technology has taken over. Today’s travellers are empowered to do their research online. While this might seems like common sense, analysis of accurate insights and data for your online presence both organically and paid is a crucial step. During analysis just ensure:
- To be visible on all online platforms: The challenge of being in the hotel industry is the overwhelming amount of competition. To be easily searchable online, you need to be everywhere (on all online platforms) such as social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn), search engines (Google, YouTube, amazon) and travel websites like Trip Advisor.
- Identify your direct and indirect competitors: To stand out from the competition, first you have to gather information about your competitors. Your direct competitors are with same location, same city offers same services to same clients. While indirect competitors are those who offers slightly different services or target different clients with same territory. Analysis of competitor’s services, pricing, branding techniques, their strength, weakness and market reputation will help to create future strategies.
- Identify Right Audience: Before you begin marketing efforts, you need to identify your target audience to focus your brand marketing efforts. Analysis can be done by market research by location, market trends etc. or analyzing your online insights accurately.
- Fix your objectives
A complete analysis of your current position vs. expected position in market definitely helps you to decide your objectives for marketing plan. Outcome of your analysis for online platforms will give you accurate data and help you choosing the right platform for marketing. You can create an engaging and competitive presence on those platforms. Even it will help you in creating and budgeting paid campaigns. You can categorize your audience and create the right campaigns to the right prospect on the basis of analyzed data. Allocation of budget for different seasons is a most important objective to be decide before begin marketing strategy.
- Select the strategy Plan
When you are clear with your objectives, plan a strategy that fulfills the outcome of your objectives. During planning of strategy always include the marketing of your location, USPs, food, local experiences and most importantly guest reviews. Don’t forget to include your safety and hygiene measures, contactless payments as hygiene and safety is new trend as well as demand of hotel marketing in context to COVID pandemic. Building of customer loyalty program, remarketing and gift cards are most important parts of strategy planning. Split of budget is also important. It just makes sense to spend more of annual budget in your busiest season. Adjusting the budget according to steady, slow and busy season is a smart way to play. Google and other platforms make it easy to adjust your budget on an ongoing basis.
- Implementation of strategy
It’s the time when you turn your strategy plan into action in order to accomplish your objectives. Now you have to address who, where, when and how situation. If implementation is done effectively, hotel can gain competitive advantage. For the purpose just assigned concerned person clear goals that tap into their strengths.
- Analysis or Tracking of Marketing efforts
Tracking of progress is crucial to accomplish your goal. Regular SWOT (Strength, weakness, opportunities and threats) analysis will help you in understanding that your hotel marketing efforts are going in right direction. If something in the plan is not working, change it. Take accurate actions or move towards the changing trends. Either monthly or quarterly basis assessment of your efforts is a must ongoing practice. The hospitality industry as well as online marketing strategies have fast shifting trends, you have to update with new goals and strategies constantly.
If you are not able to achieve the optimum revenue after creating such wonderful marketing strategy, than you must shift towards professional revenue management services or marketing service providers, they have experienced staff to manage all your marketing hurdles.