Bijan Chitsaz - Ways to adjust with hotel marketing strategies Bijan Chitsaz hotel marketing strategy — now what? Well, you’ve got to take action, of course. Get busy executing those marketing ideas, but while you’re at it, remember that your strategy is a living, breathing document. There’s always room for improvement. Technology and trends change constantly. The five steps I’ve outlined below are key to ensuring that your hotel sales and marketing strategy stays agile.
Use these tips to stay ahead of the curve and you’ll be able to fine-tune your strategy throughout the year. 1. Stay curious Bijan Chitsaz - What do the most influential leaders and marketers have in common? It’s that they never stop learning. Digital marketing moves fast.The trick is curiosity, plain and simple. Having a healthy curiosity is essential to both developing and continuing to improve solid marketing strategies. There are actually a lot of easy ways to flex that muscle:
Follow someone you admire on Twitter or Facebook; or subscribe to their emails
Attend a professional conference, workshop, or skill-share
Enroll in an online course
Listen to a podcast
Subscribe to a reputable newspaper or magazine
Read different blogs about hospitality management
Meet a colleague for coffee and exchange ideas
Pay attention to what’s going on in global culture, politics, health, economics. Anything impacting potential customers or your competitors is worth learning about. Your hotel marketing strategies have to evolve as issues like climate change or economic recession come into play. 2. Look to other industries When I talk about learning, I also don’t mean just learning about hospitality. In fact, I’d argue the hotel industry is painfully slow to innovate and hoteliers can learn a lot by looking outside our little bubble! Some of the most exciting innovations in technology and digital media are coming from other sectors, like fashion, beauty, retail, sports, entertainment, food, and transportation. These industries are bucking traditional ideas about marketing trends in favor of setting them. List is pretty exhaustive, by the way — and there’s only one hotel co on it. If you look at who’s making waves in the travel sector, the headlines are dominated by alternative accommodation providers like Sonder and socially-conscious tour operators like Intrepid Group. You hate to see it, but online travel agencies are also marketing and delivering the product our customers want. Some of the most compelling and forward-thinking ideas that could shape your hotel marketing strategy actually come from industries like fashion and beauty. Sports marketers have also upped the ante in terms of online engagement. We can all learn a thing or two about customer loyalty by watching how sports teams interact with their fans over social media. 3. Understand data (and use it) Bijan Chitsaz, the data we use to power our best hotel marketing ideas can come in many different forms. Our guests tell us what they like — and what they don’t like — in the form of reviews, social media posts, blog posts and surveys. Our booking engine or PMS keeps track of who booked what room, when they booked, and how they booked. That’s a lot of data. So what are you doing with it? Hotels can use data to power their marketing efforts in a lot of valuable ways, from improving the experience for guests to filling their meeting space with the right group at the right time. Data is just that powerful.
Let’s start with improving the guest experience. Does your hotel actively gather feedback from guests? The analog days of leaving comment cards in the room are long gone. Instead, hotels can automatically send out a post-stay email that includes a short feedback survey or asks the guest to share their experience on a review site. Don’t let your guest feedback data just sit there on some server, gathering dust. Look for patterns. Start by understanding review sentiment is the feedback positive, negative, or neutral? Armed with this knowledge, you’ll constantly improve your product and your marketing tactics. Another important way hotels can use data is to increase occupancy. How important revenue management is to your hotel marketing strategy. Combined with innovative hotel technology, you can use data and artificial intelligence to streamline and power your business decision-making. Not to over-simplify things, but when it comes to using data to drive hotel bookings, that’s really what it comes down to. Understanding hotel data means recognizing patterns — and adjusting your marketing strategy accordingly. 4. Collaborate Bijan Chitsaz, one of my former general managers spoke a lot about the dangers of departments. What’s actually a very common problem among properties, both chain-operated and independent hotels. I still hear this from hotels big and small all over the globe: departmental collaboration is a real pain point. So how can it improve? And what impact does collaboration have on your bottom line? Marketing needs to drive the direct booking effort during periods of low groups occupancy. Sales needs to work with revenue on booking groups at the right rates. Your Operations team needs accurate forecasting data from revenue management to staff the hotel appropriately. Around and around it goes. To improve collaboration in the hospitality industry, technology only gets us so far. Hotels can use any of the great project management systems available, But the key to better collaboration at hotels is actually pretty simple: You just have to communicate. There is no instant fix to poor communication in the workplace — it requires commitment, effort, and practice. Departments need to be aligned under a simple, common goal, like reaching and caring for potential guests. When different departments come together and collaborate to make it happen, you’ll notice improvement in team satisfaction and a more sustainable long-term business strategy. 5. Outsource and automate There are advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing in the hospitality industry. I’m making a case for the opposite, actually. For example, let’s look at the marketing role. In my experience, hotel marketers are pulled in many often-conflicting directions.
Most hotel marketing manager job descriptions are also overflowing with skill requirements. We’re expected to be just as proficient at social media marketing and public relations as we are at search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising. Yes, with the right training, hotel marketers can certainly pick up new skills and hone their craft over time. But every individual is unique. Even a marketing “generalist” will excel in some areas more than others. Having a wide range of basic, overlapping knowledge but a deeper capability in 1-2 particular skills is called a T-Shaped Marketer. And in my experience, that’s what most of us in hotel marketing roles become, by necessity. Still, your hotel marketing strategy will have a lot of moving parts.