5* Marketing With This Hotel Marketing Agency
The hotel world is one in a serious period of flux at the minute. It’s had to baton down the hatches and weather the storm. Companies such as AirBnB have shaken the industry up like nobody could’ve possibly predicted. Not only that, but prices are becoming ever-more competitive, even in the more exclusive echelons of the industry.
Bearing this in mind; marketing has never played such an important part in the success of a hotel as it does now. With good marketing, you stand to survive and potentially thrive in this cut-throat sector. With poor marketing, on the other hand, your chances of success sink away, no matter how good your hotel is. The team here at VerriBerri, a leading hotel marketing agency in Essex, want to look at what you can do as a hotelier to make your establishment stand out from the rest.
What Is Your Hotel’s Strongest Selling Point/Target Audience?
We get sick of hearing the term USP; but there’s a reason that it’s stuck so long as a keystone of marketing. This is where you should start, because whatever ‘category’ you find that your hotel falls into will inform your subsequent marketing choices. Whether you like it or not, and whether you feel you neatly fit into a category or otherwise, this is now the way the hotel world works.
It’s a world of booking platforms and their filters. Which bracket would your hotel fall under, then? Are you a ‘budget’ hotel or a ‘luxury’ hotel? Do you offer spa retreats or city breaks? Is your hotel catered towards a younger or older demographic? There’s too much competition out there for you to take a scattergun approach, trying to secure everyone.
Even if it’s only slightly; you need to refine who you’re targeting in terms of the guests you’re looking to attract. As a hotel marketing agency, the thing we see more than anything else is a lack of direction and focus.
How Much Are You Using Social Media?
If the answer is not much, then therein most likely lies part of your problem. In today’s digital era, a failure to utilise social media platforms is going to place your hotel at a distinct disadvantage when compared with your competitors. Social media needn’t be for youngsters, as some of the more pretentious industry members may seem to think; and there is no better way of reaching a large audience than by using these platforms. Not only a large audience, but a predominantly high quality audience as well.
Different social media platforms serve different purposes. All of which can be helpful to a hotel in one way or another. LinkedIn is one such social media platform you can leverage to your hotel’s advantage. Reputation is something that matters in the hotel world, reputation as much in industry circles as in the public. With LinkedIn, what you get is an incredibly good networking resource.
So; you can get in touch with leading industry professionals in a way which would’ve been hard to in previous years. In terms of forging more of a brand-bond between yourselves and potential customers, apps such as Instagram are the way to go. This platform also provides you with a fabulous opportunity to show off the best parts of your hotel; whilst using a content strategy tailored to best suit you.
Social media platforms all use hashtags as one of their main features in their sharing of content. The major benefit of using hashtags is that it allows you to be much more targeted with who you’re trying to reach. You can target pretty much anyone you like, whether that be very open-ended or incredibly niche. If social media has never been your strong suit as a hotelier, then this is easily rectified by using a hotel marketing agency. A social media account manager will handle your accounts, across all your platforms, taking content you provide (or sometimes curating the content themselves) and scheduling it so that your hotel is consistently putting out content and interacting with users for better engagement.
Get Into Publications
In spite of changes in how we consume media as a society, we still can’t help but take more serious stock things that we see written down in print within the pages of a glossy magazine. Securing an editorial in a leading B2B or B2C publication is still one of the best ways of getting your hotel noticed. Customers will scroll past hundreds of hotels on sites like booking.com, not batting an eyelid at any of them.
If those very same customers see an interview with you and a tour around your hotel in a renowned magazine; then they’re obviously going to take more notice. The PR team of a hotel marketing agency will process the most salient points and qualities of your hotel before pitching to the journalists of these magazines to secure exposure and coverage within them.
When it comes to marketing your hotel; the process is all about continually building your brand recognition up more and more, little by little. Those firms that offer you quick returns are invariably the same firms that want extortionate amounts of money for less organic marketing means… pay-per-click advertising, for example. These more heavy-handed approaches do work, but they’re far less sustainable than building your hotel brand up with strong and stable foundations. Sustainability is something that your hotel is going to want in the competitive times every hotel is now facing.
Contact Us
Taking a more concerted approach to your hotel’s marketing is one of the best things you can do to propel your business onwards. So, if you’d like to find out more about our hotel marketing agency, then get in touch! Contact VerriBerri today on 01376 386 850. We’d love to discuss a plan on how to take your hotel’s marketing to the next level.
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