Ready to transform your hotel digital marketing madness into a clear and simple strategy?

Scary. Intimidating. Overwhelming.

These are just some of the words that probably describe how you view the world of digital marketing.

We all know that working in the hotel marketing industry can be stressful… sometimes even chaotic, with demands from every single department on top of your digital demands.

One thing is for sure though, in the online world is where a large proportion of your audience is, and every day your hotel’s digital presence is not optimized you’re missing out on reach, impact, and direct bookings.

But the truth is…

Having a website and a Facebook page is simply not good enough!

You need a clear strategy, an action plan, with clear goals to make it easier for your potential guests to discover your hotel and create a stronger digital presence.

Doing a hotel digital marketing strategy is overwhelming

Did you know…

Many hotels and marketing professionals are scared of creating a digital marketing strategy because they feel overwhelmed by the always-changing digital world?

However, this just translates into a clear lack of digital and industry-specific knowledge, because having a clear digital marketing strategy will help you to:

• save time 
• reduce unnecessary efforts of your Marketing team by helping them to follow a simple process
• define a clear digital roadmap to attract the ideal guests.

So, it’s time to leave the guessing work aside.

It’s time you start making the most out of the digital world.

It’s time you get all the knowledge needed to take your hotel’s online presence to the next level.

But first…

what is an omnichannel strategy?

Before we go straight into each part of the strategic process, you need to understand that in order to develop your hotel’s digital presence and reputation, you will need to create an integrated guest experience with a combination of online and offline actions – not only digital actions!

So in essence, you´ll have to develop an OMNICHANNEL STRATEGY, which will help your hotel brand to be present throughout the different stages of the customer journey with a consistent message across different channels and touchpoints.

The omnichannel strategy will be the best approach to attract your hotel´s ideal guests. Some of the channels you´ll need to consider are the following.

• Digital channels: website, social media, OTAs, paid advertising, email marketing, etc.
• Offline channels: radio, TV, magazines, printed ads, sales brochures, and more.

But don´t panic, here´s the part you were waiting for.

5 simple steps to create your hotel digital marketing strategy

This is a framework I´ve been using with some of the largest hotel groups and trust me, you won´t believe how simple it is.

1. DEFINE YOUR IDEAL GUESTS

The first thing you need to be clear on is everyone is not your client.

Here you will need to have clarity about who are your current guests vs your ideal guests. Once you get that information, you´ll need to evaluate if your hotel is currently attracting those ideal guests.

If your answer is ´no´, then you´ll need to go through a very useful exercise which is defining your hotel ideal guests’ profile – not the target market – ideally, you should create between 4 or 5 profiles maximum.

Here´s where you´ll go into details! You can start by answering some of the following questions:

• What do they like?
• What they don´t like?
• What are their interests?

And the list goes on and on… But not to worry, cause I´ve created this FREE guide to help you create your hotel ideal guests profile.

By doing this exercise you will also understand your ideal guests’ online behavior, which channels they prefer and more!

2. WHAT MAKES YOUR HOTEL UNIQUE?

Either if you work at a family own hotel, Airbnb or a global hotel group, you will need to be very clear on what makes your hotel unique, as this will be a key message to use across your communication and different channels.

You will also understand what are your hotel brand values, what it stands for and the unique services/facilities that can only be found within your hotel.

For example:

• Your hotel can have the largest wedding venue in the city
• Your hotel is pet friendly
• Your hotel has a vegetarian & vegan restaurant

These are just some ideas to inspire you, but now it´s your turn!

3. DEFINE YOUR MARKETING GOALS

Here´s where you´ll need to spend some time with your DOSM or Comercial team to understand what are the short, medium and long-term sales goals. Remember: the Marketing team has to support sales!

For example:

One sales goal could be to increase honeymooners booking from Australia by 20% or drive awareness about a new facility or even position the hotel in the luxury segment.

Once you´re clear on your Sales team goals, then is the time for you to start defining your Marketing goals – which should be aligned with the sales ones. This means what do you want to achieve in every different stage of the customer journey?

4. DEFINE THE CHANNELS

In step number 1 you have already defined your ideal guests’ profile, which means you are now familiar with their digital behavior, right?

The goal here, is to be very clear on which are the specific channels your ideal guests spend the most time, so you can focus only on those channels – not on every single new social media channel!

Here´s a good time to stop and think about this for a moment:

• Is your hotel present on the same channels that your ideal guests spend the most time on?
• Do you have enough resources (in-house skills / external support) to create content on those channels consistently?
• What channels do you / your team have time for?

Only after you´ve come this far, you can then go ahead with the content creation process, so you can create content to attract your ideal guests and convert them into potential bookings.

5. DEFINE SUCCESS

This is the last part, and one that I typically see a lot of hotel marketing teams falling short, which is defining what success looks like.

To do so, you´ll need to define which are the main K.P.I.s that you´ll be considering based on your goals, how often will you monitor them and how often will you generate reports for your team and for your stakeholders.

This can be a simple Excel Sheet or Google Sheets, however, my preferred way of generating simple-to-use interactive reports is Google Data Studio – here´s a quick tutorial about how to use Google Data Studio from Loves Data.

So now is your turn, are you ready to create or review your hotel’s digital marketing strategy?

Let me know in the comments if this content was useful.