Marketing in the hospitality industry is changing with every year as new and new resources and marketing tools are appearing. If you want to attract your customers, advertise efficiently in a modern way on the channels, be where your target audience is and be relevant, you need to start to apply these trends.
Here is the summary of major trends in hospitality marketing for 2019:
1. Messengers and Chatbots will be a New Form of Communication between Guests and Hotel.
Special individualized marketing campaigns via social media messengers, chatbots on the websites will be popular marketing tools.
Major hospitality leaders have already launched Messenger Applications, where guests can directly communicate with the employee of the hotel, requesting a drink to the pool, or additional hygiene set to the room. A dedicated employee will interact with the guest, smoothly delivering the request. Marketers use messengers (such as Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp) for individualized marketing campaigns, to send personalized offers to the guests, follow it up and attract the potential customer. It helps to directly communicate with an extremely targeted audience, avoiding the problem not to be noticed on the social media stream.
Chatbots (special AI computer system, for dialogue communication with the user) is on the rise and will continue to gain popularity whole next year. Chatbots are utilized by marketers as a great digital tool of the first impression: when you land on the website, small chat box window will pop up; chatbot will greet you and inquire how he can help you. They have a database of info and ready to reply to visitors’ many inquiries and questions. This creates additional attention to the website visitor, hook him up, and encouraging him to start communication, answer his requests and potentially turn him to the customer.
2. SEO is evolving
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is constantly improving its algorithms, making a user experience better – to find and present to the user exactly what is he looking for on Google. Hotel marketers will need to update their content to make sure it ranks high upon the search. It’s a constant process to monitor the third parties booking websites content, Google my Business, hotel website, social media contents – because all these are considered upon ranking.
In order to improve the SEO ranking, marketers should:
- Monitor and constantly update the contents and info on all hotel channels (including third parties booking websites)
- Create unique content: blog posts. More relevant blog posts add value upon the search and ranking.
- Adapt websites to be fully mobile-friendly (as more and more people search on mobiles).
- Focus long-tail keywords in order to attract a specific audience and get higher performance with the search.
- With the widespread of voice searches (such as Alexa, Siri, etc) hotel marketers will make sure to adapt the content to fit the voice search.
3. Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality is becoming an important part for the hotel visional presentation. Today, hotel websites provide VR 360 tour through the hotels, they upload VR videos to social networks (such as Youtube and Facebook 360). It’s strong marketing and sales tool at the same time: instead of providing to the customers a traditional brochure with the same photos and old promo video, sales can share special VR kit with personalized and detailed virtual reality 360 tours through the hotel, restaurant, ballroom or hotel suite. It provides the ”real feel” – a more realistic impression about the hotel or resort, gives details about all facilities, such as the size of the room, bathroom location, or even view from the window.
4. Social Media still in the Reign, but with New Forms
Social media is a great asset to today’s marketing, and it remains to be the leader in terms of effectiveness, reach and targeting the right audience. Naturally, social media goes through constant evolution process, and social media marketing therefore evolves and takes new forms:
- Today, it’s not enough to post an attractive photo and signature to it. It’s more about creating content marketing that matters, telling a consistent story to your audience, building the interest with the quality content; blogging about the brand, making video marketing. It’s not about bold advertising on your pages, its more about engaging with your audience in a natural way, sharing with them the variety of interesting content.
- Additionally, both customers and hotels will more treat social media as separate search engines: customers to search for the hotels and offers they are interested, (using groups, events, and simply search console on social media); and hotels – more information about their potential customers, review competitors, research for the reviews, mentions and react to them.
5. Live and Video Marketing
According to the researches, people engage with video content 85% more compared to non-video content. Live video streamed on social media allows the audience to witness and interact with you in real time: whether it’s a live event, Q&A session, backstage video or a launch of the new product.
Hotel marketers will heavily integrate video content on their social media channels, live translations will become more and more popular among hotels: a launch of the new restaurant menu, Q&A with our Chef, cooking class video, Spa skin treatment tutorial, etc – options are limitless.Due to social media algorithms, usual organic content gets lost among the huge noise in the newsfeed. On the opposite, posts with video engage more people and rank higher.
Live translations are even better in performance, as your audience get notifications when you go live, they have the opportunity to interact with you in real time. Instagram and Facebook Live translations will continue to dominate among the streaming sources. Instagram has even expanded its video options, adding new full-length video platform: Instagram TV.
6. Online Reputation is Crucial
The reputation of the brand always depends on the customers’ satisfaction and feedback. Today, with the power of such giants of review and ranking websites like TripAdvisor, and Google Review, hotels reputation is publically exposed and under constant monitoring of millions of potential customers. According to analytics company anyxe, every minute more than 280 reviews and opinions are posted on TripAdvisor. Hotels are striving to create the ultimate experience for their guests to obtain positive reviews and endorsements; as well as trying to quickly and efficiently resolve any complaint issues.
The ratings on these websites have become the key index for the reputational image of the hotel. Guests will still measure the hotel by these trusted ranking websites: both customers and hotels will be more engaged in these websites, leaving more reviews and photos, and hotels – solving complaints, trying to improve the hotel image and performance on the website.
7. ”Word of mouth” Promotion in the New Age
Thousands of influencers (bloggers, celebrities, etc) are doing product placement and advertisement on their social media pages, influencing the mass audience. Yet, the approach is changing now. It’s more and more becoming popular the old new ”word of mouth” promotion. It’s natural, that we choose to trust simple people like you and me, surrounding us: our friends, neighbors, and colleagues, whom we would more likely to connect and therefore trust in their choices. These common groups of people (our friends, colleagues, etc)- are becoming the main promotional base on social media for the brands.
The referrals and good reviews or feedback done by our friend or colleague for any product are much more recognizable and valuable than review and recommendation from an unknown person.
8. Next Level Personalization
More and more people expect personalized offers from the hotel, so it’s becoming more of an expectation, rather than extra innovation. Hotels have special Guest Intelligence systems, where you can log in and find all relevant information about the guest.
Marketers use guest data to form their customer persona, plan and execute their campaigns such as:
- Remarketing campaigns on Google;
- Planning advertisement campaigns on social media
- Using big data to personalize the guest experience (birthdays, anniversaries, special preferences and requests, etc)
- Personalized offers and newsletters, based on guests preferences and interests.
Summary
All these trends are crucial and important for today’s marketers in the hotels in 2019. They will help you to target your marketing to your guests and potential customers; improve the interaction with the guest and get a higher return on the investment. So, don’t waste your time, start to apply these trends now!
Farah Sinjeri 