The 5 Key Pillars You Need for a Solid Marketing Strategy

Are you using the knowledge gathered about travelers in your marketing campaigns? Do you know how much acquisition costs are for guests using indirect and direct channels? To build a competitive marketing strategy, these are a few questions that many hoteliers ask themselves or should ask themselves daily.

With a market in constant change, your hotel’s survival depends on understanding your environment, identifying competitors and adapting to changes. Consolidation in the online travel industry makes it difficult for hoteliers to increase direct sales and even threatens their livelihood. Dependency on channels with a significant market share means that you need to constantly be aware of what’s going around you to make the best decisions.

One virtue we’ve found in some of our clients is the capacity to correctly measure time and structure a strategy adapted to the current market. It’s not the same to create an awareness-raising campaign and to do so simply to cover your basis during times of need. Revenue Managers look at their own property’s attributes as well as those of their competitors. In your daily routine, we recommend including parameters such as time, your competitors and the socio-political situation of your destination. Doing so, will make your campaigns more grounded in reality.

Steps to take to plan your marketing strategy

• Determine the role and objective of each campaign within your hotel’s global strategy. It’s important that you implement actions that put into practice what has been established on paper. However, a marketing strategy will only work if all departments play their part and share a common objective. As cliché as it may sound, this is essential if you want coherency within your hotel’s actions.

• Diversify your offer and increase your distribution capacity in profitable markets. Diversification is a strategy used by hotels to attract new traveler profiles by developing new products and taking action. Diversification by channels, products or markets is a logical step towards increasing your hotel’s distribution capacity.

• Evaluate how your campaigns evolve in real time and optimize to improve your hotel’s results. Hotels are constantly generating and tracking large amounts of information, so it’s important to adapt campaigns to the results obtained in each report.  The cost associated with each action and the gains obtained are significant indicators of the market needs targeted by your campaigns.

• Focuses on direct distribution to achieve the highest and most efficient market share.  Being the most efficient in a given market allows us to give the best possible price, after identifying our target audience and having focused our efforts on placing products. What we must achieve is to run a unique advertising and social media campaign for a single product.

• Don’t let your day-to-day get in the way of your long-term vision. This step is more personal than strategic. However, in a landscape that is constantly evolving, like in the hotel industry, it’s extremely easy to lose sight of the big picture. Avoid immersing yourself completely in daily work to maintain a neutral view of the market and your guests.

In a rapidly changing market, it will be imperative for your hotel to improve competitiveness and continuously innovate. The best advice we can offer hoteliers, at BEONx.