5 Tips for your Hospitality Marketing plan: I always liked the idea of “Marketing”. I thought this was the fun and exciting part of Hospitality, generating sales and creating a buzz about your property. The trouble is, as you’ll know, if you’ve ever tried to market your property, it’s so hard to see any sustainable results or any significant difference in your revenue lines. Costs can escalate quite quickly, and once you stop spending on those ads, you disappear instantly from view.
That is why it’s so easy to get caught in the trap of just waiting for your bookings to come in. You’ll perhaps get on all the OTA websites, get set up on Trip Advisor, have a friendly website (though your SEO optimisation may not be right), and you’ll think that’s about as much marketing as you can muster. Especially given how much time you can devote to it.
Well, for many hotels, bed and breakfasts and guest houses, that’s probably as far as you feel you can go. You don’t have the big budget to spend on “Marketing”, to spend thousands on Google and Facebook ads without any clear returns. You may have started to collect some email addresses, but it’s hard to get them these days, and you rarely send anything out, fearful that you will annoy people when you do. So you sit and wait for the bookings to drop in.
But there is another way. A better way that doesn’t take up too much of your valuable time. An approach that builds over the years into an efficient and robust marketing process that gives you ever-increasing returns year on year and one that doesn’t cost you thousands to keep it visible.
Learning how to Boss your Marketing Plan is simple. Follow these 5 tips for your hospitality marketing plan to get the basics right
Rule 1. Don’t get distracted.
It’s so easy to get pulled in all sorts of directions when you start to look into Marketing. Every corner you turn, you find something else you could be doing or the next big thing. STOP. The old saying, “He who chases two rabbits catches none”. Instead, create a Marketing Plan, keep it simple to start with, and stick to the plan. If you see something that interests you, great; Keep it in a safe place and wait for your next review date. But don’t get caught and distracted with shiny new things because the result is you never master anything, and you end up with a load of half-started projects, a lot of money spent and nothing tangible to show for it.
Rule 2. Plan for a whole year & Focus on a quarter at a time.
It may sound obvious, but every year is a cycle. So if you have a plan for the whole year and stick to it each year, you can learn from the last and apply it to the next.
Month by month, event by event, season by season. How often have you said to yourself that we should do this next year and never do it? How many times have you said we should have done something for that? Or if we’d gotten our act together, we could have made a killing on that Black Friday or Cyber Monday offer; thought about the Wednesday after? You create your Easter promotions too late to be effective. Having a 12-month plan, of which you focus on preparing for the next quarter, gives you a proactive way of making your Marketing constructive and decisive.
Do you review your marketing plans and compare them to your current bookings? Do you know if you are on track to make your quarterly targets? If you don’t know, then you can’t adapt or react to your current situation and attempt to influence the outcome.
Rule 3. Build your email list.
The essential Marketing tool you have to have is your email list. You own this, and you can manage this. You can speak to your email subscribers at any time you like.
Only having access to your clients through other platforms such as social media, paid adverts will always be at the mercy of that platform your target audience is using.
Those platforms may change the rules overnight; they may want you to start spending more money to keep access or visibility; they may even reduce your visibility if they feel your content is no longer valuable. With email, you are in control of your communication with your clients. Building an email list is your number 1 marketing objective.
Rule 4. Divide your marketing into manageable parts.
Like anything new, breaking “Marketing” down into manageable segments means it’s easier to understand and makes working at it more comfortable. Don’t think you need to do all sections at the same time. Don’t believe that all Marketing is created equal. Don’t think Marketing in the different segments should have the same goal in mind. For me, the best way to break marketing down is into these four sections:
Section 1. Email Marketing
Email Marketing is the number 1 thing every hospitality business should do. Building your list, even in the GDPR era, is the must thing to do. Actions to Build your list should be the first thing you do. Building a list is not done overnight, so the quicker you start, the more potential and current customers you can catch.
Is an extensive list needed? No! If you only have 1 or 2 people on your list, then hey, great! That makes it easy to reach out to them and ask them how you can help.
Remember; if people are signing up to your list. They like what they see, and they WANT to know more, so don’t be afraid to reach out to each subscriber and ask how you can help or if they had dates in mind.
If you captured their email address when they stayed with you, then don’t be afraid to retain your relationship with them and keep you ‘front of mind’ for their next stay. If your client booked via an OTA the first time, Email marketing is the best and most powerful way of getting a direct booking on their next stay with you.
Section 2. SEO Marketing
How do you get your website to rank high on Google? The quick and expensive way is with Ads. Ads cut out the graft and hard work that’s needed to rank your website, but for many of us, that’s an unsustainable model.
Don’t get me wrong; paid advertising has its place. But for the long term visibility of your website – your online brochure – ranking high in searches on Google, Bing, and others are a great way to get yourself noticed.
Ranking through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is probably the most misunderstood mythical thing in marketing. However, there are many things you need to do to rank, both on and off your website.
You can read endless articles on google on how to rank, how this new trick will beat the algorithms or how this no longer works. Yes, some of that is right. However, Google and others have changed the game’s rules to stop those tricks and algorithm cons from working.
Why? Because the success of a search engine is to produce valuable, RELEVANT results to the user. If the user doesn’t get the correct type of results they are searching for, guess what? They will use another search engine! So yes, the likes of Google have refined their algorithms to combat the cons so that people searching see relevant quality content.
What does that mean to you and me? It means; play by the rules, build up your content and make it relevant and valuable, and Google will do the rest, more or less.
SEO marketing can be and is successful in growing your marketable reach. You can do it; it takes time. The significant benefit of it is that the results are longer lasting. When you rank, you will continue to rank if you keep the process going and your content doesn’t become old, unlike Paid advertising which disappears as soon as you stop spending.
Section 3. Paid Advertising
I’ve said before that paid digital advertising could be costly, and it can if you do it wrong, it can bring in little returns for your investments. The big OTA’s spend thousands of dollars cornering the market in paid adverting’s, and your budgets won’t compete anywhere near on the same level. Not even the large Hotel chains can.
So why is paid advertising still on the list? Why not write it off completely? Well, it does have its place. A small part to play. Instead of thinking of and measuring paid advertising on an ROI to Direct Bookings, think of Paid advertising as an introduction payment for access to potential clients.
Paid ads are how you are introduced to potential clients. Suppose you structure your site with a sign up for more information in exchange for their email address? Then paid adverts become a great way to get prospective clients onto your list, so you can grow and develop your relationship with them. Cost per click will not always directly convert into cost per bookings made. You have to work on the opportunities given if they like what they see.
Section 4. Social Media = Throw away media
I’ve yet to see anything good from social media, and you shouldn’t spend vast amounts of time on them.
Social posts have a life span of days, if not hours, and their returns are minimal. Far, far too many people focus solely on the development of social media at the expense of those listed above. It’s almost fruitless.
The only benefit of social is just that. To give a social favour of what it is like staying at your property. People will search and look at your Facebook page; people will view your Instagram story or page and get a sense of what you are.
Some do this before they commit to booking anywhere. But this is always at the end of the decision-making process, not at the start. You won’t get new business or very little by solely building your Facebook page or Instagram followers.
You won’t be able to market them successfully, attract the right audience (i.e., those seriously interested in staying with you) or be able to interact with them in any way that drives you forward.
All social media channels are different. Each requiring different content and approaches. They are a lot of work for a little reward, with most platforms leading you down the adverts route to gain any visibility.
So it doesn’t harm you to have them. But social media should not be your primary key driver or focus.
Rule 5 – Set goals – Start with the end in mind.
Without measurable goals for each marketing activity you do, you cannot know how well you are doing when it comes to assessing your marketing objectives.
Marketing aimlessly gets you nothing in return. Instead, you need to give your Marketing plan a direction, and you do that with Goal Setting.
We know the ultimate goal is to generate more direct bookings. But before that, there are several steps a client makes before deciding where to stay.
For that reason alone, not everyone who visits your site is ready to make a booking, so to look at that measurement alone would be unwise.
Some of your actions should be about gaining and building trust in your email list.
What’s the cost per email address you are obtaining? How many site visitors are you getting each month? Where is your page ranking in your chosen keyword searches? Not every metric or Marketing action will drive instant direct booking results, but over time and as things build, a tipping point arrives where it all starts to pay off.
Summary
All of this takes time, and it takes money. It’s not always as simple as employing a marketing agency to make things work.
Not all of us can afford to pay the agency for an extended period until we reach that tipping point. Some of us prefer to go it alone to see if we can make the numbers work before investing.
Some of us are keen to give it a try if we can get the training and tools to do it properly, then we’ll quite happily grow and Boss our Marketing plan until the fruits of our labour come home to roost.
Whatever route you choose, you’ll need a plan. Without a plan, with a strategy and aims for your Marketing. You can’t Boss it. I hope you found these 5 tips for your hospitality marketing plan useful.
