Hotel Internet Marketing Strategies

This section focuses on the need for hoteliers to achieve consumer relevance at scale and reshape their marketing strategies to deliver it across all touchpoints.

Shifting trends in the consumer space are driving new expectations of guests as to how they interact with hoteliers—through multiple digital channels and personal interaction points. The industry players must consistently provide relevant experiences across all channels, consumer segments and geographies. For example, hotel Internet marketing can play a crucial role in helping deliver a seamless guest experience.

Learn how to Get More Personal and Leverage Social-driven Information Technology [PDF, 557 KB].

In the digital era, companies need to move away from traditional marketing, transform the function into a business discipline centered on meeting guest needs, and work toward improving and sustaining business performance while controlling costs. Relevance is about using the economy and flexibility of scale to make it affordable and effective consistently. It means that “less is often more”—smartly putting data and technology to work to ensure that each campaign targets the right visitors and each experience is directly relevant to each target.

By adopting online hotel marketing strategies, lodging companies can provide timely and appropriate offers to guests by blending customer functions and digital strategies in new ways.

Accenture research indicates that companies must measure brand value in terms of cumulative consumer experience. Lodging companies need to rethink their current online hotel marketing approach and organizational structure to develop relevant guest offerings across digital channels.

Social media for hospitality can be used as a marketing tool to assess guest experience with hotel properties and insights can be leveraged to influence consumer behavior. We see hotel Internet marketing strategies becoming increasingly important to meet the growing expectations of guests in various technology-enabled areas, such as a full self-service website, check-in solutions, connectivity and interactive entertainment centers.

Lodging companies that focus on moving forward and building new capabilities to adapt to the changing marketplace hold the potential to create value for themselves and enhance guest interactions and loyalty.

Whether hoteliers take a transformational or phased approach toward developing online hotel marketing strategies, consumer relevance begins with several essential building blocks:

• Rethink your operating model—Dismantle traditional marketing functions and reshape operating models to create an organization that is guest-centric and embraces digital.

• Connect the dots—Integrate across all guest touchpoints so that experiences are relevant at any given time.

• Decipher big data—Leverage internal and external data to build better understanding of target guests.

• Connect fragmented data—Develop an analytical mindset and core capabilities to appropriately synthesize and act on fragmented data, and get actionable insights.