How to make the hotel marketing funnel work for you
In 2023, US hoteliers spent over $3 billion on advertising. But how much of that was actually effective, and how much went to waste?
In order to get the best return on your marketing spend, you need to understand the hotel marketing funnel and how to make it work for you.
Because the marketing funnel isn’t like fishing. You’re not casting a line into the deepest waters of your target audience in the hopes that you’ll get a bite. That’s like spending $3 billion on advertising without a plan.
Hoteliers who understand the marketing funnel can build an omnichannel communication strategy to target their ideal guest, skillfully and wisely. And if you’re filling your funnel with clean and accurate guest data, you won’t need to play a game of “go fish” — saving you money in advertising and making your marketing channel a revenue powerhouse.
What you will see here
- What is the hotel marketing funnel?
- Educate your teams on the hotel marketing funnel
- Signs of a healthy hotel marketing funnel
What is the hotel marketing funnel?
Plain and simple, the hotel marketing funnel is the path to present the right content in front of the right guest at the right time — encouraging them to book and keep booking directly with your hotel for future stays.
There are several layers of the hotel marketing funnel, but the easiest way is to think about the funnel in four layers — awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty. These layers also correspond to communication touchpoints within the booking journey from inspiration to arrival.
Hoteliers who fail to understand the hotel marketing funnel leave money on the table, because they’re essentially baiting the hook and casting their line to attract a guest without the right strategy to achieve a “full-funnel conversion.” And a full conversion is what turns an inspired guest into a loyal direct booker.
Focusing on each funnel layer is important.
Awareness
Guests have to get to know you first. That’s when the awareness layer of the funnel comes into play. How you get in front of the eyeballs of your future guests matters, especially if you want to capitalize on their inspiration to travel.
Channels like your website, social media, or even your voice channel are just some ways to hook your guests.
Take your website, for example. This is often the guests’ first interaction with your property. Any opportunity you have to enhance the display to showcase your property, your brand story, and brand identity is an opportunity to push that guest over to the consideration layer of the marketing funnel.
Consideration
Hopefully, by this time, guests will know who you are. And hopefully, you will have their email addresses, because now it’s time to use the guest data.
As Jason Pirock, Head of Marketing at Springboard Hospitality, said on the Hotel Moment podcast, Make sure that there is always a call to action every single spot that that user is going to be. The effectiveness of that call to action is ultimately determined by the data you’ve collected on your guest so far.
Did your highly trained reservations agent secure the guest’s email on their first touch with your property — ready to use for a targeted email campaign? Because all the details agents collected in that first conversation with the guest go toward building a personalized call to action in an email campaign. The personalization that the voice channel affords is what blossoms the consideration layer of the marketing funnel as guests decide whether or not to book with you.
Conversion
Jason went on to say, Ultimately, the easier we make it to book, the more likely we’re going to be able to get those direct bookings, because we all know once they leave the site, the chance of them coming back are so slim. So we’ve got to do everything in our power to tell a compelling story and get them to convert as quickly as possible.
Let’s think about your booking engine for a second — one of the most pivotal points in the conversion layer of the hotel marketing funnel. The ideal scenario starts with guests entering the booking engine and emerging from it with a shiny new direct booking. All of those storytelling elements Jason is referencing about making that booking experience unique to that guest surely helped, right?
But if that’s not how this scenario unfolded for your hotel, which certainly happens, you don’t have to get stuck here in the conversion layer of the hotel marketing funnel. Use the guest data you have so far to inform a personalized, automated shopping cart abandonment email to send their way! That’s how The Meritage Resort turned their warm leads and abandoned bookers into loyal guests.
Loyalty
One thing guests remember? A positive guest experience. 73% of customers say customer experience is the number one factor they consider when deciding to purchase from a company. So, if you want to know if you’ve made it to the end of the hotel marketing funnel successfully, see how many repeat guests you have. Loyalty is the final layer.
Every guest interaction from pre-arrival to post-stay, shapes the image a guest has of your hotel. Because marketing doesn’t stop at conversion. Marketing continues past the stay to create loyal guests. Your hotel is in the business of creating an ideal guest experience and creating lasting guest relationships.
And if you’re keeping track of loyal guests with Revinate’s loyalty tiers and arrivals reporting, repeat guests are easily identified up to five days before arrival. Staff can quickly see how often they’ve stayed with your brand and are empowered to “surprise and delight” guests upon check-in complete with in-hotel perks chosen by the property based on their loyalty tier.
How to educate all teams on the marketing funnel
Marketing is a team sport. There’s no “I” in this team. Sales, marketing, revenue teams, and even on-property staff, have an impact on the hotel marketing funnel.
So, if there’s a knowledge discrepancy between different departments when it comes to the funnel, then it’s time to drill down on education. Joel Morales, Chief Marketing Officer at Castlerock Asset Management, described a similar scenario with his team on the Hotel Moment podcast, saying, There was a lot of education that took place. We were able to have discussions with sales and revenue about the funnel. Really, this is awareness. This is where we want to convert and really start aligning strategies, aligning those revenue strategies to those awareness strategies.
With every department aligned, identifying target guest segments, organizing promotions, and tracking conversions becomes seamless. It’s siloed work that prevents you from moving efficiently through the hotel marketing funnel to ultimately drive sustainable revenue. And that siloed work is only perpetuated by siloed data.
Streamline marketing communication with a CDP
One way to eliminate those data silos and make marketing communication a cohesive part of the hotel marketing funnel is with a Customer Data Platform (CDP). Because teams that get used to pulling data from a number of disparate systems, or worse, waste time searching for the data they need, aren’t going to make it through the hotel marketing funnel.
Technology like the Revinate CDP consolidates data in one place, offering a clear picture of the guest, so teams can generate brand awareness, drive conversions, and foster loyalty. This approach helps you plan for the long run and anticipate demand in any season, so you can keep the funnel moving. As Joel said, If you’re looking in marketing to push demand within the next 30 to 60 days, then we’ve done something wrong. I think that that is not where marketing lives. I think we’ve got some great strategies for those kind of short lead times, but we shouldn’t live in that space.
Signs of a healthy and productive hotel marketing funnel
If you’re booking a lot of guests, then you must be doing something right. But, the important thing is to know what that “something” is when it comes to attracting guests and successfully moving through the hotel marketing funnel consistently.
Here are signs that tell you if you have a healthy and productive marketing funnel.
More direct business
If all you know about them [guests] is their email and their first and last name, or if the email is an alias of an OTA for that particular segment, it’s going to skew all the statistics, and it’s going to really prevent you from doing a deep dive into the emotional drivers behind why a guest is booking with you, rebooking with you, spending more with you, or recommending to their friends.
TThat’s Adam Mogelonsky, Partner at Hotel Mogel Consulting, emphasizing on the Hotel Moment podcast how a CDP lends more detailed guest data to get to the “why” for your guests’s travel goals. Because once you know the “why” and you have the data to back it up, that’s when the real personalization can begin — taking your guest from the consideration layer of the marketing funnel to conversion.
And the more channels you can involve for this strategy, the better. For The Salamander Collection, they drove $45 million in direct revenue just by consolidating their data and making it actionable for their email and voice channels. It can be a perfectly segmented email campaign, or the right message from a reservation agent reminding the guest why they wanted to book in the first place.
Accurate guest communication
Before we dive into what accurate guest communication in the hotel marketing funnel looks like, let’s start with what can happen when these two things work together.
This newsletter campaign from Ambiente™ Sedona capitalized on personalization — reminding returning guests of the magic they experienced during their visit. But it’s with accurate guest data that the team at Ambiente was able to collect from the voice channel that they launched a cart abandonment drip campaign driving $264K in direct bookings. By using call data and information gathered about the guest on the first touch, these campaigns became highly successful. It’s a perfect example of how to use the hotel marketing funnel to include multiple channels and multiple data sets to get the most precise details possible about your guest.
Any type of guest communication becomes accurate guest communication when it’s data-driven. It’s why when you have one place — like a CDP — to store data from your voice channel, can you inform shopping cart abandonment campaigns like Ambiente Sedona. A CDP puts you one step closer to securing a booking as you tap into guests’ true motivations to book. As Adam reminds us, It [CDP] allows you to get more granular with the data to inform the future of marketing, as well as get real analytics on those emotional drivers.
A loyal and growing guest database
Your data has to be of a high caliber…Realistically, when you want to do any sort of one-to-one marketing, or you want to find out who your guests are to inform the future of packages and future sales.
That’s Adam again — pointing out why the hotel marketing funnel doesn’t stop at conversion.
Just because your direct bookings increase doesn’t mean that’s the only sign your hotel marketing funnel works. You have to consider repeat business from the same guests. It’s the litmus test for your email campaigns and overall guest experience. Done well, curated to each guest and their preferences, you’re more likely to foster loyal guests.
And if your hotel marketing funnel needs more help beyond a “We Miss You” campaign to encourage guests to book again, then see what guests are saying about you. Is your guest feedback largely positive or negative, and how can you use that data to inform future guest communication?
Maximize resources with data-driven marketing
When you use your hotel data to feed the hotel marketing funnel, driving revenue and attracting guests becomes a lot less random — saving you money instead of eating into your budget. The hotel marketing funnel acts as a conduit for the personalized communication that your guests desperately need in order to move from consideration to conversion to the loyalty layer of the funnel. So, for your next round of targeted campaigns or when preparing for the first touchpoint with your guests, add in some education about the hotel marketing funnel and lead from a place of data-driven communication to secure the booking.
About Revinate
Revinate is a direct booking platform that leads the hospitality industry in driving direct revenue and increased profitability.
Our products and our people combine to give hoteliers the superpowers they need to crush their goals. With Revinate, hoteliers shift share away from OTAs and drive tangible results across an individual property or a portfolio. Our industry-leading, AI-powered, customer data platform collects, unifies and, synthesizes data giving hoteliers a foundational advantage.
Hoteliers gain critical intelligence – guest lifetime spend, stay preferences, ancillary revenue, and more. With our Rich Guest Profiles database, hoteliers don't need to guess who their most profitable guests are, or how to drive conversions across email, voice, messaging, and digital channels.
Revinate's direct booking platform and omnichannel communication technology powers 900+ million Rich Guest Profiles across 12,500+ hotels to drive over $17 billion in direct revenue.
