How boutique hotels can embrace marketing technologies
The hospitality industry offers a variety of options for different types of travelers, with boutique hotels being one of the popular choices for experienced and well-off guests. The US boutique hotel market alone is worth $7 billion, growing almost 5% annually.
By definition, a boutique hotel is a small hotel which typically has between 10 and 100 rooms in unique settings with upscale accommodations and individualized unique selling points. Such places nurture a different style of design and architecture, provide guests with highly personalized service, and foster local culture and cuisine.
But in the global abundance of boutique hotels, it becomes challenging to promote your resort among target visitors. Small hotels need less staff, so there is no room for big marketing departments. You need to be clever and use the right channels of promotion. In this post, we will show you how boutique hotels can embrace marketing technologies.
Promote Unique Selling Points
The first thing you need to do is to create a beautiful website where you can promote unique selling points of your boutique hotel. Of course, blogging is mandatory here because it enables you to describe each one your special features.
You should write about local landscape, food, hotel events, architecture and art, spa, the friendliness of your staff, etc. To cut the long story short, you just need to explain to website visitors what makes your boutique hotel so much better than others - just like Malaga Inn does in its own posts.
Keep in mind that your posts have to be flawless. There are great online tools such as proofreading Aussiewritings.com services or Grammarly to check the quality of the post, so make sure to use them before publishing.
Exploit Social Media
Social media gather more than 3 billion active users worldwide and you can obviously find target clients on platforms like Facebook or Instagram. Don't think you'll have to spend too much time online - one or two social networks will do enough if you know where average visitors hang out the most. It's only important to publish high-quality content and to do it regularly. That way, social followers will expect your content and look forward to learning new details about your boutique hotel.
Create Multimedia Content
A picture is worth a thousand words, which couldn't be more true in case of boutique hotels. We already mentioned that such places are breathtaking combinations of landscape and architecture, so you only need to create quality images to prove this point.
You should always hire a professional photographer to make a perfect picture for your website and social media. For example, take a look at this profile photo of the Sanctuary on Camelback Mountain Resort and Spa. Who could resist visiting this hotel after seeing an image like that?
Besides photos, you should consider shooting video content about your place. This is a more expensive content marketing tactic, but it's definitely worth every cent. We recommend you create videos that don't focus on the property but rather on people and stories that make your boutique hotel so special and outstanding.
Take Care of Online Reputation
Word of mouth is crucial to the success of small hotels, so you need to invest a lot of effort to build the online reputation. Ask satisfied guests to leave testimonials and place them on the website along with their photos - it will look more credible and convincing.
At the same time, you should engage in online communication with social media followers. Answer their comments, ask them questions, and reveal a human side of your business. It will strengthen relations between you and your clients, while other followers get to see how well you treat the guests.
CONCLUSION
Boutique hotels are special and unique, but they still need a good marketing strategy to ensure long-term sustainability. In this post, we showed you how boutique hotels can embrace marketing technologies.
Do you practice any of these tactics already? Which one do you consider the most important for your hotel? Share your experiences in comments and we'll be glad to discuss this topic with you!
