As the hotel industry continues to transition away from the financial stresses and operational upheavals of COVID to a more stable post-pandemic position, owners and operators are taking stock and working to embrace to a new normal.

As always, marketing remains essential. Hotels are clearly still taking pains to acknowledge in their marketing the health protocols they have implemented to ensure guest safety and wellness, reassuring guests that every precaution is being taken to safeguard their well-being.

But this message has gone from front and center to fine print.

Aside from that obvious point of emphasis, however, how else have marketing strategies evolved at a time when, for better or for worse, the industry has changed in seemingly indelible ways-and when the market looks very different than it did just a few short months ago? What new marketing strategies, tactics, priorities, and emerging best practices are helping hotels stand out in a fast-changing market?

Understanding what is working now for leading properties and hotel management teams is critically important. Not just because of the necessity of bolstering bottom lines and spurring growth in the near term, but also because it can potentially provide a glimpse into the future of the industry: giving industry professionals a better idea of what the mid- and long-term marketing landscape will look like for many years to come.

Grab the Funnel

Traditionally, top-of-funnel marketing has always been driven by the brands. Prior to COVID, the standard structure was for the brands to stimulate the desire for travel and put their brand front and center-and then for that to filter down to individual properties, which had the responsibility to capture that demand at their individual hotel. But during COVID (and in the immediate post-pandemic period), that dynamic shifted in a profound way. When elective travel stopped cold turkey, brands took a big step back and individual properties were forced to actively engage at the top of the funnel.

Hotels looking to maximize their marketing efforts and stay competitive recognized that they needed to actively create the need for people to travel. No longer can they just capture the business that was flowing their way like the good old days, but rather, hotels need to inspire people to travel to their hotel in the first place.

While a temporary problem and solution, growing numbers of hotels have experienced the success that can result from this shift in the marketing model and it has remained even as travel has rebounded.

That has played out in several ways and across different segments. We are seeing a continuation and evolution of the successful Work from Anywhere campaigns that first took off in the heart of the pandemic-essentially encouraging remote workers to dream about the prospect of a simple change of scenery: why work from home when you can work poolside at a hotel and enjoy a quick swim in between calls or at the end of your workday? Scenic imagery in general-and pool imagery specifically-remains a pivotal piece of the marketing puzzle, with lots of hotels leading with pool imagery and even marketing programs inviting parents to bring their kids to swim in the pool clearly targeting families looking for a safe and much-needed change in routine.

We've seen this evolve as of late to more creative workspaces as it has become more and more acceptable to work remote and even in vacation destinations. In the group space, we are seeing successful properties inspiring meetings with outdoor events, using marketing language and promotional imagery highlighting outdoor event space and pointing out additional perks like attached meeting rooms, free outdoor welcome receptions, and other extras. Perhaps a zoom meeting was planned but the ideation of an easy, safe outdoor event through the right marketing can stimulate that decision to switch to in-person. For bookers looking to plan corporate events after an extended period of down-time, that can be an appealing proposition: much more so than a dowdy ballroom, without any lingering concerns about group events indoors.

As the worst and most disruptive impacts of COVID continue to wane, and as growing numbers of travelers start traveling again, brands are starting to reengage with marketing. But hotels remain very involved. This new dynamic has largely stayed in place, and properties are training and executing their own top-of-funnel marketing initiatives. Going forward, it will be fascinating to see if (and for how long) that shift persists.

Inspire the Why

To be able to successfully operate in that top-of-funnel space as described above, hotel owners and operators have had to learn how to "inspire the why.", and not just the where. It simply is not enough to just say you are going to orient your marketing efforts in ways that motivate people to travel to your hotel, like the days of the past-you must have the specific skills and execute the strategies required inspire why they should travel to your hotel in order to make that happen. That starts with being more intentional and thinking critically about how specific words and images inspire prospective travelers and guests.

In an industry space that has traditionally been extremely focused on numbers and metrics and market segments, becoming skilled storytellers and creating messaging and materials that get people to dream and inspire them to travel does not usually happen overnight. It requires training: developing new skillsets with marketing teams and potentially bringing in outside experts to facilitate that process. It also requires information: you have to teach your people to understand the why before they can inspire the why. There are a number of ways to gather that information, but one of the most effective is to go right to the source – fish where the fish are: consider asking each and every guest why they are traveling upon check in.

You can acquire valuable information using this simple guest engagement and learn things that will surprise you and will almost certainly inform your marketing efforts to stimulate demand and capture more of it. One of our own properties, for example, found that a much higher percentage of guests than we had suspected were staying at the hotel in question as part of a golf vacation, so we knew to pivot our content to lead with information about golf trips, access to golf, and the golf experience at our hotel.

Inspiring the why does not just require changing how you talk in your marketing efforts-but where you say it. Social channels and platforms are particularly rich sources of inspiration for potential travelers, and increasing your social spend and the sophistication of your social content is an important piece of the marketing puzzle in this industry moment.

Revenue Optimization

As hotels continue to emerge from the shadow of the pandemic and get busier seemingly by the day, their priorities start to shift from doing everything possible to get people in the door to becoming more strategic and thoughtful about how to manage that demand and capture rate. There is a growing focus on ADR right now, and a push from successful properties to refocus on profit optimization. With strong demand and so many dates of compression, savvy revenue teams are moving to direct their marketing resources toward their most profitable channels. It is less of a shotgun approach aimed at every channel, and more of a precisely targeted focus that reflects current market realities and the return to a keener level of focus on profitability by channel.

Those revenue optimization contributions from the marketing side are much easier to implement when Sales, Marketing, and Revenue is all functioning as a single team. When your goals, targets, and incentives are all aligned, your strategies can be, as well, and properties with a synergized collaborative commercial team will be able to adjust to shifting conditions more efficiently and act in a speedier and more coordinated manner as demand changes over time. At the property level, the industry has always been about sales first. But it feels like we are moving into a new paradigm, where there is now much more of a balance between sales and marketing. Perhaps as an acknowledgement of that shift, brands seem to be getting better about providing marketing training for members of their sales team.

Capture Ancillary Spend

One of the many ways in which hotels have changed over the course of the pandemic is becoming much more adept (out of necessity) at capturing ancillary spend when guests didn't want to venture out and about: allowing hotels to drive guest utilization of outlets, resources, and amenities within the hotel or resort. Many guests have become more comfortable with this and have rediscovered the convenience of going to a resort and simply staying there, taking advantage of on-site dining and other in-house amenities. Hotel owners and operators have responded by offering more incentives to keep them there such as hotel or resort credits as part of promotional packages; these credits can be used in the spa, restaurant, gift shop, market, etc. Marketing priorities should reflect that shift and highlight both the amenities and the programs designed to help guests make use of them.

Grouping up

There is an interesting dynamic playing out right now in the group space. Group demand is quite strong, but bookings are taking place in very short windows relative to pre-pandemic norms. In many cases, events that would have been planned weeks, months, or even years ahead of time in the past are now being finalized just days in advance. Presumably driven by planners' desire to wait until the last minute to make sure their event will still be taking place, this trend likely will not be sustainable for much longer as booking volumes continue to increase.

On the marketing side, industry professionals need to get out ahead of the coming shift and recognize that they need to be educating customers that availability is shifting rapidly from what they've been used to over the past two years, and marketing for longer booking timelines. In other words: at this moment in time, they should no longer be marketing for next month, but for the fall).

Bolster your team

Finally, it is important to realize that with bookings on the rise and many hotel owners and operators recognizing the need to make a correspondingly significant shift in their marketing approach, building a bigger and better marketing team is a necessity. Some properties are already ahead of the game, having moved quickly to take advantage when many talented and experienced marketing professionals were furloughed or laid off in the early days of the pandemic. Those hotel owners and operators with the foresight to invest in their marketing teams early find themselves in an advantageous position relative to their more cautious competitors.

The figurative bottom line is that the literal bottom line has long been dependent on the quality of the people on your marketing team. At a time when seemingly everything else has changed or is in the process of changing, that foundational truth remains.

Reprinted from the Hotel Business Review with permission from www.HotelExecutive.com