Hotel marketing team — Photo by Daniel Diosi & Partners

In the past ten years of experience working with hotels, I've learned that marketing strategies are only as good as the data and information they build on. That's why it's mission-critical to have proper analytics and business intelligence handy when making big marketing decisions.

In this post, I'd like to share a bundle of brilliant tools I use in my day-to-day work, along with some best practices that have helped me heaps to bring my hotel clients from A to B.

It's important to highlight that these tools are only tools - and won't do miracles out of the box unless used purposefully. Even with the best data and strategies, results will not show without proper execution.

  1. GuestRadar: GuestRadar is a 360 hotel market intelligence tool that provides destination-specific insights. While a free version is available, I use the full version, which shows predictive data about travel budget, demand, booking preferences, demographics, and more by each market I subscribed to. GuestRadar is an invaluable tool for monitoring inbound travel trends to a specific destination, making it easier to create targeted marketing campaigns.
  2. Google Analytics 4 (GA4): GA4 is the new version of Google Analytics, and it's the tool I use to check performance and ensure that website traffic and online reach are on the same page with the data suggested by GuestRadar. It allows me to track website traffic, user behavior, and conversions and provides insights into where we need to improve.
  3. OTA Insight: OTA Insight is the best for OTA (Online Travel Agency) performance monitoring. It shows demand, pricing, rate-shopping insights, and more. With OTA Insight, we can make informed decisions about pricing and promotions, optimize our revenue management, and stay ahead of the competition.
  4. Hootsuite: Social media is a crucial part of hotel marketing, and Hootsuite is my top recommendation for managing multiple social media channels. I don't personally manage any social media campaigns for years, but the free version of Hootsuite can make life a lot easier. It allows me to schedule posts, monitor conversations, track metrics, and collaborate with team members, making social media management easier and more efficient.
  5. Roivenue: Roivenue uses AI attribution to drive revenue growth and increase profits, ensuring that our marketing budgets are allocated properly where it gets the most return. This is especially helpful if your hotel wants to attribute revenue to campaings more accurately than GA4 can do out of the box. With Roivenue, we can see which channels are performing best, optimize our marketing campaigns, and achieve better ROI.
  6. SEMrush: SEMrush is a great tool for researching keywords and monitoring SEO performance. It allows me to see how our website ranks for specific keywords, monitor backlinks and analyze competitor data. By using this tool, we can optimize our website's content and improve our search engine rankings.
  7. Google Trends: Talking SEO, using Google Trends is unavoidable for short and long-term search engine visibility. I use it to identify trending search trends, then arrange content so my client's websites rank high for trending search terms.
  8. Hotjar: User experience is a critical component of hotel marketing, and Hotjar is a fantastic tool for analyzing user behavior on our website. With Hotjar, we can see where users click, how far they're scrolling, and where they're dropping off. It helps us identify areas where we can improve the user experience and optimize our website for better conversions.
  9. Sprout Social: Similar to Hootsuite, Sprout Social is a social media management tool that allows us to monitor and manage multiple social media channels. One unique feature of Sprout Social is its social listening capabilities, allowing us to monitor conversations about our brand on social media and respond to customer feedback in real time. Sprout Social is more costly than HootSuite but better suited for scalability and has more advanced features, in my opinion.

These are the tools we use daily, and I am happy to recommend these to anyone who wants to bring their digital marketing to the next level.