Rethinking Hospitality Marketing Team Deployment to Optimize Success

It should go without saying that cross-functional collaboration is essential for success in hospitality. The same is true for marketing in the hospitality space. Developing effective marketing strategies that attract and retain guests, drive the topline and boost team member recruitment and retention takes a village, to borrow a phrase.

Evolving technology and shifting consumer preferences, along with an incredibly crowded marketplace, present complex challenges for the hospitality marketer to overcome. To stay ahead, marketing teams must be agile, data-informed, and guest-centric.

Prioritize High Impact Activities

We all know that hospitality is a 24 hour-a-day, 365 day-a-year business focused on humans who are often unpredictable and who need things. That’s why we’re here, right? Sometimes, all that makes it difficult to focus on things that are going to move the needle. At Davidson Hospitality Group, we often refer to the Pareto principle, big rocks or the 20 that gets you the 80. Whatever you call it, it means focusing on the things that are going to make the most impact.

It’s tempting to spend time on something that is fun to do or that is the sexy new thing, but it’s important to be honest about whether those efforts will lead to loyalty from your target audiences or result in revenue. If the answer is probably not, then exercising discipline and prioritizing things you know will give those results is important to long-term marketing success.

For example, one of the areas of marketing that still reaps high rewards is email marketing. Not super sexy and often not prioritized, email marketing remains one of the best ways to fortify your relationship with your loyalists. In the first four months of this year, 12 of Davidson’s independent hotels generated $5.1M in room revenue through email marketing. Those are remarkable results considering the average hotel size of 189 rooms and that about a quarter of the revenue was generated by hotels under 100 rooms. Dedicating resources whether it is professional copywriting, time to partner and strategize, or budget for the right tools is crucial in developing the right marketing deployment for success.

Another high-impact area of hospitality marketing is tending to the general display of your hotel across the internet. Expedia reports that 61% of online bookers, who ultimately book travel on a hotel website, conduct research on an OTA first and 23% of online bookers use a hotel website or app for their final booking. With so many hotels and private rentals competing for the attention of bookers, spending time with your revenue management or distribution partners to make sure your hotel is merchandised with the most compelling photography and copy possible should be a top priority. In fact, your very own website shouldn’t be a set-it-and-forget-it task either. Regularly infusing your website with appealing content and photography showcasing the guest experience and dedicating time to fact checking not only reduces emotional friction and potentially boosts SEO, but may entice guests to habitually return for ongoing updates.

That doesn’t mean that the team shouldn’t explore new channels and spend time on those fun and sexy things. You can’t be disruptive if you’re not doing disruptive things! So get the less-fun things done, and done well, then move on to creating your cool, virtual lounge where guests can gather at your space-circus themed bar and drink glow-in-the-dark cocktails while listening to ASMR music.

Put the Guest at the Center

Adobe reported that consumers see around 1,700 advertisements a month. How does one hotel stand out in such a dense crowd? In today’s experience-driven economy, customization is everything. In polls across the internet, the majority of customers consistently say that they expect a personalized experience, so it stands to reason that if your ad isn’t customized, it will get lost. Marketing teams must ensure experience is the focus of all strategies and tactics. Dedicating resources and brain space to work with internal partners like revenue management or analytics partners like Buxton, Davidson’s analytics partner, to gain valuable consumer insights to understand guest behaviors, preferences and pain points help marketing teams create experiences that get right to the heart of their target guests.

Data insights enable our marketing teams to draw upon the cultural touchpoints within their local markets and engage partners and products that speak to what’s important to their customers. Those insights further inform visual and written assets used in the various forms of advertising created to support those partnerships and to define the channel strategies to deliver them. The same insights may also influence pricing and control strategies implemented by revenue management partners or other offerings on the hotel footprint.

One of the hotels under Davidson’s management recently launched a targeted campaign to help fill some shoulder dates. The team worked with an existing partner with whom the hotel has worked on many successful activations over the years, to create something new and completely different. The activation had several elements that were attractive to the target audience in the past along with new additions that were in line with the preferences of the audience. The team then supported the new activation with co-branded marketing pieces, a segmented email campaign and a well-defined, geographically and intent oriented paid media strategy. The campaign was a success, the shoulder dates became peak dates, and the guests were entertained with on-site programming that resulted in hotelwide revenue boons and positive guest reviews.

Working as cross-functional teams leads to more effective aggregation and exploitation of insights and helps to create a through-line from ad to execution.

Involve and Evolve

With marketing technology evolving at break-neck speed, marketing teams and playbooks must also evolve to stay ahead of trends. Dedicating brain time to self-education is an absolute must. An easy way to get a taste of what is new and newsworthy on the marketing front is to subscribe to a newsletter like Marketing Brew. Having at least a high-level curiosity about a topic could lead to major shifts in how marketing is operationalized and how teams are deployed. In addition, understanding how other industries leverage platforms that may be in use at your hotel, or platforms that you’ve been considering, may unlock new or better ways of exploiting the technology.

For example, in the early days of marketing our lifestyle hotels, we were clamoring for ways that would help us capture as much online revenue as possible. We were a very small team then - there were two of us - so we were always looking for solutions that were a fairly low-lift and that were economical. Through extensive reading and networking, we found a solution for cart recovery that was used mainly in the retail space. It was in our price range and very easy to set up, so we suddenly had a cart recovery tool that helped our hotels capture thousands of dollars that may have gone elsewhere had that tool not been in place. It did not end up being our forever platform, but did an amazing job solving our problem and allowed us to focus on different, high-impact initiatives.

Evolving yourself in marketing, as with most things in hospitality, can and should also take place “off the page.” It’s so important for marketers to experience things the way that a guest would experience them, whether it’s something brand new that is a true discovery, or something known but executed differently. Those firsthand experiences obviously help to evolve marketing with an introduction of something fresh. But they also serve to potentially cut down friction within existing activations or deployments with the infusion of learnings from the experience.

Involving external agencies and internal partners in day-to-day marketing is crucial in catalyzing and fostering ongoing evolution of team deployment. Outside agencies not only bring specialized expertise and additional bandwidth to the table, but they also contribute fresh perspectives and knowledge gained from experience with other customers. They can help identify blind spots, challenge existing paradigms and inject ingenious solutions that move the team forward.

Internal partners offer deep organizational knowledge, alignment with broader business goals and insights into guest needs that the marketing team simply cannot glean from other sources. Enlisting internal partners to be full-time members of the marketing team fosters better marketing integration and creates the best kind of feedback loop, helping the team to constantly evolve to meet the overarching needs of the asset.

Conclusion

When considering the future of hospitality marketing, one thing is clear: The power of human connection will only continue to grow. It is experiences that make us feel seen and heard in ways that will stay with us. And, creating those experiences, be it an ad or an activation, will require continued education and evolution for marketers and extended marketing teams.

Collaboration is the key that unlocks innovation, creativity and the ability to stay ahead of the curve. It’s what helps us understand our guests on a deeper level, harness the power of data and emerging technologies and build the kind of loyalty that lasts. In a time where being distinguished is more important than ever, using data in a meaningful way and coming together as a cross-functional team are two of the most valuable plays in the book.

Reprinted from the Hotel Business Review with permission from http://www.hotelexecutive.com/.