What are the biggest challenges hotel marketers face today? This week, we zeroed in on the issues that every modern hotel marketer faces. How do you deal with an industry where your average consumer goes through nearly 40 websites before making a purchase? How do you measure ROI on the multitude of digital channels? What’s the way forward on mobile, with app downloads dropping off?
We dove into articles that discuss the problems and lay out strategies and solutions. Check out the best of them below:
The Challenges Hotel Marketers Face
The key measure for the travel industry is bookings—“heads in beds”—and the yield, or average value of those bookings, versus the cost to acquire them. The challenge for the marketing professional is to develop tracking methodologies to track marketing actions back to this core metric. The only real reason to ever spend marketing dollars is to drive a sale that would not have happened unless that money had been spent. Everything else, such as click-through rate, is marketing jargon, and a poor proxy for the really important metric.
How can you translate that ”jargon” into heads in beds? Measuring ROI is one of the biggest challenges for the modern hotel marketer.
Questions to Ask Your Marketing Team
Here are six questions that I am encouraging you – as a general manager, owner or other senior team manager – to ask your sales and marketing team right away and in advance of the plan’s development for next year. These questions are not necessarily the easiest and will probably require some data analysis. But, the work done in the process will be worth it given the potential return on financial investment. Obviously, involving your revenue management team would also serve you well.
Study finds Internet Travel Planning at Saturation Point in the U.S.
The travel and tourism industry was quick to adopt the Internet as a “new distribution channel” and “advertising medium”. Yet, the study claims that we still know surprisingly little about “how travel planning has evolved” alongside these technological developments. What are the challenges hotel marketers need to overcome?
How Brands Helped Kill the App
The numbers no longer support the hype when it comes to mobile apps. Americans now download less than a single app per month, according to ComScore’s 2014 U.S. Mobile App Report, and the 2015 report found that users spend four out of five smartphone minutes in their top three apps alone. In May, downloads of popular apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram saw a 20% decline in downloads compared to last year.
How to Deal With Your Hotel’s Digital Marketing Challenges (webinar)
Learn the essentials of a hotel web marketing strategy that can take your hotel website to the next level; how to deal with technology changes and new channels to reach travel shoppers; and you’ll be left with practical takeaways to stand out from your competition and drive more bookings.
Written by Tayor Smariga.
