How To Use Digital Marketing In The Hospitality Industry

The hospitality industry is one of the most diverse, quickly-changing industries in the world. At the same time, it’s also one of the oldest.

As an example, let’s say you own a hotel that has been around for 50 years but hasn’t invested in any digital marketing efforts until now. Your website has been out-of-date for years and when people search for hotels in your area on Google or Bing, there aren’t any listings that feature yours first because it doesn’t have enough social media followers or other online presence outside of its own website, which isn’t even optimized. This means potential guests won’t be able to find out about everything else going on at this location-they’ll only see what information is available through traditional channels like print ads or television commercials which are usually outdated by the time they air anyway!

So, how can you take advantage of digital marketing for your business? Here are our top tips:

Use Data and Analytics

As a hotel or hospitality business, you have an abundance of data at your fingertips. It’s important that you use it to better understand your customers and improve the way they experience your brand.

Here are a few ways that data can be used:

• Use analytics to understand customer behavior patterns and preferences. This will help inform decisions about how much time should be spent on each channel (e-mail vs social media) or how much money should be invested in marketing efforts.
• Use analytics for segmentation purposes-identifying which segments are more profitable than others based on past performance will help with future planning as well as ensuring that all customers receive an equally great experience from start to finish (and beyond).

Be Mobile-Friendly

Mobile-friendliness has become a must for any business in the hospitality industry.

If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, then your site is not being viewed by Google as being up-to-date and modern. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, then it may be affecting how people find you in search engines like Google or Bing. This can lead to a decrease in traffic coming from those searches and ultimately cause more harm than good if left unaddressed long enough!

Use Social Media as Part of Your Strategy

Social media is a great way to reach customers and interact with them. It’s also a great way to promote deals and specials, as well as provide customer service.

Social media is an excellent channel for collecting feedback from your customers, but it can also be used as part of your strategy in other ways:

• Create an account for your business on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. These sites offer free accounts that allow you to post content directly on their pages without having any prior knowledge of coding or design skills, though if you want something fancy, there are plenty of tools available. You’ll need an email address and password at a minimum-and maybe even some money down the road if you want access beyond just posting comments!
• Schedule posts ahead of time so they go live at specific times during the day, weekend, month, etc. that helps keep things consistent across each platform while still giving people who use those networks something new all the time (and hopefully keeps them coming back!).

Test, Test, Test!

You can’t just test one thing, though. You have to test everything!

• Test different types of content: blog posts, emails, social media posts, and landing pages are all great places to start experimenting with different messaging. If you’re going to try something new in one place, make sure that it’s not going against your brand voice or values. For example, don’t post something on Instagram with an angry tone if that’s not who your business is at its core (although there are plenty of businesses that do this successfully). It may sound obvious but it’s important to remember when you’re trying out new things in the digital space-you want them all aligned with who your customers know and love already!
• Test platforms: You should also consider testing the platform where consumers spend the most time, consuming content — whether that means Facebook or Instagram (or both). Your customers might prefer one over another so why not give both a shot? Just make sure they aren’t seeing too many ads from competitors while scrolling through their newsfeeds.
• Social Media Posts: Social media posts can be used as another way for people to visit pages within Facebook Groups which contain links back into other areas like specific events being held at hotels or resorts.

Don’t Forget About Email Marketing

Email marketing is still a powerful tool. It’s an easy way to engage customers and build relationships with them, even if they don’t use social media.

Get Creative!

There are many ways you can use digital marketing to get creative and capture the attention of your audience. You can use social media, video, infographics, and animated images. Even memes can be effective in engaging customers with your brand.

Digital marketing is a must for hospitality businesses because it offers the tools they need to engage customers.

It’s also an important way to build awareness of your brand, create relationships with consumers and drive sales.

Conclusion

We hope that this article has given you some insight into how to use digital marketing in the hospitality industry. We know that it can be overwhelming to try and figure out how to use these tools, so we recommend starting small and testing different strategies before committing too much time or money to any one platform. If there’s one takeaway from all of this: TEST!

Originally published at https://spireunlimited.com on February 16, 2023.