Hotelier is faced with a big challenge: to capture and retain the attention of consumers who are constantly on-the-go and becoming increasingly aware of their control over the way they receive and interact with your marketing messages.
The Customer Engagement Channel demands a completely new distribution and marketing approach in order to meet the demands of today’s consumer. Consumers must be convinced that your channel is theirs and that they are in full control of the content they receive and consume. They must also feel control over if, when and how they engage with your brand.
This new single customer engagement channel demands a completely new approach to hotel marketing and distribution.
Mastering the direct online channel and all of its segments: traditional Web, SEM, SEO, email, social media, mobile Web, etc., is a crucial step in this direction. Hoteliers must find a way to dominate the digital information cloud with their own marketing message and customer interactions, otherwise the OTAs and the competition will “control the conversation.”
To achieve that, hoteliers need to employ multi-channel marketing and distribution strategies, the antidote to the current silo approach. Multi-channel marketing has already become the norm and is the foundation for a smart direct online channel strategy. In this environment, the hotel website, SEM campaigns, email marketing, social media presence, mobile, etc. have a symbiotic relationship. Unleashing a marketing promotional campaign simultaneously across all available marketing channels produces a compounded effect and far greater returns than each individual marketing format.
Hoteliers must develop marketing campaigns that create customer engagement in order to achieve longer lasting results. Instead of a one-way dialogue, where a hotel sends out marketing messages hoping to direct people to the website and toward the reservations process, hoteliers must focus on building relationships through engagements.
Furthermore, hoteliers must start focusing on understanding the combination of marketing initiatives that lead to a customer engagement and potentially, a conversion.
In addition, there is now a need for smart and centralized content delivery. Not only must you reach the travel consumer at multiple touch points, but you must also try to serve the right content in the right format and at the right time. Invest in a new Content Management System for the hotel website that allows all new special offers, promotions and events to be automatically pushed to your social media profiles and mobile website. Engagement requires tailored content via the appropriate medium.
How can hoteliers engage in this two-way conversation with current and potential guests?
- Provide choices for how consumers can hear from you. Consider adding a page on your website where the visitor can choose to hear from you via email, text message, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Give them the option to ‘opt-down’ – if they unsubscribe from one marketing format, give them the option to choose to hear from you in another way.
- Keep your marketing plan dynamic. If your website visitors or social media followers are not responding to a campaign, learn from it and try a different tactic.
- Utilize multi-channel marketing for all campaigns. With the hyper-interactive consumers of today choosing how and when they want to interact with your campaign, it is essential to reach them at multiple touch-points.
- Stimulate website visitors constantly with fresh content, contests and promotions on your website and through social media. If the content on your website is stale, there is no incentive to return. The same goes for your social media profiles. If the only update on your Facebook page concerns the weather, you will not stimulate and engage your fans.
- Use analytics to fully understand the path your website visitors take before making a reservation. The journey to a conversion is often complex. Before you rule out a marketing initiative a failure, analyze whether that campaign was part of the path to a booking, increased the number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers and people on your email, etc.
- Invest in technology needed for centralized content delivery: a good CMS should be able to push your content not only to the hotel website but at the same time to social media channels, the mobile Web and even to your email and mobile opt-in lists.
In 2011, hoteliers need to invest in technologies and expertise needed to better execute these types of multi-platform and multi-format campaigns. Consider partnering with a company that fully understands this convergence of marketing and content distribution channels, is fluent in multi-channel marketing methods, and understands that the Customer Engagement Channel is now a reality.
