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While the engagement in social media within the Danish hospitality industry still remain easy to miss, the Peruvian-based blog WorldClass Hotel Marketing News provides a blogpost on best practices on how to connect with hotel guests via social media – a blogpost that is worth mentioning and reading, not only for its insights but also for its best-practice on a hotel that happened to generate great results from engaging in social media.
It is no surprise that the competitive power of a hotel lies within its service. It is from the level of service that a hotel derives customer loyalty and traditional word-of-mouth marketing spread.
“Modern” hotel marketing today is probably best known from sites such as hotels.com, where the determining competitive power primarily is based on price and location, and where the hotels appear by ‘Best sellers’ that not necessarily represent the quality of service. Additionally, the key marketing initiatives seem to be newsletter sign-ups and traditional reward / member programs, which are both debatable in terms of efficiency and additional sales potential.
By engaging in social media and the possibilities that are available through Web 2.0, the level of service can now be increasingly improved, in large due to the possibility of engaging in dialogue with potential customers, and therefore in co-creating unique experiences for the customers.
The blogpost on WorldClass Hotel Marketing News presents four potential strategic initiatives for social media engagement. These are as follows:
- Engage in ‘corporate’ blogging as a means to distinct the hotel from competitors, and accentuate visibility to unique aspects of your hotel product and destination in a more dynamic and involving manner. A blog is easy to setup at a platform like WordPress.
- Initiate a customer feedback function to your existing online platform(s) with the intention to retrieve insights on how to improve the totality of your service, often supported by some sort of reward system. We recommend platforms such as Get Satisfaction for this kind of implementation.
- Apply interactive competitions to generate viral spread and promotion. Such an initiative is likely to increase the number of daily online visitors, thus providing various opportunities to derive additional sales. Platforms such as Foursquare, Facebook, or Twitter could be applied creatively to setup various forms of competitions.
- Initiate interactive events as a way to derive increasing traffic to your various online platforms. This is likely to affect how often your hotel provides updated online content, hence it affects how many potential guests you can influence with appealing offers and other marketing messages. It is recommended, though, that you bear in mind that dialogue is key, and this is why you should remember to involve and engage online visitors.
The benefits of choosing to engage in social media seem more and more evident. As online user behavior, indisputably, is increasingly driven by demand for engagement, interaction and participation, organizations in general are to comprehend that traditional mass marketing messages are steps in the wrong direction. And that goes for hotels as well.
Focus should be put on addressing potential customers where these are present; online! A fact that is no less true for travelers. By adapting marketing initiatives to this, a hotel will be enabled to establish closer relationship to its (potential) guests based on its level of service and develop a more appealing, modern and dynamic profile, which in combination should be the pivotal element for generating business.
As a final piece of advice, I recommend that you make sure to plan your social media strategy in same manner as you plan all other business activities. And we will of course urge you to read the full blogpost on WorldClass Hotel Marketing News.
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