Marketing Strategies for Hotels and Hospitality. Use the power of the Internet to brand your hotel and hospitality company. And make more money while you’re at it!

Before reading this post on Marketing Strategies for Hotels and Hospitality, I would recommend that you read the introduction to this post, Custom Media and Social Media for Hotels and Hospitality, if you would like to understand more about the basics of marketing strategies for hotels and hospitality. As you’ve seen in my introductory post, marketing for hotels and hospitality is not something that comes the easy way, and branding campaigns for hotels are just not simple anymore. And the two most important criteria for a successful hotel and an even more successful hotel marketing strategy is the spreading of an idea (your reach) and the receiving back of ideas (feedback).

If you own a hotel and want people to  come in droves every weekend and weekday, how would you start? What is the best way to reach out to potential customers from across the world? We’ve all heard of email marketing  and online marketing for hotels by having a huge mailing list and having frequent email campaigns. But what is the real concept behind all of these strategies and ideas? Why do some campaigns work and some fail miserably?

By reading the mind of a potential customer, we can clearly understand about his or her brand perception and interest in your hotel. So if someone wants to travel to a vacation spot, how do you think they zero in on the right place to stay?

The Most Important Factors to Influence Customers’ Minds

Customers and potential customers follow a specific trend when it comes to hotels and decision making. Confetti Media has conducted several surveys to really understand the mind of a potential customer. The four most important factors that influence a customer to decide on a hotel are the ones mentioned below. If you have these covered, trust me, your marketing strategies will take off to a flying start all by itself.

1. Word of Mouth via Friends and Co-workers

2. Word of Mouth via Social Networking Communities

3. Word of Mouth via The Internet a.k.a. User Reviews

4. Word of Mouth via The Internet a.k.a. Your Company Website

[Click on the links provided in the pointers to read about these ideas in detail]

So at the end of the day, word of mouth is one of the best methods to reach out to your audience. But I’m not talking about traditional forms of word of mouth. We need to have a lot of mouths talking about you, not just ones that are regular guests at your hotel. If you want to create a bigger impact, you need even people who have never stayed at your hotel to speak well about your hotel. Some companies have created this for themselves, though they may have taken years and decades to get branded as one of the best.

The biggest advantage of starting a marketing campaign for hotels in today’s internet savvy and social media world is the reach it gives you. You can put up 140 characters on your Twitter page, and chances are, there’s someone retweeting your information from another part of the world.

Words spread fast. That’s the easy part. The difficult part is spreading good words. And that makes all the difference!