Create Successful Internet Marketing Strategies for Hotels using Social Media Platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Blogs.

Over the last couple of posts, we’ve discussed hotel marketing strategies and marketing campaigns, and tips on using hotel guests and inhouse magazines as effective marketing campaigns. In this post, I’ll be telling you about internet marketing strategies using social networking communities.

Over the last few years, emails and internet chatting has slowly led to a better and bigger platform for interaction. The World of Social Media. And quality hotels have been incorporating online media marketing by using social media as a platform to connect with their customers and potential customers. So how can you use social media to promote your hotel or hospitality business?

Successful Hotel Marketing Strategies

Part 1 of 4: Successful Hotel Marketing Strategies – Inhouse Magazines and Brochures

Part 2 of 4: Word of Mouth a.k.a. Social Networking Communities

Word of mouth, as we’ve discussed in my introductory post Custom Media Marketing Strategies for Hotels, is the most crucial element in every successful marketing strategy of hotels. And after inhouse magazines and brochures, social media marketing is the next factor that every hotel must focus on, to reach out and spread “happy words” about the hotel.

What are the different types of social media?

Great social media sites crop up every day. So focussing on all aspects of social media may not be the best approach to reaching out to potential customers. We’ve all heard of the old adage, a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush. Try to build a firm ground in a few prominent social media platforms, before getting ambitious and going all out. For the hotel industry, the best social media platforms are Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs, not necessarily in that hierarchical order, but yes, no matter what your creative marketing agencies say, these social media platforms are the three best options as of now.  It may change, but not today. We do have several other social media platforms that are great to create awareness about your hotel, but I wouldn’t want to confuse you with more names now. Look around, and I’m certain you’ll find a lot of good options through a search engine.

How to create a social media presence?

Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs, as I’ve mentioned earlier, are the best platforms to promote your hotel. To implement a social media campaign for your hotel, obviously, you need to create a strong presence in all three mediums. All three mediums have their own way of building networks, the most personal one being Facebook, the most spammy one being Twitter, and the most authoritative one being a Blog.  Now you’re going to need all three, and for entirely different reasons, because together the three-combo can pack a serious punch.

The Combination of Facebook, Twitter and a Blog

Facebook is a great social medium to create an internet marketing strategy that involves the creation of a community, and one that can pay rich dividends as long as you show interest in keeping your community active. As long as you reward your community members with gifts and freebees, they will spread your word for you, and they will spread it well.

Twitter is by far, the best medium to create a point of purchase scenario online, and draw people to your hotel, while branding your hotel as a customer-friendly one at the same time. It is also the medium with the lowest recollection rate due to the high number of tweet links that a user is bombarded with, every day. The advantage of Twitter has drawn so many spam accounts that it’s quite difficult to differentiate a spam link from a genuine one. But yet, if you learn to use it well, there’s probably a good chance that you can create an excellent campaign that will have your hotel desk bell ringing all day long.

Blogs are the perfect medium to create a strong online presence, and reach out to people who want to know about your hotel, or about your city. Create a blog, but don’t restrict it to the facilities in your hotel. Add more, and you shall receive more! Talk about new events in your city, about places to visit in your city, travel packages, guest reviews of your hotel, the add-ons that only your hotel can provide, and so much more. Blogs can actually do more than brand your hotel. It can increase the trustworthiness of your hotel, as blogs have the added benefit of comments and feedback. Take the help of a good custom media house that can help you plan an exhaustive campaign that can change the way you draw customers.

These are just a few basic tips that you could use while planning your next marketing campaign for your hotel. Learning to use the internet to market your hotel is a bit like starting a hotel.

The business model is simple. After all, it’s the execution and implementation that makes all the difference between a badly planned one and a great one.

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Introductory Recommended Reads

Custom Media and Social Media for Hotels and Hospitality

Internet Marketing Strategies for Hotels and Hospitality

In my previous posts that are linked above, I’ve discussed about the most important factors to influence customers’ minds, you would have read that word of mouth is the most crucial requirement for the successful running of any hotel or hospitality business. In this post, I will be discussing the first major word of mouth marketing strategy with relevance to hotels. I’ll be talking about marketing strategies for hotels with respect to Word of Mouth through friends, co-workers and magazines. By understanding the requirements of word of mouth and using it effectively in email marketing campaigns and in the marketing strategies of hotels, any hotel can see a significant difference in its brand perception, and in turn, in its profit curves.

Part 1 of 4

Word of Mouth a.k.a. Friends and Co-workers

One of the behavioural traits of humans in general is their need to be convinced. We ask friends and other people for suggestions all the time, whether it’s about looking good in a new dress, or whether we’re doing the right thing by jumping into a new relationship. We always want to hear opinions from other people, even if we’re convinced about an idea ourselves. If you’re involved in strategising a marketing campaign for a hotel, this is a good point to take note of. People always ask their friends and co-workers for recommendations while making travel plans. It’s easy and trustworthy. It may not be the biggest priority, but yet, it’s an important one. If you have a new guest that’s come to your hotel, keep them happy. And they’ll spread happy words on your behalf. You know all the rules of hospitality, but do you know what else you could use?

With respect to marketing, you definitely need good brochures and inhouse hotel magazines. Not the low grade ones that are created by local print shops, used mostly by school kids for class projects! You’ve spent millions on your hotel. Seriously, a little more respect and ego for your brand should get you thinking here. If you think guests ought to pay you more because you provide a better service, understand that the same goes for design and content solutions too. Partner with a good media house and sign up on a long term contract that could end up cutting your costs by a large extent. But wait a few months so you can be entirely convinced of any media house’s customer-relations and quality. Sometimes though, with great quality and creativity comes a great big ego. Wait a while and see which media house can balance your requirements without compromising on the best quality you can afford.

What do you need?

What impresses a guest when they check in at your hotel? The plush rooms, the ambience, the food, and everything else that a good hotel provides, of course. It’s time to take it up a notch. Along with the goodies of the hotel line, some of the most important requirements are good hotel brochures, travel tips, restaurant and additional menus, and an awesome inhouse magazine that’s placed neatly on the coffee table (magazines are the best option, which of course, comes at a price). Going back to discussing hotel amenities, a great hotel counts for good memories, but every hotel needs more than that. Hotels need good communication tools to spread the happy word.

Hotel Magazine Tip: Create a good magazine. Period. When it comes to luxury additions like magazines and travel guides, having a bad inhouse magazine is actually worse than not having one at all! So if you are serious about having an inhouse magazine for your hotel, outsource or hire a good team! Or make sure you’ve got a good media house working on your magazine. You could contact me or my media house if you are keen on having an inhouse magazine, after all, I may be an occasional blogger, but I am a full time publisher.

Get your guests to talk happy – Conversation Starters and Builders

So how do you get your guests to talk happy about your hotel or hospitality business? Good service and amenities are good conversation starters. But all hotel bosses know that it takes more than good conversation starters to sell its suites, it needs great conversation builders! And nothing is better to carry on great conversations than stunning brochures and classy magazines. With a hotel magazine, you can do all that and more.

Convert your guests into brand builders

So what do guests do after they get back home after a great trip? They talk about their trip with their friends and co-workers. By giving away a great hotel magazine to every guest that comes to your hotel, not only are you giving away a treasured souvenir to your happy guests, you are also arming them with the perfect ammunition to become your “accidental brand builders”! Your guests loved their vacation, and they will talk. And big chances are, when they talk, they will talk about your magazine, and bigger chances are, they’ll show their friends a copy of your hotel magazine and share stories about your hotel. That’s a good half an hour of a marketing pitch about your hotel. And give this a thought, your marketing team isn’t even in the picture! Friends have the power of convincing better than any super-marketing-man. Can you imagine if you have hundreds of guests every month, and each of these guests spread the word about your hotel to their friends using your magazine? With a magazine alone, you could create thousands of free evangelists for your hotel. Every month.

Do you need a magazine, really?

But you may ask, why does my hotel need a magazine? Your guests may talk about your hotel anyway. So what’s the use of a magazine? We’ll do a simple comparison here. If you need to sell a marketing pitch to a potential client, who would you use, your master chef or your marketing head? Similarly, your happy guests are not marketing agents, they’re just the messengers who have friendly credentials and happy momories. Your guests will definitely speak more about their vacation than your hotel. Your guests may speak about your hotel, but they may not be able to convince their friends, a.k.a. they may not be able to sell your product for you. But a magazine can be used well to talk about the vacation spot with great stories and travel tips, while at the same time, discreetly brag about your hotel and show off its facilities and amenities, without sounding like a marketing pitch at all.

Try it, I know it works. And it’s profitable in more ways than one. If you know how to monetise it by bringing on advertising partners, chances are, you’re going to sell without a marketing team. And at the same time, make more money with advertisement spaces in your magazine!

The great advantage that a hotel magazine can give you is the power to sell, without really creating a marketing pitch or having a marketing team spread across the world!

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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!

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How to use Inhouse magazines, Custom Media and Social Media to brand and promote hotels, resorts, spas, and the hospitality industry.

The Hospitality Industry is one of the most “shallow” industries in the world. Why shallow?! Well, because the guests want everything to be just beautiful! The suites have to be beautiful, the employees have to be gorgeous, the food has to be delicious, and what not. I’m sure we can come up with many more shallow requirements if we ponder over shallow thoughts and hotels for a few minutes. So can any other industry get any more shallow than that? I think not. So that clears up one of the most obvious requirements or factors that make a hotel or a resort a good one. Branding.

Surprisingly and not unexpectedly, guests at spas, hotels and resorts are extremely picky. There’s something about hotel hallways and luxury suites that bring out the “dung-under-the-nose” expression in most people. Perhaps, it’s because they have to use a room that’s been used by many people, or maybe it’s because people like being bitchy to the hospitality industry! But the flipside to all the dung in bad hotels is this, if you keep your guests happy in a good hotel, they will market your hotel even better than your “marketer-of-the-month”! And for free!

From my own experience, people love to talk to other people about great hotels. Great hotels are like great dates and relationships. You’re looking for them all the time, but you’re left disappointed almost all the time. But on that rare occurrence when you find a great one, heck, you can’t stop talking about it with others! So as much as this talking trend sucks for the irresponsible hotels, this human tendency to talk about great hotels is a boon for the hotels that really care about their guests (and make good money while they’re at it!).

So what’s the point?

All theories apart, let’s get to the point. So you have a good hotel or a spa? A few people do come by, but there’s really not much happening for you? Or your place may have had a bad past, and you may have revamped the whole hotel and the staff, but people still don’t come back in droves. What on earth could be going wrong? Well, at times like these, unfortunately, the proverbial shit happens, or the constellations have just aligned themselves to read “your hotel sucks!” Sometimes, all the guests in the world can’t really evangelise for you or sell your hotel rooms. Perhaps, your hotel’s just to rich to afford on a daily basis, or your spa provides a service that’s just too niche, or maybe your luxury club’s just too exclusive. No one knows the reason, but we all know that we can’t just sit back and wait for the grey goose to drop golden guests. At times, we have to take a step ahead and go where the potential guests go. Catch them when they’re least expecting to be caught.

The two most important criteria. And Custom Media.

There are just two important criteria to sell your hospitality product in today’s world. One, the reach of your brand. Two, the feedback. Nothing else matters in today’s world. You could be hidden on a faraway island lost in the middle of deep oceans and may never have advertised a single day in your hotel’s lifetime. But if you have created a brand, and got good feedback, no one’s going to stop you from singing ka-ching! If hotels in Antarctica could stash money, why can’t you, especially when you’re plonked right in the middle of a big city?!

But nevertheless, how do you collect brownie points with these two key factors, reach and feedback? And how do you get this fast? As confusing as it may all seem, my advice to you is two words for these two factors. Custom Media. Custom Media can literally nuke your worries away if you use the strategies well.

Irrespective of whether you’re a heritage hotel or a new boy in the block, Custom Media can change the way you work, and make money. For example, let’s say you’ve hit the big time and started a swanky star hotel. One of your key interests at the beginning is to promote it well. If you advertise in a newspaper spending hundreds of thousands of rupees, it’s going to reach out to a lot of people, true, but how many people are really going to come by and stay at your hotel or even remember your hotel after they roll the newspaper and fling it into the “recycle” bin?

As good as traditional media may seem to be, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, the return on investment is just too darn low! And to top that, consumers don’t really like being bombarded by your advertisements everyday. It only spreads word that your hotel is on a mass advertising spree to get some attention. People hate attention seekers, and love exclusivity, even if it’s just “artificial exclusivity”. Therefore, exclusivity is the key to branding.  I’m going to give a small piece of advice to all the traditional thinkers (unfortunately we’ve got far too many of them in the world). You may think you’re running the Buckingham Palace replica for all anyone cares, and you may love it. But no one gives that a thought, they want to hear what others say about it. What do your guests say about your hotel? If you want to start making a difference, learn to read your customers’ minds.

The Story of the Blacksmith and the Mare

Just the other day, I had a chance meeting with one of the key thinkers behind a grand chain of hotels that’s spread across India. Their brochures were terrible, their newsletter was completely lacking editorial and design skills, their website was a template straight out of the most popular sections of cheapest-templates-in-the-world.com, and the whole package was literally repulsive.

But their hotels were flawless and magnificent! What have we learnt today? If a blacksmith has to create a faster chariot, he should stick with banging metal to create the best wheels. Don’t try to make a better horse by banging the mare! Leave that part of the job to that magnificent palomino you found on eBay! If you’ve got a great hotel, give your guests the full package. If you’re good at running a hotel, stick with it. Hire a good custom media team on full employment or partner with a custom media company. Think about it, instead of spending millions on a marketing team that’s equipped with weak brochures and presentations, spend a small percentage of that money on working with a good custom media team to prepare better products that can talk for themselves and create better word of mouth campaigns for you.

We all have egos, and so does your communications team. They may say your media inventory is the best in the world, but really, can you trust your communications team on that? Don’t listen to their feedback, especially when it’s their fault your company’s media skills suck. Listen to your guests, and ask them what they think about your custom mediaware. Do they like your brochures, magazines, newsletters, and all the other media works? Try to find out which hotel’s media offerings they like more, so you can understand how you can make things better for your hotel.

What’s Apple got to do with it?

Apple may be one of the most revolutionary companies in the world. Their products have been blessed with the boon of buy-without-seeing! Everyone talks about Apple and their products months before the launch of a product. But what makes Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Inc., such a cool guy is his passion to take it to the next step. At every one of his launches, he creates a presentation that can put some of the best speakers to shame! He doesn’t need to do that, especially when his products do that for him anyways, but here’s a man who will not compromise on anything. And that’s what makes Apple, Apple.

If you really want to make a difference and get people talking about your hotel, spa, resort or just about any other name under the hospitality industry, learn to be good at everything that you do. And if you and your team are not good at something, outsource the job or get someone who’s good enough. Remember, in today’s world of social media awareness, there is nothing more important than the spreading of an idea (your reach) and the receiving back of ideas (feedback).

The Definitive Checklist to use Custom Media, Social Media and Content Marketing to brand your hotel in Six Months (and make more money!)

I’ve created a checklist that every marketing head of a hospitality company should consider heavily in today’s internet savvy world in the link that I’ve provided below. Perhaps, that can help you start moving the wheels of change in your company. After all, traditional is called traditional for a reason. The faster we understand that, the better prepared we’d be for evolutionary jumps in the hospitality industry.

Internet Marketing Strategies for Hotels and Hospitality – The Four Most Important Factors to Influence Customers’ Minds.

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