Hotel Marketing and Social Media – The Top Performers and Tips
Hotels and their marketing mix have gone through some major changes over the past decade. Online booking accounted in 2000 for only around 1% of the bookings whereas in 2010 already 50% of all bookings were made online. However, researching hotels and prices online is likely to be much higher, hence there’s an immediate necessity for hotels to be present and run social campaigns where the bookers search for information, ask for recommendations and communicate with each other.
Social Media Platforms.
Social media works well as a marketing channel to exponentially increase word-of-mouth, recommendations and brand value. If done correctly, these platforms can provide plenty of opportunities to attract new guests through the use of content sharing, trustworthy customer reviews and a general active engagement with the customers.
Examples of Top Performers in Hotel Social Media Marketing
According to a report Hotels Digital IQ Index 2012 by research company L2, Four Seasons, Hilton Worldwide and Marriott International were the most innovative when it comes to digital marketing and social media:
Four Seasons was one of the first successful hotels on Pinterest. It doesn’t only share pins with its followers, but engages them too. Currently, the “Pin your dream wedding” competition calls on fans to create their own Pinterest boards visualizing their ideal wedding in a Four Seasons hotel. Great publicity for Four Seasons – and fun the same time! Their local websites also hosts widgets with user generated content coming from Facebook and Twitter posts. TIP: Trip Advisor reviews are also integrated, which can help retain users rather than losing them to the official Trip Advisor page.
Hilton Worldwide has the largest and fastest growing community on Facebook with over 300,000 fans and offers promotions, Facebook booking services and engaging content. One can easily imagine what virality can be generated when 300,000 fans share promotions with their average 130 friends.
Marriott International is working hard on engaging both customers and potential/current employees in an integrated social media approach. One of their projects falls into the area of gamification, to be specific a Facebook game called “My Marriott” that gives players the opportunity to manage a hotel. However, not all the levels are available yet and we’re not very sure of the impact such a game could have on social media activities.
Social Media Marketing – Further Tips for Hotels
We believe the best social media campaigns utilise an integrated approach. Visibility and engagement across many relevant social platforms as well as using the same brand-building voice and format seems to work well for the best social media players in the market. Programs however are often siloed – disconnected between the hotel’s booking pages and their internet and social media marketing (i.e., search, display advertising, blog & other user-generated content, and email marketing).
The impact of independent customer reviews on the booking decision is very high and checking hotel reviews on sites like trip advisor is a very common thing too amongst holiday makers. This means for hotels; integrate these user generated reviews on your website, the user will check them anyway. If the reviews are rather bad, you’re doing something wrong in the first place.
Also, the ever increasing penetration rate of smart phones enables you to reach consumers through mobile channels – booking capabilities, mobile applications on the brand and property level or the use of QR codes on marketing materials do work here quite well. QR codes are two-dimensional codes which can be scanned by smart phone cameras and instantly direct the user to an online link showing a special offer, customer reviews, a Google map, a promotion video… This can work as a great call to action – TIP: try putting QR codes on your sales team’s business cards, ads or brochures.
Hotel chains also need to take into consideration that creating local fan pages on top of global ones allows them to generate more locally relevant content and can provide specific and required customer service for the hotel guests. This can function as a digital concierge –recommending local sightseeing highlights, events or nightlife and would certainly improve customer service as well as customer satisfaction and loyalty.
This is a guest blog post by Richard Buettner, Social Media Consultant – Weever Media.