In the digital era and growing digital media, digital marketing has the ability to promote businesses in the hospitality industry on a global scale. Digital Marketing has the calibre to deliver results that cater to the nature of the hospitality industry and its high competitiveness, outreaching a broader audience base.
Is digital marketing required in the hospitality industry?
Digital marketing is influential to businesses in the hospitality industry as it is one of the crucial strategies that help analyze potential clients and efficient communication channels for outreaching, building reputation, developing loyal customers and maintaining the same for a competitive edge.
Most customers spend a large amount of time online, researching places to visit, stay, dine and more. Being visible on these channels while promoting the brand message and values can enable businesses to generate quality traffic and conversion on the website.
Marriott’s hospitality digital marketing enables it to understand its audience and guest experience in-depth and reach out via channels convenient to them like Facebook or YouTube.
Advantages of digital marketing in the hospitality industry
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO aims to improve organic rankings on search engine result pages SERPs. As mentioned earlier, customers are constantly looking for hospitality services on the search engine, proving visibility is an essential aspect. SEO works towards the same and improves the number of website visitors, eventually leading to higher rankings. The improved brand awareness and quality traffic on the website drive sales and conversion rates. It also builds brand credibility, gaining trust and repeat clients with increased brand exposure. An efficient website, services, and offers provided to customers can improve brand relations and gradually build customer loyalty.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Due to the target-centric nature of the strategy, ads target a specific audience segment, enabling the website to drive better results with clients more likely to convert. These ads aim to appear and offer the potential customers, who are most likely to be interested. With precision, these ads can help hospitality businesses rank higher on the SERPs.
A majority of travellers are either spontaneous travellers or book their tickets last minute. When paid ads appear higher on the result pages, these guests are more likely to visit and convert quickly with the fear of losing out on deals. - Content marketing: Content can be beneficial in numerous strategies with the main aim to keep the audience engaged. It can entertain, provide information and insights, answer queries and convey brand messages providing the business with a competitive edge. It helps improve the rankings on search pages, influence potential customers, build brand awareness and reputation, and build relationships that can generate new leads and conversions. A well-maintained website, producing high-quality and fresh content, can boost the rankings and reputation of the business.
- Online brand reputation: Online reputation management (ORM) can create a positive image for the brand by responding to customer reviews and feedback. This, showcases the potential customers, the business’s willingness to improve and that it values the customer’s input. It enables the business to control the customer perception of the brand instead of primarily depending upon reviews. This leads to customers building trust and brand loyalty while brands increase the potential of repeat customers over the long term. Improvement and positive reviews are influential factors in the search engine algorithm and directly improve hospitality businesses’ rankings.
- Build a loyal customer pool: One of the most rewarding benefits of this strategy is, it increases revenue. Customers make purchasing decisions based on their and other customers’ previous experience with the brands. They are more inclined to return to the brand that offers them excellent services increasing business revenue.
Services for loyal customers can be personalized and customized that are more useful to them, while brands foster relationships. It can also form a network providing honest feedback and areas of improvement for the growth of the business. - Wider audience reach: Reaching a wider audience is highly essential for the continuous growth of business in the hospitality industry. It brings more traffic to the website through the channels used for digital marketing. Increased website traffic can increase brand awareness and potentially convert some of the traffic. It also invites brand exposure and retention resulting in more future client purchases.
A wider audience is also likely to bring a good amount of referral traffic, increasing the quantity of audience interested in the business’ offers and generating more leads and sales.
Social media post content
- Most customers in the hospitality industry spend a lot of time online, researching places to visit, stay, dine and more.
- Higher visibility and audience can increase brand awareness, website traffic, leads and revenue.
- SEO, SEM, Content marketing, ORM, building a loyal customer pool and reaching a wider audience can provide unparalleled benefits.
