Small businesses in travel and hospitality face hurdles like any other, but they deal with unique marketing challenges as well. Hospitality is an ever-evolving industry that heavily relies on a solid understanding of customer needs and behaviors. Accommodations can be booked in several different ways, the amount of excursion opportunities have broadened significantly, and travelers are more reliant on accurate information and planning than ever.
With that said, your business needs marketing strategies and resources to stay in tune with what your customers and potential clients are looking for and how they are looking for it.
Here are 10 ways to step up your marketing game in your travel or hospitality organization.
1.) Regularly reassess your marketing strategy
While you likely have a strategy in place, reassessing it is a pivotal first
step for hospitality businesses seeking to expand their client base and
revenue. In an industry that ebbs and flows and is often heavily influenced by
the media, it’s crucial to regularly reevaluate whether your strategy aligns
with current trends.
Before diving into tools and tactics, businesses must have a clear idea of their current goals. Consider what you want to achieve, identify your target clients, and determine the best ways to reach them. Typically, the main goals in this industry are to increase bookings and improve guest experience, which requires defining your ideal client profile. With this profile in mind, you can customize your marketing efforts to effectively attract and engage your target audience.
2.) Diversify your marketing mix
Digital marketing has transformed the way businesses interact with their clients. With social media taking the industry by storm, it’s easier than ever to form impactful relationships with clients. From YouTube videos to Instagram Reels to TikToks and Facebook posts, the internet offers an abundance of ways to engage with customers. In addition, word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most powerful tactics in the hospitality industry.
How can you know where most of your clientele is coming from, though? A hybrid marketing mix including call tracking and form tracking can give you the exact insights you need. Reporting on digital marketing strategies with robust tracking ensures that calls and conversions are appropriately sourced to specific campaigns, providing a clear picture of return on investment. Furthermore, with conversation analytics, marketers can analyze conversations for insight into caller intent, allowing for enhanced customer experience, streamlined marketing efforts, and improved conversion rates.
3.) Team up with AI to increase efficiency and decrease manual tasks
Conversational AI revolutionizes the hospitality sector, where tailored interactions are paramount. Conversation intelligence manages customer queries efficiently, offering instant insights to help your business deliver a unique personal experience. Keep up with client preferences, remember their travel history, and provide customized suggestions for what they might enjoy on their next adventure. A personalized experience is often what can make or break someone’s experience when traveling, booking accommodations, or going on a one-of-a-kind excursion.
Conversational AI not only increases the efficiency of your operations but also helps your business ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty. In the travel and hospitality industry, testimonials, reviews, and word-of-mouth are some of the most crucial parts of marketing. With conversational AI, you can balance each of your clients more effectively, personalize their experiences, and earn your business a glowing review on Google Reviews, Yelp, or social media.
4.) Utilize search engine marketing and optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of trying to get your website to rank higher in search results based on relevant keywords. Use keyword research tools, citation management sites, business listings, insights from your website analytics, and your Google Business Profile to publish helpful content and share the information that people actually want to know about your business.
Similarly, search engine marketing (SEM) is a strategy to help your ads appear in the top paid search results for relevant keywords. Using artificial intelligence (AI) to review your customer call transcripts can help you identify the words and phrases that are important to your customers. Using your customers’ language in your ads and landing pages will help them find and relate to your content and messaging.
Pay-per-click (PPC) is another SEM tactic that can help generate leads. The keys to seeing results are writing quality ad copy that resonates with your target audience and using the right ad network to ensure your ads reach your ideal audience.
5.) Elevate your referral strategy
Referrals are non-negotiable for the travel and hospitality sector. Before booking an experience, hotel, venue, or other excursion, a majority of travelers depend on reviews and word-of-mouth referrals to let them know if your business is worth their time and money. Google and Yelp reviews are one thing, but if someone personally recommends your business to a friend, that friend is likely to have your name at the top of their list.
You’re probably benefiting from referrals already, but other than providing exceptional service and hoping referrals roll in — how can you be sure you’re maximizing this tactic to drive business impact? Consider leveraging a solution like CallRail to add Call Tracking phone numbers to your business cards, social posts, emails, and event flyers. That way, when referrals come in, those leads will be automatically classified as such in your analytics.
For referrals that seem to come in organically, self-reported attribution – a feature of Conversation Intelligence® – can help you uncover how potential clients heard about your business. If your lead tracking is set up properly, leads may appear to come in through sources like your Google Business Profile or Google Ads, but self-reported attribution would reveal incidentals such as when a client says they were referred by their college buddy who just got back from a trip booked through your business.
6.) Improve your email marketing
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective tools you can use for targeting in the travel and hospitality industry. You can send special offers, nurture leads, share client experiences, and build relationships through email.
It’s important to regularly evaluate your email analytics so you can make better messaging decisions and help with audience targeting on more expensive channels. Look at unsubscribes, open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and more to determine how well your email campaigns are performing.
You can also do A/B testing and segment your audiences to better target your email messages. Building and growing a compliant list is one of the biggest challenges, but it’s often worthwhile. You can improve results by testing and refining your messages and their timing.
7.) Optimize your website to generate leads
With the valuable information and insights acquired from analyzing the data collected through your website forms, you can further enhance your website performance by optimizing not only the site itself but also the keywords used. It is crucial to ensure that your website is both visually appealing and user-friendly, particularly on mobile devices. Incorporating clear and easily accessible contact information enhances the overall user experience.
For travel and hospitality, imagery is specifically effective in generating interest and securing leads. A video showcasing all that your business has to offer, a photo album of a current client’s most recent travels, or a section of testimonials on your website speak much louder than a generic blurb or bulleted list of offerings.
Additionally, using dynamic call tracking numbers on your site can help determine which pages and content are driving the most calls, providing valuable insights for optimizing your website and marketing tactics overall.
8.) Level up your content marketing
Content marketing is the development and distribution of informational and educational material that is valuable to prospects. Content geared toward current and potential travelers can help build relationships, increase trust, raise brand awareness, and generate and nurture leads for your business. Through intentional content you can demonstrate an understanding of your client base, your expertise in the hospitality industry, and your specific value in comparison to similar businesses.
Create content for the different stages of the buyer’s funnel—awareness, consideration, decision, and delight—to acknowledge a prospect’s pain points, provide answers, offer specific solutions, and build a relationship they’ll deem worthwhile to continue.
Effective content types include:
- Social media posts
- Blogs
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Infographics
- Case studies
- Ebooks
9.) Rely on social media marketing
Social media can be used to build brand awareness, introduce your company to new customers, and keep in touch with current customers. It’s also an opportunity for prospects to find social proof, such as ratings, reviews, video blogs, and testimonials that build trust for your travel and/or hospitality business.
However, some platforms are better than others when generating leads through social content. It is important to identify and maintain a presence on the sites where your potential clients are. It’s also critical to have a strategy in place so that you don’t waste time creating posts that the right people won’t see.
Many travel and hospitality businesses heavily use Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, but some have also found success on Twitter, Snapchat, and even LinkedIn. You can always try out a channel to see whether it’s worth the effort.
Once you decide which platforms to focus on, you can try a mix of organic and paid content. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Organic efforts require less financial investment but do require time and usually don’t get as much reach, as it takes significant effort to grow an audience. Paid social media includes advertising, boosted or sponsored posts, and influencer marketing. These methods can cost a lot, but you can target your audience more effectively.
10.) Take advantage of event marketing
Event marketing–from webinars to local fundraisers–is a great way to build relationships. Both in-person and virtual events can be valuable ways to meet potential clients, create connections, and showcase what your business does best. Events can include anything from neighborhood block parties to tailgating at a sporting event to auctioning a free nights stay at a preferred hotel.
Whether virtual or in-person, what’s important is the value you provide to your prospects and the level of engagement you have with them. Be sure to find ways to collect information and continue the conversation post-event. A great way to do this is with a QR code that both virtual and in-person guests can scan to fill out their information. After that, you can even use form tracking to determine how many leads came to the event, recognizing the effectiveness of this kind of marketing and adjusting your strategy accordingly.
Bonus tip: Measure your marketing performance
Measuring all your efforts can be informative and satisfying because it provides information about how your marketing is performing, where it can improve, and where there are untapped opportunities.
Metrics
To determine what you should measure, decide on your key performance indicators (KPIs) based on your marketing goals.
Key marketing metrics often include:
- SEO rankings
- Website traffic
- Lead attribution
- Form submissions
- Customer lifetime value
- Website conversion rate
- Customer acquisition cost
You can easily track these with the unique call tracking phone numbers you create for your different campaigns, as well as form tracking and web and social media analytics.
Reporting
Create reports to see how your marketing efforts are going. Ideally, your
reporting will compile data from one place, making it more accurate and easier
to manage. With Call Tracking and Form Tracking, you can sort and tag by the
criteria that is important to you. Then, you can create reports illustrating
outcomes like the best-converting PPC keywords and
cost per lead.
CallRail delivers in-depth insights into client calls, clicks, and conversions and can automatically record and transcribe phone conversations. Conversation Intelligence uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze keywords and customer sentiment and produces complete transcripts, while Premium Conversation Intelligence™ provides call summaries and call sentiments to provide the context and tone of conversations in an instant.
Streamline marketing for your travel/hospitality organization
Marketing is essential to building a successful business in the travel and hospitality industries. The tips outlined in this guide can help you strategize and execute a marketing and advertising plan to generate more leads and grow your revenue.
Try Call Tracking for free to get insights into your best customers and discover which channels drive your best leads.
