If you’re looking to build a successful and popular hotel, you need to make sure that all of your marketing strategies are pointed towards the same goals, and those common objectives are made clear across the entire organization.
Many established hotel businesses built their marketing plans around analytics, as it is an effective way to match your performance against tangible feedback from your customers.
It’s all about creating key goals and trying to understand your business and your customers (past, current or future clients!). Asking questions and finding answers through data segmentation is the perfect way to know how your business is doing, and if you are meeting your targets.
Some hotel businesses tend to shy away from data analysis, as it may reveal gaps that marketers do not want to find (it sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t?). However, marketing analytics isn’t always about shouting how great your hotel is from the rooftop bar. Sometimes it’s more about finding the gaps and creating solutions to fill them in order to improve your overall user experience.
So how do you develop your use of marketing analytics as a hotel marketer? Here are 5 tried and true solutions.
Have preassigned targets
Once you have an understanding of the rate your hotel is growing (or even declining) at, you can set objective targets to push you and your team in the right direction. This way, you’ll be able to see the raw numbers and have a critical view of the hotel.
Having actionable targets (discussed below) supported by figures will ensure that you and your team know exactly where you are headed, and stakeholders know where they stand.
Make sure to introduce benchmarks and forecasting indicators alongside these targets to ensure that the hotel stays on track, and employees understand why specific goals have been set.
Digital Authority Partners suggests looking into meta search marketing to increase the number of visitors booking through your website. Tracking this number will keep you set on your goals and striving to achieve more.
Set actionable Key Performance Indicators for your hotel business
It’s important when you look at data regularly that you don’t let yourself fall into the illusion of numbers (there’s a lot of variation in hotel performance in the short term). Instead, you need to follow key performance indicators set by senior management. The hotel stakeholders should define and help the marketing team define and follow measurable values, rather than metrics that tend to change constantly and cause huge confusion with weekly tracking and targets.
You also need to make sure that your metrics really do match your KPIs, according to Mind Tools.
Having an employee who works hard is great, but if he or she is not working on things that advance the organization’s purpose, your business may find itself in a rut.
It’s the exact same when it comes to hotel marketing.
For example, you could set a hotel KPI as profit. To track this, a marketer should analyze monthly visitor numbers, the amount paying for room extras, and the retention rate of these customers. Bottomline: you must set up KPIs that make sense and define the specific “intermediate” success criteria that ultimately amount to the overall KPI.
Create a marketing dashboard
A marketing dashboard is the easiest way to monitor all of your KPIs in a clear and easy to understand way.
A robust dashboard should collect data from every data source your hotel uses in order to allow marketers to visualize KPIs over time. Marketing metrics should also be included, such as campaign, channel, and revenue tracking, engagement metrics, and attribution modeling.
A dashboard that can produce real-time data will always be best, as you receive a clean and accurate representation of your marketing efforts.
Having a marketing dashboard set up will make it easier to see how close you are to reaching your goals, whether that’s profit, the number of visitors or website traffic, and help you report on how the hotel marketing efforts are performing over time.
Monitor social media
Social media monitoring is a must for any business in 2019 and is especially important for something visual as hotel marketing activities. With over 2 billion monthly Facebook users across the globe, social media reach is quickly becoming the biggest and best way to market yourself.
By monitoring the performance of your Facebook page, you’ll be able to see what posts do the best, and similarly, which ones underperform.
You should be keeping track of your online reviews, how many people your posts are reaching, and how many social media users are actually engaging with those posts to track the performance of your social media content.
There’s a variety of tools available for this, many of which are visible on social media websites themselves such as Facebook and Twitter Analytics. Try Google Analytics if you’re new to the game, and build up from there.
You could even start to use and build Facebook ads, which will allow you to target a certain audience and see how well people interact with your posts.
Make sure your monitor your competitors
Using a site such as Ahrefs or Moz will allow you to analyze the work of your competitors to ensure you are staying ahead of the game.
You will even be able to see how your website ranks against others, so you know exactly what to do to outperform your competitors.
For example, you could keep track of all of the hotels in a ten-mile radius from your hotel’s location to see how you should reshape your SEO strategy and content to stay on top of your hotel marketing plan.
This means you’ll be able to compare your strategy to the hotels around you to make sure you are capitalizing in the areas you’re currently outperforming your rivals and working to improve the areas where you’re not.
The bottom line
We realize this is a lot to take in all at once, so consider introducing these strategies one step at a time.
This way you’ll be sure to work effectively, and it won’t be long before you are a mastermind at hotel analytics strategies.
Remember not to get too overwhelmed, and you’re sure to find the best ways to get the most out of your business using metrics.
