Now more than ever before, luxury hotels need to be able to create and execute strong and innovative marketing strategies. There’s never been a better time to plan for your upcoming marketing initiatives and focus on how you can differentiate your brand, offer unique experiences, and ultimately drive more direct bookings.
In an industry where only 18% of executives at travel and hospitality brands say they believe their company is a digitally mature organization, there are incredible opportunities to improve your marketing strategy and win more market share. Here we will assess advanced hotel/resort marketing strategies in detail, showcasing 10 strategies that can help your resort marketing plan bounce back.
The hospitality/hotel industry is an emotional one - it seeks to provide comfort, enjoyment, delight, happiness. It’s critical that your resort marketing strategy and promotion remains aware of this and works to provide a positive emotional reaction at the foundation of all marketing efforts. Today’s consumer is more exposed to digital advertising messages than at any point in our history, and too many of them are one-dimensional promotions.
Luxury hotels and resorts have an opportunity to surprise and delight, and if you want to get the best ROI then you need to aim not just towards the lowest CPC but also towards the highest impact emotional reaction you can achieve. This can often be achieved through social partnerships, environmental initiatives or philanthropic efforts. But even in the simplest of ways, your choice of images needs to not only capture the design of your hotel but also capture the way it makes your guests feel.
If your luxury hotel marketing strategy manages to send a clear message to potential guests that they will experience these positive emotions, to the extent that they can feel this emotion when they view your digital marketing messages, you can be sure that you will achieve your revenue goals.
In 2019, 60% of consumers were influenced by consumer generated content when planning travel, whereas the influence of professional brand images was only 19%. Experiences are often critical drivers behind the decision-making of vacationers, so don't just mention that you offer bungee jumping or horse riding. Instead, leverage the tools available to you to bring these adventures to life and show real and relatable people actually doing these things. Your audience will relate to other people more than they will to actors who are faking it.
As a great example of resort development marketing strategy that leverages real life experiences, take a look at Cabot Links . Known for being a world class golf resort, Cabot uses earned content related to featured activities on different pages of their website. For instance, their “Food & Drink” page includes a gallery of guests’ dining experiences, helping the resort to highlight the fact that Cabot Links has more to offer than just golfing.
Curating your Instagram feed and incorporating it seamlessly into your web pages is another effective way to achieve this, especially for a boutique property or if you have a resort real estate marketing strategy. Take a closer look at how we drove exceptional revenue growth at Ka’ana Resort using experiential digital marketing messaging.
As a luxury hotel, you need to offer something unique and distinctly different to separate you from the competition. Similarly, your luxury hotel marketing strategy needs to be equally unique. As with everything else in the hospitality industry, high quality customer care needs to be at the core of everything you do. Going the extra mile for your guests can be the difference between converting that enquiry into a booking, or converting that guest into a loyal repeat customer. Take a closer look at how we leveraged high quality creative concepts like Solar Cottages and Carbon Neutral Villas to help Itz’ana Resort & Residences deliver record breaking revenue.
It’s all about making sure you’re doing things a little differently. Operationally, this could be providing customers with a complimentary treat at check-in or turndown. From the resort property marketing office, this could be creating a list of local recommendations to send to your guests prior to arrival, or creating a beautiful lookbook of all local eateries, bars and adventures to help your potential guests fall in love with your destination and learn to trust you as their guide. In the past, we’ve turned these local recommendations into an illustrated map that’s instagrammable, or even an online interactive map that can convey a lot of information in a fun, visual way.
One of the best ways to stand out from rivals is to deliver tailored, individual marketing messages. Using different visuals for different segments and experiences that travelers seek is one great way to personalize your marketing to each customer segment. This is especially important for resorts and luxury hotels that serve significantly different client segments - e.g. international visitors, honeymoon couples, families, etc.
81% of travel respondents consider it very important for brands to provide personalized experiences to their customers. You can use your customer segments to further personalize email marketing, customer loyalty programs, and print materials. A good rule of thumb is to always create high quality visuals that reflect the audience you want to target.
Remarketing ads can target viewers based on a variety of factors. For instance, you could create an ad that features the specific room type they previously viewed on your website, serving as a specific reminder to them.
