Marketing is a fast-paced, tech-driven industry. In the US alone, marketers spend $23 billion on tech like social apps, CRMs, and email marketing platforms. Hospitality marketers are particularly well-positioned to take advantage of emergent technology. Automation can speed up content creation while AI-integrated CMSs can turn guest’s data into useful consumer insights. These insights can help you achieve higher levels of productivity, improve your marketing ROI, and help you turn more highly qualified leads into guests. Let’s look at how marketing technology can streamline your business.
Automation
Automation is crucial in today’s marketing landscape. Automating your workflow can significantly improve your productivity and save time for more creative efforts. If you’re new to AI, start with simple, profit-boosting automation strategies like:
- Targeted Emails: Personalization is king in the hospitality marketing game. Automation can speed up the personalization process by enabling automated triggers and highlighting user behavior or specific events in your inbox.
- Customer Identity Resolution: Folks who stay with you want to feel “seen.” Automation can gather and combine consumer data to help solve common identity challenges and deliver personalized marketing experiences.
- Lead Generation: Automation can help you connect with more leads than ever before. AI-powered tools are capable of high-speed lead scoring and qualification and use data to help you nurture the folks who are already in your sales funnel.
- Social Media Management: Social sites are increasingly lucrative. However, you don’t want to spend all day creating posts and responding to comments. Automation can alleviate the burden of social media management by flagging mentions, scheduling posts, and collating analytic data.
Automating your workflow can boost your productivity and improve your personalization plan. This is particularly important if you want to capture repeat guests or connect with a new audience. An automated workflow maximizes your marketing spend, too, as AI-integrated tools collect massive amounts of data for future utilization.
Data Integration
Marketing is a data-driven industry. A clear data collection and analysis program should form the backbone of your efforts and guide your future strategies. However, data management can be time-consuming and burdensome.
Emergent marketing tools can be integrated seamlessly into your current data collection strategy. Incorporating high-tech tools can improve data analytics by minimizing human error and improving efficiency. A digitized, high-tech database can also increase security as you can back up images, documents, and other data on cloud-based databases.
Utilizing cloud-based data management systems can give you access to real-time updates, regardless of your location. This is particularly important if you’re trying to market a bustling hotel, cruise liner, or casino. Real-time updates give you a chance to see how, exactly, your marketing campaigns impact consumer behavior so you can refine your approach in the future.
Chatbots
Responsive, friendly customer service is crucial. People need to feel cared for or they’ll jump ship to one of your competitors. However, you may find responding to every FAQ quickly becomes overwhelming — particularly if you don’t have a customer service department to lean on.
Chatbots can’t replace human interactions, but they can take care of some common queries. Chatbots can boost your brand value, too, by giving potential customers an immediate touch point when they land on your website. This is helpful if you’re looking to connect with consumers from overseas, who may want to speak with a representative outside of your office hours.
If you do use a chatbot, be sure it integrates with your customer relationship management (CRM) software. That way, you’ll gather important data while your bot speaks to potential leads. This may expose important insights that would have otherwise been missed while your human representatives were offline.
Virtual Reality
Virtual reality headsets can add serious value to your business, especially if you’re in the hospitality industry. VR is no longer a gimmick. Big brands like Marriott and Holiday Inn already use the tech to give potential guests virtual tours of their space.
You don’t necessarily need to incur the costs of headsets, either. Instead, start by shooting your VR video with a 360 camera. This will give folks who own a VR headset a chance to tour your rooms without ever leaving their own homes.
VR headsets can also help desk agents upsell rooms when guests do arrive. Giving guests a chance to see premium suites and penthouse accommodations may convince them to splash out on an upgrade during their stay. Many will leap at the chance to try to tech out, too, as VR is still something of a novelty for most consumers.
Conclusion
Tech-powered hospitality marketing can maximize your ROI and help reduce risk. Even simple automation tools, like social media management apps, can save you hours every week and free up time for more creative tasks. Utilize these tips today to improve your marketing strategies and your conversion rate.