Although it’s a fun buzz term, the “staycation” is a scary concept for the hospitality industry. More and more leisure and business travelers are simply staying home in these tough economic times. Hotels and other hospitality businesses are faced with decreasing occupancy and revenue. As a marketing professional or hospitality business owner, how can you be proactive and tackle the situation head on?
First of all, you can’t stop marketing! Studies have shown that you should actually increase your marketing budget in an economic downturn. We believe that you need to get creative with your hospitality Internet marketing strategy and smarter with your marketing mix and spending. We don’t think you should immediately cut rates, since this significantly affects RevPar and thus profit margins. In addition, cutting rates can start a price war with competitors, weaken your brand perception (especially for boutique or luxury businesses) and it is difficult to reverse once customers are used to lower prices. We’ve put together a list of smart and creative hospitality marketing strategies below to help you out.
5 Ways to Get Creative With Your Hospitality Marketing Strategy in an Economic Downturn:
1. Target new customer segments: try to direct your sales and marketing efforts towards customers you may have never targeted before like students and seniors. While discounted rates for these customers will decrease your margins a bit, you should be able to make up the difference through other services and by not losing occupancy.
2. Get creative with your promotional strategy: Promotional strategy is particularly important in an economic downturn; look for creative ways to run promotions without lowering your brand perception or cutting into your profits. For example, bundling services into package deals is a great strategy. If you can creative extra value for guests, e.g., by offering free or discounted spa services or meals packages, you can maintain occupancy without cutting room rates too much.
3. Invest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO): many hospitality companies who haven’t previously implemented SEO or who need to improve their hospitality SEO results are finding that now is a perfect time to invest. Rather than wasting your precious marketing dollars on paid search campaigns with limited effectiveness, why not take the time to invest in a highly effective and proven long-term strategy?
4. Work on building a unique and dynamic online brand: your website is your brand. Studies have shown that customers generate all of the perceptions and feelings they have about your business and your brand within the first 30 seconds of looking at your website home page. And customers are twice as likely to make purchase decisions based on emotions than product or service features. With the right website design and feel, features and user experience, you can get customers excited about your hospitality business and what you have to offer that is truly unique and valuable. Get that “wow” factor!
5. Develop an effective Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategy: Social media sites are becoming more and more important in marketing. Facbook alone currently has 175,000,000 active users. Use viral marketing strategies with the right message that will build buzz and brand awareness for your hospitality business on social media sites such as Facebook, TripAdvisor, Twitter, YouTube and Yelp. In addition, SMM campaigns have a great crossover benefit with your hospitality SEO strategy because they bring you a large amount of quality “backlinks” that will increase your search engine rankings.
For more information, check out our hospitality Internet marketing services and strategies.
