The rapid pace of today's digital evolution is unlocking new, exciting, unforeseen ways to deliver transformative digital experiences in the hospitality industry.
From personalized marketing at scale, to utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) for communication, there's no shortage of innovative tools and tactics that can help a hotel differentiate its brand experience.
The Screen Pilot leadership team gathered to identify which digital marketing trends we see having the greatest impact on the hospitality sphere, and what outperformers are doing to take advantage of these opportunities.
These are the six hotel and resort digital marketing trends to watch.
Cohesive, Personalized Experiences
Long gone are the days of one-size-fits-all marketing. Recent data shows that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and more than three-quarters of consumers (76%) get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. Further, the ability to provide 1:1 messaging has been shown to dramatically increase conversion rates.
Hotel and resort teams now have the ability to leverage customer data and provide personalized experiences, including targeted promotions, recommended resort activities, and tailored messaging to the needs and wants of your customer profiles to match and communicate the unique selling points of the property.
By picking up digital cues along the user's journey, personalization can not only be tailored to interests, but personas of what type of vacation a user is looking for.
Top performers understand that personalization should extend across all digital touchpoints and channels, from the primary property website, across vanity sites, email, chatbots and social media advertisements in order to drive customer engagement and acquisition, while also solidifying brand loyalty through consistent brand messaging.
AI-Driven Communication
It seems hardly a day goes by without a headline about how artificial intelligence is changing the world around us. For certain, AI and chatbots are evolving the way hotels interact with website users and guests by delivering 24/7 customer service, personalized recommendations, and instantly answering frequently asked questions. Some hotel teams are even using AI tools to create written content as a base for their content marketing strategy.
These automated tools are helping hotel and resort teams save time and resources while providing their guests with a seamless and efficient digital brand experience. While hotels should still communicate regularly and directly with guests through personalized emails, SMS messaging, and social media engagement, AI is making the guest communication experience more robust than ever.
Voice Search Optimization
Voice search is increasingly prevalent thanks in part to the mass adoption of smart speakers, and the ease of integrated voice search tools in products from Google, Apple and Amazon. In 2022, 40.2% of all searches in the US were voice-based, and 75% of US families will own a smart speaker by 2025.
As users increasingly lean into voice related search, hotels need to be savvy about optimizing marketing channels for voice-related inquiries to ensure potential guests can find them easily. This means brands need to develop content with a natural flow, long-tail keywords, and deliver comprehensive answers to common questions in a conversational tone to help with ranking for voice-related searches.
Virtual Visits
Virtual and augmented reality technologies are becoming increasingly affordable and, in turn, popular, providing hotel teams with new ways to showcase their offerings. Virtual tours of rooms and amenities, augmented reality-powered brochures and 360-degree view videos can offer potential guests an immersive experience from miles away.
Every hotel has the opportunity to build trust by providing an inside look for those making important rental decisions. While a picture is still worth a thousand words, virtual visits are a gateway to a deeper understanding of a property and the brand promise, across common space, rooms, event space and leisure amenities.
As the popularity of virtual visits continues to grow, they will evolve from simply a cool tool into an expectation. Indeed, the recent global health crisis cemented the place of virtual visits securely as part of the new normal. For now, use of the technology clearly illustrates that the hotel in question is a leader and on top of the latest digital trends.
Booking Engine Optimization
The booking engine is no longer simply a place to book a hotel room for a given number of nights. Today’s booking process offers hotels an opportunity to communicate their value proposition, drive additional revenue and offer a personalized experience to users based on their individual preferences.
Booking engine optimization should aim to streamline the booking process, provide guests with a user-friendly interface, offer personalized recommendations, and convenient payment options. The booking engine is also a great opportunity to pick up on user cues such as price sensitivity, arrival and departure dates, and the guests they are bringing to create personalized offers in real time.
And when a user engages with the booking engine but fails to complete a transaction? This is when savvy hotel teams use the captured data for remarketing opportunities via the internet, email, and paid social advertising.
Reviews, Reviews, Reviews
Reviews have long played a crucial role in hotel marketing, with 81% of travelers saying they always or often read reviews before booking their accommodations. Furthermore, reviews - and their hotel responses - live online in perpetuity as social proof.
While the importance of reviews is not a new notion, it’s worth reminding hotel teams of how critical it is to encourage guests to review their stay after departure, especially if they hinted or otherwise explicitly declared they had a positive experience via a post-stay survey.
Responding to reviews in a professional and timely manner, addressing customer complaints, and showcasing positive reviews can help improve a hotel's reputation with search engines and positively impact search rankings.
When it comes to local SEO, a brand's collection and interaction with reviews factors significantly. The search engine algorithm looks at three key pillars for local SEO:
- Proximity
- Prominence
- Relevance
The second bullet point, prominence, is how reputable and popular an online brand is to users. The quantity and quality of positive reviews can improve a hotel’s reputation with search engines to benefit more favorably in local search rankings.
___
Across the bulk of the hospitality industry, brands are embracing the digital evolution to deliver a more cohesive and personalized experience to their guests than ever.
By using customer data to personalize marketing, virtual and augmented reality technology to showcase a property from afar, optimizing marketing channels for voice search, enhancing the property’s booking engine and leaning on AI-driven communication, hotel teams can create an efficient and immersive experience for their guests across all touchpoints and provide users with a decidedly modern digital brand experience.
By focusing on these key trends, hotel teams can establish themselves as leaders in the industry in 2023 and beyond.
___
Did you enjoy the read?
Get original hospitality industry insights delivered to your inbox. Sign up to receive the UNPACKING with Screen Pilot newsletter.
The rapid pace of today's digital evolution is unlocking new, exciting, unforeseen ways to deliver transformative digital experiences in the hospitality industry.
From personalized marketing at scale, to utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) for communication, there's no shortage of innovative tools and tactics that can help a hotel differentiate its brand experience.
The Screen Pilot leadership team gathered to identify which digital marketing trends we see having the greatest impact on the hospitality sphere, and what outperformers are doing to take advantage of these opportunities.
These are the six hotel and resort digital marketing trends to watch.
Cohesive, Personalized Experiences
Long gone are the days of one-size-fits-all marketing. Recent data shows that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and more than three-quarters of consumers (76%) get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. Further, the ability to provide 1:1 messaging has been shown to dramatically increase conversion rates.
Hotel and resort teams now have the ability to leverage customer data and provide personalized experiences, including targeted promotions, recommended resort activities, and tailored messaging to the needs and wants of your customer profiles to match and communicate the unique selling points of the property.
By picking up digital cues along the user's journey, personalization can not only be tailored to interests, but personas of what type of vacation a user is looking for.
Top performers understand that personalization should extend across all digital touchpoints and channels, from the primary property website, across vanity sites, email, chatbots and social media advertisements in order to drive customer engagement and acquisition, while also solidifying brand loyalty through consistent brand messaging.
AI-Driven Communication
It seems hardly a day goes by without a headline about how artificial intelligence is changing the world around us. For certain, AI and chatbots are evolving the way hotels interact with website users and guests by delivering 24/7 customer service, personalized recommendations, and instantly answering frequently asked questions. Some hotel teams are even using AI tools to create written content as a base for their content marketing strategy.
These automated tools are helping hotel and resort teams save time and resources while providing their guests with a seamless and efficient digital brand experience. While hotels should still communicate regularly and directly with guests through personalized emails, SMS messaging, and social media engagement, AI is making the guest communication experience more robust than ever.
Voice Search Optimization
Voice search is increasingly prevalent thanks in part to the mass adoption of smart speakers, and the ease of integrated voice search tools in products from Google, Apple and Amazon. In 2022, 40.2% of all searches in the US were voice-based, and 75% of US families will own a smart speaker by 2025.
As users increasingly lean into voice related search, hotels need to be savvy about optimizing marketing channels for voice-related inquiries to ensure potential guests can find them easily. This means brands need to develop content with a natural flow, long-tail keywords, and deliver comprehensive answers to common questions in a conversational tone to help with ranking for voice-related searches.
Virtual Visits
Virtual and augmented reality technologies are becoming increasingly affordable and, in turn, popular, providing hotel teams with new ways to showcase their offerings. Virtual tours of rooms and amenities, augmented reality-powered brochures and 360-degree view videos can offer potential guests an immersive experience from miles away.
Every hotel has the opportunity to build trust by providing an inside look for those making important rental decisions. While a picture is still worth a thousand words, virtual visits are a gateway to a deeper understanding of a property and the brand promise, across common space, rooms, event space and leisure amenities.
As the popularity of virtual visits continues to grow, they will evolve from simply a cool tool into an expectation. Indeed, the recent global health crisis cemented the place of virtual visits securely as part of the new normal. For now, use of the technology clearly illustrates that the hotel in question is a leader and on top of the latest digital trends.
Booking Engine Optimization
The booking engine is no longer simply a place to book a hotel room for a given number of nights. Today’s booking process offers hotels an opportunity to communicate their value proposition, drive additional revenue and offer a personalized experience to users based on their individual preferences.
Booking engine optimization should aim to streamline the booking process, provide guests with a user-friendly interface, offer personalized recommendations, and convenient payment options. The booking engine is also a great opportunity to pick up on user cues such as price sensitivity, arrival and departure dates, and the guests they are bringing to create personalized offers in real time.
And when a user engages with the booking engine but fails to complete a transaction? This is when savvy hotel teams use the captured data for remarketing opportunities via the internet, email, and paid social advertising.
Reviews, Reviews, Reviews
Reviews have long played a crucial role in hotel marketing, with 81% of travelers saying they always or often read reviews before booking their accommodations. Furthermore, reviews - and their hotel responses - live online in perpetuity as social proof.
While the importance of reviews is not a new notion, it’s worth reminding hotel teams of how critical it is to encourage guests to review their stay after departure, especially if they hinted or otherwise explicitly declared they had a positive experience via a post-stay survey.
Responding to reviews in a professional and timely manner, addressing customer complaints, and showcasing positive reviews can help improve a hotel's reputation with search engines and positively impact search rankings.
When it comes to local SEO, a brand's collection and interaction with reviews factors significantly. The search engine algorithm looks at three key pillars for local SEO:
- Proximity
- Prominence
- Relevance
The second bullet point, prominence, is how reputable and popular an online brand is to users. The quantity and quality of positive reviews can improve a hotel’s reputation with search engines to benefit more favorably in local search rankings.
___
Across the bulk of the hospitality industry, brands are embracing the digital evolution to deliver a more cohesive and personalized experience to their guests than ever.
By using customer data to personalize marketing, virtual and augmented reality technology to showcase a property from afar, optimizing marketing channels for voice search, enhancing the property’s booking engine and leaning on AI-driven communication, hotel teams can create an efficient and immersive experience for their guests across all touchpoints and provide users with a decidedly modern digital brand experience.
By focusing on these key trends, hotel teams can establish themselves as leaders in the industry in 2023 and beyond.
___
Did you enjoy the read?
Get original hospitality industry insights delivered to your inbox. Sign up to receive the UNPACKING with Screen Pilot newsletter.
