How Hotel Marketing Agencies Perfect Audience Targeting

Reading Time: 7 minutes
Emma Gasko
By Emma Gasko

November 8, 2018

Your boutique hotel is unique, has its own character, and offers luxurious living to guests. The problem is that other hotel properties have their own draw too, and if you aren’t able to attract your ideal customers, those other hotels will. From hitting your booked room targets to increasing RevPAR, without audience targeting tactics executed by the best hotel marketing agencies that have the strategies and tools to help you hit your growth goals, you will never truly stand out as the top luxury hotel in your market.

If you are a marketing manager or director for a luxury resort property, these tips can help you improve your audience targeting strategies. The best hotel marketing agencies have perfected these tactics, and whether you train an internal staff of marketers to create and manage your strategies, or you find that working with a hotel marketing agency will best suit your needs, this article will help you carve a path for much needed marketing improvements.

hospitality growth

Hotel Marketing Agencies Harvest Guests Through Growth Stack Strategies

One of the most popular approaches to helping upscale hotel properties increaser their RevPAR and stand out amongst their competition is through a custom Growth Stack. This is a set of strategies and tools that work together to achieve a specific goal. Audience targeting is always a required strategy in order to help organizations hit their growth goals, and since Growth Stacks use a wide variety of resources to target multiple audiences, your ability to reach the largest audience will hinge to such an approach. Growth Stacks collect a tremendous amount of data in order to fine-tune audience targeting. From organic search insights to engagement data collected from paid media campaigns, Growth Marketing has a variety of channels offering valuable insights into where to target new buyer groups, and with custom content that speaks to their true needs and pain points.

SEO hotels

Hotel Marketing Agencies Master the Buyer Persona

There are many reasons why guests book your hotel as opposed to others. Some of these reasons are obvious, while others aren’t. You may claim to know your guests better than anyone else. And while this may be true, there are many things you don’t know be it from a lack of marketing capabilities to being biased. Hotel marketing agencies don’t have these problems and can source valuable information about your desired audiences that can lead to a massive boost in booked rooms and booking frequency.

The best hotel marketing agencies have multiple tech tools and social listening devices that allow for the farming of data that reveals decision-making points in your guest’s buying process. Once all of this information is collected, hotel marketing agencies use this data to create buyer personas. These are semi-fictional representations of actual hotel guests. In addition to utilizing this data, hotel marketing agencies also use your sales data, questionnaires and surveys, and email insights to craft custom content that enables the right kind of people to become aware of your hotel property. Then it shows them why booking with your hotel will provide the best solution to their intimate needs. The leads will go through a nurturing cycle that begins with traffic generation, and ends with them making a paid booking after being educated and delighted with their purchasing decision. Buyer personas are the roadmaps that help make all of this possible.

digital marketing hotels

Blogging and SEO for Hotels

Organic traffic is often the number one source for hotel lead generation. Advanced audience targeting tactics involve harvesting the right kind of data, creating content designed to convert readers into leads, and all of this is done through an SEO / blogging hybrid strategy with social media marketing.

SEO for hotels and the way it’s performed has made some dramatic changes and comes with a whole new slew of skill requirements. One of the largest ranking factors to Google’s algorithm is RankBrain–a hybrid AI and machine learning component of Google Hummingbird that deciphers user intentions in their search queries and ranks the right landing page that best addresses their needs.

One of the most common pain points luxury hotel brands share is a lack of SEO enriched content that reflects their customer’s needs. A blog using the cluster model along with a modern link building strategy for 2019 will help fuel efforts to target various audiences through organic search results, and convert them into leads.

Getting the right content to rank for the right audiences is one step in the process; converting the traffic into leads requires a workflow using marketing automation and inbound techniques that SEO feeds. Here, blogs are the top-of-funnel carrots that entice readers into learning more about a hotel property where they opt into a nurturing program, become qualified leads, and experience an educational and creative journey where they discover how a hotel property can meet their needs.

lead generation hotels

Audience Targeting Continues After the Booking

Finally, hotel marketing agencies perfect audience targeting by continuing to stay in front of hotel guests after their stay has completed. This usually consists of questionnaires being sent to the guests, with content automated out to them using the right cadence that will keep the hotel brand in front of their audiences, while sifting through current customers to find opportunities to reach their sphere of influence.

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If you found this content valuable, we invite you to download our FREE guide on the WEBITMD Growth Stack. Learn the various strategies and tools required to help your hotel attract more guests, increase RevPAR, and be THE leading hotel / resort destination for those seeking luxury living!
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