How SSMD Marketing Can Boost Business in Hospitality Sector

The Influence of Online Advertising on Hospitality Marketing

The boisterous hospitality industry is a sign of a nation’s economic development. It also gives them confidence that things are looking up. The hospitality sector serves and nurtures customers. And, helped along by digitization, the hospitality sector has been seeing tremendous growth in recent times. Higher standards of living and surge in tourism, especially, have been catalysts. Also the digital marketing of hospitality! Digitization and the internet-savvy have brought about maximization of revenue for the hospitality sector— helping it scale new heights. The challenges and problems can be mitigated with digital marketing.

SSMD Marketing Overcomes Resource Crunch:

Hotels, most of them, don’t have recourse to huge resources. Recruiting a marketing team is not easy for every hotel chain. Not having an independent marketing crew tells on operations and performance. Roles of staff are confusing, and responsibility is difficult to fix. There are too many manpower issues. Failure to complete projects tops the list. SSMD marketing will do away with these lacunae, say experts.

Unaware Staff Is an Albatross!

Most hotels, it has been noticed, do not possess human resources with an understanding of the digital marketing mode. This tells on efficiency. When hoteliers and hotel employees show no interest in digital marketing it is a waste of time trying to convince them. It is like trying to get a blackboard to talk back. The blackboard will be unresponsive. Ditto with employees with little or no affinity to digital marketing techniques or tools! The digital platform holds a lot of promise for the hospitality sector. The spoils of having a digital platform and its concurrent channels have to be seen and experienced. The growth of the hospitality sector depends on this familiarization with digitization.

Budget Constraints

A dedicated marketing arm means interviews, recruiting, and training. There are legal conditions to be met and legal forms to be filled and filed. Employees and incentives go hand in hand. Nothing of this comes for free. With an independent marketing team comes costs, a budgetary provision—money that could be kept aside for, say, boosting customer experience in multiple ways. The point that we are making is, recruiting an independent marketing team is not feasible for most players in Hospitality Marketing.

Reluctance to Accept the Reality

Not everybody is tech-friendly. At least this has been noticed among hotel owners. The general feeling among them is that running a hotel doesn’t require rocket science. For example, what/where is the technology in-room service? Or, for that matter, in housekeeping! This reluctance to accept a changing world is universal. It is leading to initiative kills and the decimation of the instinct to take chances. Playing safe is ingrained in conservative thinking. Rampant competitiveness due to “online” has added to the challenges galore. This is where digital marketing of the hospitality sector has most impacted—hotels cannot survive these days without their human promoters being tech-savvy.

Multiple Branches Syndrome

Add all those mentioned above and there still is the problem of hotels having multiple branches, which creates its own brand of difficulties when it levels down to marketing. Individualized marketing brings with it its own unique problems. The plethora of hiring at the different branches becomes the biggest headache! The budget goes awry. HRD screws up the work. A digital marketing strategy for the multi-branch set-up will remove most if not all the irritants.

Getting Through With Event Management

Many hotels try to promote and prevail with event management doing the marketing for them and generating the leads. But this doesn’t and cannot compare against digital marketing. Event organization calls for elaborate planning and management—a far bigger budgetary allocation. SSMD marketing company delivers targets and leads at a far lesser cost, and faster.

How SSMD Marketing Is the Solution

Hotels can help themselves with digital marketing—capture the market using multiple routes, a meeting of converging routes to reach “success”. Here are some of the multiple routes…

1. Optimize the website. A classy website with apt content is half the battle won — it attracts customers like bees to honey. Website optimization can be done by choosing the right keywords. Well-planned and excellently executed websites will invariably land them at the top of the searches, inviting and encouraging “traffic” to head their way!
2. Social Media is where the action is. Social media marketing is an important part of digital marketing. People spend humongous time on Facebook, Twitter, and, these days, also on Instagram. Hogging the market via social media is no longer accidental—it is targeted and with purpose. Used efficiently, social media is a winner—for the digital marketing of a hotel chain; to strike deals with leads. Successful conversion then is a fait accompli.
3. Content is King! SSMD marketing hinges on content. People look for and are mesmerized by top online content. Blogs, surveys, case studies, client reviews, data, and infographics. Don’t leave the videos out. These are the key attractions that make content deliver clients to a hotel’s website.
4. While on digital marketing tools, don’t forget email marketing. There is nothing like email to stay connected with people and entities, with customers — existing and potentially breakthrough customers. Hotels can use email to spread the word on new tie-ups and add new services. Clients, both old and potential, will take note and follow up.
5. SSMD marketing is primed to enhance and improve customer behavior. Tagging a customer is one of the oldest customer-engagement tricks. It lends an edge of satisfaction and personalization to the exercise. Social media “likes” have the same effect. SSMD marketing aimed at pleasing customers with words of encouragement is a triumphant note. For the hospitality industry, it is building on trust and credibility.

Summing Up

SSMD marketing of the hospitality sector helps in other ways. It does away with fake pages/profiles. It helps achieve the standardization of contracts and boosts the overall credibility of the hospitality sector. Biggest of all, it gives “know your customer” the importance that it deserves—which is that, ultimately, at the end of the day, marketing is all about the customer experience and his place in the chain.

Reliable clients should be drawn to the hotel website—and take up residence in that hotel for the duration of their stay in the city. SSMD marketing of the hospitality sector is an ongoing affair and it is not going to end anytime soon or sour for that matter. SSMD marketing cuts costs streamlines manpower needs and is the best business card any hotel can hand to a prospective client. SSMD Piloto is a digital agency specializing in the design and search engine optimization of websites.