The Future of Hotel Marketing: Social Media Synopsis
By Judy Hou
Hotel chains that are open to 24/7 online social communications with their fan base can sense the power of a free flowing exchange of ideas, and capitalize on a low-cost marketing channel solution. Communication with customer base via social media channels is now expected as standard, whether these platforms are utilized to shape brand image, facilitate user-generated content or compliment a targeted pay-per-click campaign, social media is vital to the success of a hotel property. Moving into the future, the presence of the brand profile itself is no longer enough. What have we learnt so far in such a short space of time? How can we develop strategies to better optimize our online presence and manage our social audiences in order to remain competitive? What can we be doing to leverage these social platforms and optimize hotel revenue? There is no question that social media has become a major component of digital marketing. Companies need to be proactive in developing their social media strategy to gain a stronger footing. Paying close attention to technological developments as 4G network coverage gains international momentum as the speed at which international social audiences can navigate the Internet will accelerate, aiding our increasingly connected right here, right now online lifestyles. With the volume of communications online reaching unprecedented levels, marketers of hotel properties must listen and respond appropriately and promptly. Striving for a ‘within the hour’ correspondence turn around and having round-the-clock monitoring with dedicated customer services management for the social shop front is the target in view. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube provide an opportunity for hotel companies to create a social buzz about their brand at the corporate level, while at the property level inspiring travelers with a hotel’s unique selling points (USPs). In order to shape brand image and spark brand awareness through these platforms, companies need well-crafted content plans where they can regularly promote their businesses virtues. The social sphere should become a place for reputation management, where hotels publicize positive company updates, interesting and authentic company history, new properties opened, awards received and involvement with CSR and local communities amongst other content. These content that may otherwise clutter a hotel website unnecessarily can be pushed out routinely to entertain a social audience and give them valuable insight into the different dynamics of the hotel brand offering. Guests can additionally engage with a brand and give feedback about their stay on a hotel property’s social profiles, which will help to influence prospective visitors in their decision makings. Furthermore, having quality photos and ready content that is worth sharing on the property’s social site, properties can help guests in sharing their brand experiences and hotel stays with their acquaintances via their news feeds - a guest than becomes more than just a guest, but an e-ambassador for a brand. This feature in social media facilitates and promotes consumer participation whilst simultaneously helping individuals affiliate themselves with a brand name which can sometime boost their own social status. It’s every marketer’s job to help our guests to tell their special stories and share sneak previews into their personal lives online in the most refined and brand enhancing way possible. All this is well and good, but staying competitive is where one can develop their social sales opportunities. Today’s savvy connected consumer spends time researching into whether a hotel is really right for them before going ahead with their booking; the cost of the room is just the tip of the iceberg. This is where the media in social media shines through as the company displays an abundance of offerings, their properties and the intricacies of their products, to a captive audience. Professionally shot hotel photos, informative video interviews with amicable staffs, exciting food & beverage offerings and virtual tours all help to give a fantastic impression of the brand experience and allow people to decide whether this offering will really fit their accommodation, dining and facility requirements. To put things in perspective, here is a prime example of how a hotel company is optimizing their social presence in unique and interesting ways. Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group has extensive video playlists on their YouTube channel including ‘Celebrity Fans’ videos featuring interviews with Liam Neeson and Christian Louboutin; ‘Special Events & Celebrations’ videos featuring Chinese New Year celebrations filmed at their properties, and also ‘Giving Back’ videos featuring charity events held by the company which have made a difference to local communities of their hotels. A beautiful video speaks volumes compared to mundane marketing literature and is quick to digest and share. These ‘social’ videos also provide guests and the general public with behind the scenes insight, so they can really dig under the surface of the corporate label. Videos are by far the favored content on social platforms along with other visual media such as photographs due to the fact that they are highly appealing and communicate successfully across language barriers. Video reach out to audiences quickly and helps to start the brand experience early by giving guests the chance to avoid guesswork, instead, allowing them to really see for themselves whether they can identify with a brand. In just a few seconds they can gain an impression of what a stay at a hotel would be like, typical to the brand’s unique offering. Without this advance insight, which is the norm in our age of ready information, the offering can only ever be understood after the guest has stayed at the property, which is too late in the process. Travelers today expect to be provided with detailed product information alongside realistic reviews that give them confidence in their purchasing decisions early on, and video can be a helping hand in this. Video can be quick to give the impression that the hotel company offers a comprehensive service and understands the customer’s individual needs. As marketing slogans evolve into helpful information resources and convenient user-centered navigation systems, everyone benefits. Telling the brand story well and illustrating the product offering can only increase demand. The social media tools a company provides can assist the travelers in their research, and convincing them that their choice of property and location is a sound one. Decision-making is incentivized with the add-on of tangible value to the product before it has even been purchased. Adding this kind of ‘social’ value to the customer directly from the company is a good way to stay competitive with online travel agencies. A good example of a company adding ‘social’ value to their offering online is Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts who host an innovative info microsite called ‘Taste by Four Seasons: Serving up the best in global food & drink’. This microsite allows the client to explore and interact with part of the tangible product offering by acting as an information resource. The site features top content such as virtual cocktail classes; recipes shared by the chefs of Four Seasons properties; voting polls; find a Four Seasons restaurant near you and food & beverage news, trends and events. This site also demonstrates how social media assists with the optimization of the website in the search engine results pages (SEO), as the microsite is an appendage to the main bookings site, adding online value to the brand’s domain as a whole. Another great example of free value-adding content is the InterContinental Hotels Group iPad app called ‘InterContinental Concierge Insider Guides’ which acts as a destination info resource, allowing users to read worldwide city guides curated by local IHG concierge professionals. By helping the prospective guest to plan their vacation, IHG’s concierge app provides complimentary recommendations, putting service at the forefront of the company’s brand image and drawing the user in before they have even chosen the location for their holiday. By marketing the destination and being user-centric, the company makes life easier for the user by helping them to help themselves, and saves them time by showcasing a range of high quality day schedules along with super restaurant choices. This allows the hotel chain to curate the user’s experience of their brand while acting as a useful information resource. Accor Hotels are also headlining this social movement have built partnerships with local tourist boards to make this work effectively. Although discounts are not routinely offered, the information still incentivizes potential and existing customers by promoting loyalty, as good deeds promote reciprocation. Loyalty is hard to come by but is worth striving for, as we know that the cost of acquisition of a new guest is expensive when compared to encouraging repeat business. Accor Hotels also have a clever separate Facebook profile to promote ‘Accor Advantage Plus’ which is one of the largest hotel loyalty memberships in the Asia Pacific region. Their members enjoy dining and accommodation benefits at over 400 Accor Hotels throughout the region. On this social media page, Accor posts in different languages to personalize the Accor Hotels message to the broad region’s different markets. Making a booking is also most often incentivized with a discount, as today’s savvy globally connected consumer searches for special offers and throw-in added value. Here Accor is leveraging social media to promote their members discounts by showing photographs and vacation or dining suggestions alongside calls to action to ‘book now!’ Here the social media platform is proving useful tools for creating awareness of a hotel promotion launch; the hotel’s loyalty program benefits are publicized while time-sensitive booking opportunities are made known in a fun and visual way. So we have communicated, entertained and informed on the people’s channel, but how can we turn these interactions into the digital marketing life-blood of our business? What can we be doing to leverage these social platforms and optimize hotel revenue? Social media can help to create more points of sale by tapping into new customer segments, customers who might have previously never encountered the hotel brand before. This is where the opening up of social online channels presents more marketing options to hotel marketers, pushing them to weigh up the strengths and costs of each and every option available to them. In addition to expanding the market, Accor Hotel’s Facebook page demonstrates ways to turn a social media profile into a direct sales funnel. There is a tab urging the user to ‘book your hotel’ and when clicked this tab takes the user through to a form with a search function at the end, which in turn takes the user’s enquiry through to the hotel chain’s online booking system. There is another Facebook tab featuring the Accor Hotel’s website address which takes the user through to a dynamic page (with a choice of twelve language options) that allows the user to conveniently click to discover more about either ‘Weekend Getaways’, ‘Family Fun’ or ‘Theme Holidays’. This acts as a filter before taking the user straight through to the main bookings site. These strategic sales-focused social functions set a precedent for how to leverage social platforms in order to reach bookers worldwide on their channels of choice, with the aim of optimizing hotel revenue. Here hotels can successfully maximise their online visibility and tap into more sales opportunities. Hilton Worldwide is another company who take an integrated approach to drive demand for their hotel properties, with their Global Online Services team who leverage search, online advertising, social media and mobile marketing with a goal to reaching customers ‘everywhere and anywhere they happen to be’, driving the online lead from any online channel in the direction of bookings. So the big players in social media platforms should certainly be solid components of a hotel chain’s brand awareness efforts and online campaigns, but keeping contemporary in our methods, how do we know whether or not to jump in with both feet when it comes to recruiting new social media channel ideas? We should take opportunities where we see them in the more unchartered territory of new social media platforms. The statistics speak for themselves when we consider the use of newer avenues such as Pinterest, Instagram and Google+. By year-end 2012, the number of Pinterest users hit 11 million, with a high volume of users crossing over with a hotel market’s demographic. As outlined previously, online communities are increasingly accustomed to visual content, so this platform is complimentary to that growing trend. The global market of millennial consumers also have a creative streak to their generation, and Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts are already leveraging that by having a social profile on the Pinterest site with boards full of glamorous hotel and product offering images for users to re-pin at their leisure. At the same time, Instagram have an incredible 90 million monthly active users, so this avenue certainly cannot be ignored and should be investigated for use as a potential common social channel. Along with the popular social media platforms, increasing numbers of more focused interest group social media platforms are on the rise, helping to segment audiences and providing further opportunities to tailor online social communications. Google+ is going to be the real showstopper platform with a social revolution gaining momentum at over 400 million members, in comparison to Facebook’s over 955 million active users. With Google+ brands should improve their fan base just like with Facebook, and get as many ‘+1’s’ as possible. Google+ allows users to further define the relations between pages and authors directly to the Google search engine and show authenticity due to the alignment of user names with real people, and real businesses with verified physical business addresses. We all know that Google is the major search engine to impact our website’s visibility and so it is of paramount importance to understand that if our Google+ contacts have given a ‘+1’ to a page or website, this action will impact the probability of us seeing that page in Google’s search engine results pages. The only marketing intelligent option is to build and promote a strong, popular brand profile, which will be rewarded with better search rankings directly from Google. As well as recruiting new social media channels, our online social shop fronts should be international audience friendly, as travel opens up with the advent of budget air travel, increasingly streamlined visa processing and the rise of emerging middle classes in swiftly developing countries. The UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) predicts that by 2015 there will be 100 million outbound Chinese tourists. We should take opportunities in the often-unchartered territories of these growing bookings markets. Facebook, Twitter and the Google-owned YouTube are not readily accessible from within China, rendering them almost useless as social channels for meeting Chinese audiences on their terms. Instead, brands need to adopt domestic social media tools such as Kaixin, Sina Weibo and Youku, whilst communicating in simplified Mandarin Chinese. International audiences such as the Chinese use social media in alternative and unique ways, so it is important to be adaptable and tailor efforts. Building relationships is paramount to doing business in China, so social media acts as a channel for hotel’s to build relationships with their brand-savvy audiences across the water. In terms of methods of accessing social media platforms, these sites are increasingly being accessed from smartphones and tablets locally, and people are progressively being given the ability to use their smartphones to facilitate their user experience in and around the hotel. People are even being presented with the option of booking their hotel with hotel booking apps. Last minute discounted bookings via hotel apps could be essential ways to boost revenue and avoid empty hotel rooms. Smartphones have become a way of life, so mobile and tablet friendly social sites are constructive ways to keep the browser experience at the center of the booking process while we keep our doors open on the client’s terms. Close in the footsteps of smartphones are smart TVs, giving customers the option to access the Internet and social media channels from their living room, in place of traditional broadcast media. This will further push the hotels’ interactive social media under an ever-growing spotlight – so get ready to be more social
