We’re over halfway through 2022 and our wonderful hypothetical hotel is thriving. All summer bookings have come direct, the email list is growing nicely and we’re carefully analyzing our analytics, making insight-driven optimisations along the way. All of this has meant we’re now very profitable and give little away to OTAs.
But why stop here? Next up, we will take aim at showing off our hotels brand to thousands of potential guests, driving up demand and allowing us to charge the premium we deserve.
Q3 – Becoming the choice
This quarter is primarily focused on growing awareness through visual advertising across digital platforms. It’s one thing marketing to a tribe of 3k on our email list but it’s quite another marketing to 50k across the web. Q3 is where we open the door on our hotels brand to new target audiences.
Enhanced social media
We started posting on social media back in Q1 but now, we will be allocating a small monthly budget to ‘boost’ the social media content and make it go further (maybe even 38% more investment for 401% more outcome).
To do this, we take successful social media posts and show them to a specific target audience. For example, I might have a post showing some guests in our spa that gets very strong engagement (likes, comments etc) and then decide to invest £50 showing that to a ‘lookalike’ audience of ‘people who book hotel rooms’ within 50 miles. With £50, I will reach around 50k people who Facebook has identified as being like our past guests.
This process repeated dozens of times combined with careful analysis will ensure I get our hotel in front of many relevant eyeballs who will to different extents become aware of the hotel.
Evergreen campaigns
Posts are great to push but sometimes, a bit more is needed. For example, with promoting posts, we cannot take advantage of the many ad creative formats which are available in Facebooks’ Business Manager.
This is where evergreen campaigns come in. I would start by developing stand-alone campaigns across Google Display Network, Facebook & Instagram for each of the hotels business objectives, these campaigns would be highly visual and aimed towards inspiring people to find out more about the hotel brand.
These campaigns would last indefinitely with the only changes being creative and targeted, based on the seasons and current results.
If I have time, I’d also take a peek at doing some experimentation on TikTok and Snapchat, given the large reaches of these platforms – but that may have to wait till 2023…
Final word
We’re now reaching many more of our ideal customers across the country and in doing so, our awareness continues to compound. The ROI may not be obvious today but this combined with the fundamentals we set in the first half of the year means we’re setting ourselves up for years of success in 2022 and beyond.
Only 1 more step to go now and that is kaizen, otherwise known as ‘continuous improvement’. In the final leg, I’ll explain how I would go about maintaining and improving marketing efforts because unfortunately, marketing left unattended quickly becomes outdated and ineffective.
If you’d like a deep-dive on anything above, please let us know here! we’re working hard to make this blog relevant to your hotel marketing needs and we can only do this with your feedback.
As always, thank you for reading and I hope you will stick around for the journey!
Jack