Social media plays a huge role in influencing today’s big markets and industries. From small businesses to the big ones, like pharma companies, automobiles and hotels, all use social media to their advantage.
Using strategic social media marketing practices can increase brand awareness, drive product or service popularity, and increase number of potential customers. Social media helps brands stay relevant in the fast-changing markets of modern business by putting your product or service in front of the customers.
The hotel business, on the other hand, doesn’t offer the common low-price advantages to its customers. That’s why social media marketing for hotels needs to be more nuanced and evolved as compared to other businesses.
The nature of the hotel business requires an impeccable marketing strategy and planning that can rake up client interest, raise engagement on its social pages, increase hotel bookings and popularity.
By regularly posting on social channels and pages, you can understand what the current hotel trends are, what customers need from a hotel experience, and a chance to engage and connect with your followers on an organic level.
This blog is going to attempt at distilling and condensing the ultimate social media strategy for hotels in 2024.
Why do Hotels Need Thriving Social Media Marketing Plan?
Before jumping right into the strategy and the steps involved, we want you to have a clear understanding of why and how to use social media marketing for hotels:
Increase Brand Recognition
In order to keep milking the benefits of increased brand recognition, a continuous internal audit that identifies the impact of the marketing efforts and strategies put in place is required.
This thorough social media auditing requires businesses to seek the professional services of social media managing companies that maintain, create, and assess social media content and analytics for your business.
A brand that is leading in an industry space is advantaged in the sense that it has to put a lot less effort into acquiring potential customers, closing deals, and gaining market share.
To stand a cut above the rest among a sea of other brands, vying for the same customer attention and retention, you have to ensure visibility through backlinking, an optimization strategy perfected by the team at the Link Building HQ, where content is calibrated in such a way that it increases reach.
‘Memes’ have become the go-to social media content that is not only highly entertaining but also highly informative and relevant, too. Improving products and services with help of social media insights and direct, one-on-one engagement with the followers will drive brand loyalty.
Branch out into other social networks and target audiences more precisely
After achieving a certain level success on the social media channels, you will gain valuable insights into your customers. These include: new followers, demographics, mentions of your brand or product, how many times your content gets shared, traffic to your pages, viral video views, etc.
You can then use these insights into informing your future social marketing strategy and tailor your content down to the specifics to drive even more engagement from your customers.
You can also use the insights to know if you need to target a certain demogrpahic from an entirely different social media platform.
Increase Customer Loyalty by Employing Engagement Strategies
Social media allows brands to build long-term relationships with their customers.
Engagement over the social media channels allows the customers to know more about the brand, fills in their knowledge gaps, and inspires favorable opinion. The object here is to let the customer know that that they are getting exactly that which they expect.
Engagement can be driven by introducing and catching on with trends, starting meaningful conversations, and collaborating with famous and most-liked celebrities and influencers in the space.
These strategies will promote a brand image of dominance and popularity among your targeted markets. An effect will be created around your brand, where customers will synonimize prestige and novelty with your brand.
Keep A Track Of Consumer Feedback
While engagement is highly important, you need to keep an eye out for feedback, be it positive or negative. Never neglect customer suggestions in improving your brand’s offerings. It is important that you not only monitor their feedback, but also let the customers know that their feedback is heard and valued.
Monitoring customer feedback will give you sneak peek into customer perceptions of the brand, their sentiments, and how does the brand size up to its competitors in the market.
Keep a track of how often customers engage with your own and your competitor’s brand, so you can work on better social media tactics.
Transform Your Social Media Followers Into Customers
Ultimately, every business is about turning its investments into revenues and profit. The social media tactics mentioned here will help you turn your followers into new customers.
You can use tailored and targeted aid campaigns, awareness drives, surveys, and other such techniques into pique interest. Make sure you are constantly evaluating your plans, working on improving them, and tracking feedback constantly.
How To Develop the Best Social Media Marketing for Hotels Strategy?
The hotel business, as mentioned previously, is a little different than other models of business, and, therefore, hotel marketing is a little different. The hotel business, as mentioned previously, is a little different than other models of business, and, therefore, hotel marketing is a little different, so it’s essential to look at the latest trends in hotel marketing to develop strong strategies. The following are the prime elements of any effective social media marketing strategy that also works well for hotels.
Seasonal Planning
Most hotel businesses don’t have season-to-season strategies in place, which means that there are gaping holes in your social media strategies. First of all, you should have a dedicated team of marketing experts, working the entire 12 months of the year, who can make season-specific strategies for your hotel in order to capture the in-season demand spikes in customer interest.
The seasonal fluctuations should inform your social media strategies. Consider peak and off-peak seasons, and tailor strategies to the kind of demand that each season is bound to produce.
For example, if it is peak season, post attractive content on your social media channels along with limited offer discount packages, which will influence the prospective clients to choose you over your competitors.
If, on the other hand, it is the off-peak season, the content on your socials should be geared toward audiences that prefer a relaxing weekend stayover at your hotel.
Constant Improvement
You can use certain social media management apps to keep track of your customers’ reviews. These apps gather insights and data on your social media engagements and presence, and can be used to inform your future strategies.
You should also actively check Google reviews on your business and respond to customer feedback. Don’t disregard negative comments and let them help you identify your problem areas. Let your customers know that you value their reviews and recommendations.
Build a Deeper Connection
Let your audience get to know you. Through your social channels, give your audience a tour of the hotel’s kitchen, the menu, hotel rooms, ballrooms, and the buffet table. Take them behind the scenes on different events, and post clips and images of your staff working hard in serving their guests.
All this social media engagement is geared toward creating familiarity and making the guests feel at-home when they arrive at the hotel.
To drive further enagagement, loyalty, and connection, you can post stories, polls, contests, and weekly and monthly challenges.
Always keep the followers engaged, in one way or another, on the social media channels, so that your brand stays relevant and front-and-center in the customer’s mind.
Collab With Influencers
Hire influencers with a huge active following and a high conversion rate. Invest in a luxurious stay for these social media influencers, so they can then post videos and pictures of your hotel from their own accounts to the millions.
Exotic poolside videos and luxurious hotel room photos go viral when posted by social media influencers and get shared in the millions, spreading your reach far and beyond.
Before hiring any influencer, you have to keep your budgeting restrictions in mind. Influencers charge a certain fee for promoting your business to their followers. Also, ask yourself which influencer complements your brand best.
Video Content
Bite-sized clips are the rage these days on all the social media platforms. Whether it is the Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or Snapchat, we are constantly scrolling through endless feeds of short video content. Then why not show off your scenic hotel views through short-form video content?
For creating short video content, look into hiring up-and-coming videographers. That way, you will get your content made within budget and help support and provide work for promising young talents in the field of videography and content creation.
Offer Special Discounts
People generally follow brands on their social media channels to keep track of their offers. Loyal customers stay on your pages and interact with your content.
In return, to appreciate and encourage your customers’ loyalty, you can offer them different hotel packages, loyalty points on their next visit, and special discounted offers. Such marketing tactics are employed to encourage repeat business and potential customers to choose your hotel.
Hotels can also provide incentives and loyalty rewards on the services offered alongside the room stay, like free poolside cocktails for leaving a stellar review on the social media page. To ensure easy social media access to its pages, the hotel management can hang a scannable code, somewhere in the lobby, so guests can easily scan and hit like.
Also, offer discounts on next visits for guests who post nice reviews on their pages along with videos and pictures of their stay in the hotel. You can gain more followers, widespread recognition, and active business by offering such loyalty benefits.
Post Regularly Across All Of Your Hotel’s Social Media Accounts
The social media is a long-haul game when practiced ethically. Doesn’t matter how much hype your competitors get, you should put in your creativity and effort into reaching ever wider audiences through your social channels.
Consistency is key to becoming successful in the social media space.
The following is a primer on what to post and how often should you post in a week on your social media channels:
- Regular updates – This doesn’t mean that you can start posting content haphazardly without any thought or schedule. Set a proper schedule for posting content onto your social pages. For example, you should post videos and images to your pages 5 times a week, at least, but you should be posting 5 times a day to your stories. The stories could include images and videos about the hotel’s daily buffet menu, chef’s special, events, pictures of the staff, aesthetic pool-views, etc.
- High-quality images – As a hotel business owner, you should never compromise on posting high-quality images and videos. A compromise on content resolution quality reflects poorly on your professionalism. Look for the best image angles and video shots.
- Highlight the best attributes of your hotel – As mentioned above, hotels sell views and experience. Always capture the best-looking corners of your hotel and let your audience know what they are missing.
- Encourage guests to have a one-of-a-kind experience – For instance, you can share testimonials and endorsements from your existing guests. Post about the special occasions hosted at your hotel, like marriages or other events, and let those speak for themselves on your behalf.
Do Not Neglect the Hashtags
A lot of people are still not using hashtags to their fullest potential. Hashtags are an immensely great tool to boost your brand’s reach, especially on platforms like Instagram and Pinterest.
Hashtags make your posts and videos easily discoverable to the potential audience. Hashtag stuffing, on the other hand, is a frowned upon practice that can damage your business. Only put relevant and trendy hashtags along with your posts.
Ask the following questions before putting in any hashtags: What travel keywords are mostly searched for by your target audience? How often do those keywords get searched? And what keywords are used by your competitors? You can also make your own specialized hashtags, that represent your brand, so that customers can easily discover your brand.
Use social media to increase direct bookings
You can add a “call to action” button on Facebook that links straight to your booking engine, allowing visitors to your social media profile to access your booking engine with a single click. Easy bookings allow for convenience, especially to mobile users, who can easily look for pricing, availability, and payment options, all with a few taps on their phone.
To Wrap Up Social Media Marketing for Hotels
Hotels need to make the most of social media marketing. Social media drives engagments, increases customer base, and offers a way of staying connected with your audience. Hotels have to be a little more nuanced in their approach to social media marketing. With the steps mentioned above, you can easily craft your own social media strategy for your hotel in 2024 and beyond.