If you want to grow your events venue and attract more clients, then you need to get hospitality marketing right.
These days, there is an enormous opportunity for marketing your business online. Any kind of hospitality business can access various tactics and channels to reach more customers, engage their audience, and generate more revenue.
This guide explores some of the best hospitality marketing strategies and tips your events business can use.
What is Hospitality Marketing?
Hospitality marketing refers to the process of promoting your hospitality business to attract more customers.
As the hospitality industry is so diverse, with many different business types, hospitality marketing strategies can differ significantly based on the business and target audience. Hospitality marketers could use different tactics for restaurant marketing, hotel marketing, event venue marketing, etc.
However, there are a few core channels, tactics, and processes that any restaurant, hotel, or travel company could use to attract its target audience and generate more business.
Why is Hospitality Marketing Important?
Effective hospitality marketing is essential if you’re going to attract customers to your business. Without the right marketing strategy in place, nobody will know what your business offers.
The hospitality industry is also heavily focused on the customer experience. This means customer loyalty and displays of social proof are incredibly important for successful hospitality businesses.
The right hospitality marketing strategy will help your business stand apart from the competition, reach people who are interested in your business, and help to generate more revenue.
Hospitality Marketing Trends and Strategies
There are endless direct hospitality marketing strategies your business can use. So, finding the most effective ones can be confusing.
Regardless of what type of venue you offer or who your customers are, let’s explore some of the most powerful hospitality marketing trends and tactics for any business in this industry.
User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) is particularly important in the hospitality industry. This marketing tactic is all about using authentic, engaging, and relatable experiences shared by your customers.
By showcasing real guest stories, photos, and reviews, hotels, and restaurants can build trust, amplify brand awareness, and create a sense of community. This approach fosters loyalty and attracts new patrons.
You can promote UGC on social media through giveaways or referral campaigns. However, the best tactic for hospitality marketing is simply focusing on online customer testimonials.
People also trust referrals from other people more than they trust marketing messages from brands. So, using UGC can help your hospitality business be more persuasive.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing follows a similar idea to UGC, except that you pay for it instead of it being generated naturally.
This marketing tactic uses influential personalities to promote hotels, restaurants, and travel experiences. You can tap into the influencers' large and engaged audience to reach a broader demographic, build credibility, and generate more buzz around your brand. This is a great strategy to improve your visibility and drive bookings.
Influencer marketing becoming incredibly popular has led to the rise of the micro-influencer. This is ideal for smaller businesses, as it makes influencers more easily available to anyone - even if you have a tight budget.
Email Marketing
Email marketing may not be anything new, but it’s still one of the most reliable tactics for an effective hospitality marketing strategy.
You can use email marketing to nurture leads and send engaging content, discounts, and special offers. You can also automate your email marketing strategy, ensuring you send relevant content to the right people at the right time.
Email marketing is easy to do, and can achieve an impressive 36x ROI if done correctly.
Personalized Marketing
Personalization marketing aims to send tailored content and messages to your target customers, based on their interests and behaviors. This is something you can achieve with the right marketing automation tools, as well as a good CRM.
By personalizing marketing efforts, hospitality companies can increase engagement and generate more interest from their prospects and customers. This is ideal for boosting customer loyalty and standing out from the competition.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a big topic that spans blog content, video marketing, special media content, and much more. It plays a pivotal role in any hospitality marketing strategy. The idea is that you create valuable and relevant content that resonates with your target audience.
Through blog posts, videos, social media, and more, hospitality businesses can showcase their unique offerings, share useful tips, highlight local attractions, and more. This approach establishes the brand as an authority, boosts SEO, nurtures customer engagement, and ultimately drives more bookings.
Paid Advertising
If you want to attract an online audience fast, then running paid ads is one of the best ways to do it.
Hospitality businesses can create targeted ad campaigns on platforms like Google Search and social media. This works so well because these online platforms utilize enormous amounts of data, which means you can be incredibly specific about who your ads target. When you get it right, your hospitality marketing ads are only shown to potential customers - helping you achieve a good ROI.
Local Marketing
Your hospitality business is a brick-and-mortar space in a physical location. This means you need to attract certain customers within a particular area - which is what local marketing is all about.
While many online hospitality marketing strategies help you reach a large audience, local marketing is all about attracting your community. You can achieve this with local SEO, targeted local ads, being present on local directories, advertising on local media, or even handing out flyers.
Conclusion
These are just some of the most effective hospitality marketing tactics. However, the most impactful strategies just depend on who your target audience is and what kind of business you run.
To streamline your hospitality marketing strategy, you’ll need to use the right software to manage your venue. Perfect Venue is an all-in-one event management platform, that helps you stay more organized and improve customer experiences. Try it for free to see how it can help you grow your business.
