A precise guide to Marketing Automation for your Hotel

Marketing Automation is the remedy to gain productivity and efficiency in your hotel marketing campaign.

Thanks to the growing technology we have so many ways to reach a mass audience. But it also means that we have to manage more marketing channels to manage.

And that is why marketing automation is the demand of the hour.

The year 2020 is a revolutionary year in terms of technology. We are going to see the implementation of many new technologies.

Obviously, this is a good sign for a hotel business. But it will also mean that you will have to be smarter for the best possible implementation of these technologies

So we will have to take the help of technology to manage technology. Yes, I mean to manage all the new stuff in marketing we will have to adopt marketing automation.

So in this article, I will like to focus on four basic questions.

And those questions are What is Marketing Automation, What are the trends in 2020, why we adopt it and How we can adapt it.

Marketing Automation is the process of automizing marketing operations through sophisticated software.

Different marketing actions like social media marketing, email marketing, different kinds of website processes, etc, that are repetitive can be automated through these pieces of software.

Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitive tasks.

Wikipedia 

Now when we get to know what is Marketing Automation then we also want to know what are some tools that are used for Marketing Automation.

Let us start with email automation. Email Marketing is still one of the best marketing practices.

It is old school but most effective. It offers personalization more than any other marketing effort.

The tool that can be used for Email Marketing Automation is Mailchimp.

MailChimp is one of the most popular email automation tools which is free to an extent. So it is a good tool to start with.

We have accounts on several social media platforms. Manual Posting on these platforms regularly is a hectic task.

If you have five social accounts on different platforms and you have to make two posts daily on each of them then it actually means that you have to do ten posts daily.

So some tools that can be used for Social Media Marketing Automation for distribution are Buffer and IFTTT. Both of these tools are free and very effective.

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There are many reasons for adopting Marketing Automation and some of them are

With smarter chatbots, we will have a better customer engagement this year.

Currently, we support our customers via calls or live chats in case of any issue. Now, this modus operandi can be clumsy at times.

A customer has to wait in queue for his turn to talk. Also providing 24 X 7 support is a difficult task.

Chatbots solves these issues for us.

Through a chatbot, a user gets an instant help that too at any time of day.

Today is talk about the omnichannel approach of marketing. Here we target different channels maximum business-customer touchpoints.

But multiple channels mean more data to manage. Each channel will give you data regarding customer buying habits and other preferences.

Now data segregation, data management, data integration, and formatting are the most time-consuming tasks.

So automation will be a key factor in reducing the time and effort required in these tasks.

This reason is so obvious. Marketing Automation saves it time and it is a fact.

Just assume that in this holiday season you are offering some extras on the booking of your room. Now sending emails to hundreds or thousands of your clients through conventional email methods is a mammoth task.

Using an email automation tool will do it for you with a few clicks. Of course after first time setup.

With the help of automation tools, you can gather and use your guests’ data.

This data can be used to provide more personalized services at your hotel.

A platform that allows you to collect and centralize your guest’s data gives you the superpower to understand your guest’s likings.

And on the basis of this knowledge, you can direct your marketing efforts which will be more effective that way.

You can segregate the guests in different categories and then send more relevant information.

First of all, the automation of marketing prices will decrease the load on employees.

With the marketing tools properly implemented your one employee will give you better results than a department.

Once you have decreased some of the expenses then you have to increase the revenue.

Marketing Automation will make your sales and customer follow-ups more effective.

As things will be consistent and properly scheduled. And this will have a positive effect on your revenue and ROI.

It is not rocket science to make your marketing efforts automated. All it needs is a will and a little bit of awareness. So here are some tips to start your marketing campaign.

Before automating the processes you must analyze that are you ready for it. Because you must have some other tools in your hotel that are more important to you.

Some of these tools are PMS, Channel Manager, and a booking engine.

If you are stable with these tools and now you think that you can advance further then you can think about marketing automation.

Otherwise, you should focus on these tools first.

When you have a modern PMS or a hotel booking engine like QloApps, it will provide you with a lot of insightful stats. You can use these stats to understand your guests.

On the basis of these stats try to segment your guests. And then decide content you have to send them in which interval.

Make sure that it is not only your marketing team who is working under the hood of this task. For an example of email marketing, you need guest emails.

So put your staff on work. Because guests give much information to the staff when they are talked to. To gather this information and put them on good use.

When you have all that is needed. It is time to plan a schedule for your actions. You should make sure that you have marketed the right thing at the right time.

This will be the main factor in deciding whether your marketing automation campaign will be a success or not.

So it is evident that marketing automation is the need of the hour. We should start thinking about them.

We also discussed some points we should keep in mind while starting such a campaign.

Please share your views in the comment box and any suggestion is most welcomed.