How to identify and target your hotel customers

Before starting your hotel you must identify and target your guests. It will help you to understand your target audience.

Target marketing allows you to focus and invest your money and brand message to a specific target market.

This market will more likely to buy from you than any other specific market.

Thus, when you identify and target your customers, you can get to know about what types of customers to deal with and how to handle them.

You can build your communication strategy as per the needs and demand of your target customer.

Eventually, it helps to grow to the hotel business.

Where?

Identify the locations from where your guests are? Whether they are local or international?

And if they are local they are from which part of the country?

Which language are they comfortable to speak and understand?

You must prepare this list of questions so it’s easy to prepare facilities for them.

Why?

Know the reason for their visit. Are they visiting or business purposes or for leisure trips?

If they are visiting for leisure purposes then ask them what kind of services do they seek?

• Enjoying and relaxing in this environment.
• For practising sports.
• Explore new places, people and learn new and exciting things about the place.
• For spending quality time with their friends and family.

If they are coming for business purposes then where are their office members are residing, place where headquarters of their office is located.

Who?

The people who are visiting your hotel, you must be aware of their age group.

Whether they are-:

• Young Engaged Teenagers, 
• Young couples with children, or without, 
• Family, 
• Active Elderly, 
• retired

And also know their purchasing power

That is luxury, high-end, comfort or low.

How Many?

Know the people visiting are in large or small groups or solo or with their families.

What kind of groups do you get? 

• Friends and Family, 
• Clubs / Unions, 
• Seminars / Building a Team?

Market segmentation

Making a list of the relevant market segment and classifying them on one of the quadrants of the BCG matrix. This will help you to set your priorities.

Question Mark

Put in this quadrant that customer segment which have high growth potential but low market share.

It holds low market share in the fast-growing market which consumes large amounts of cash and causes losses.

It has the potential to gain market share and becomes a star. Eventually, it can become a cash cow.

Star

Stars operate in high-growth industries and maintain market share. You can put here that customer segment which has high growth potential and a high market share.

It is both a cash generator and cash user.

They are the primary units in which you should invest its money in because stars are expected to become a cash cow and generate positive cash flow.

Cash Cow

Put in this those customer segments that have a large market share and have reached maturity.

Cash cows are the most profitable brands and should utilize to provide as much cash as possible.

To help their further development the cash earned from “cows” should be invested in stars.

Dogs

You can put here those customer segments that represent a small share of the saturated market.

Dogs hold small market share in the market as compared to their competitors and function in the slowly growing market.

They are usually not worth investing in, as they produce a small or negative cash return.

But it is not always true. Some dogs may be profitable for a long period of time and act as a defence to counter competitor moves.

How to deal with travellers?

Ones the guest visit your hotel you must understand their need as they will not inform you what they want.

Let’s consider the example of zostels what they do is they make a neutral environment for the customer.

It is more like a home feeling. They don’t provide you with many facilities. You have to get those by asking for them.

In zostel, everyone is like one family/ friends even though in its limited-time. They make good memories even though are cheap.

So that the reason foreign tourist like to stay in zostels, not in fancy hotels.

This is one of the greatest concepts of the business while considering that every hotel heads must understand the reason guests are visiting their hotel.

Do they come for business or leisure purposes?

When they come in for spending free time, what sort of opportunities are they searching for?

Rest, or Enjoy meaningful time with their family/mates or they are seeking to meet some freshmen or all they want to know a foreign language/ community etc.

When they come for business, where are their business meetings going to hold? 

These are a few questions that you must understand before dealing with the visitors.

This is possible only when you identify and target your guests.

Ultimately, it will enhance their experience when visiting your environment which meets the needs of their visitor.

Benefits of identifying the target audience

Generally, precision has to do with the main advantage of developing and optimizing prospect groupings.

The more precise you can be about your segmentation of the market, the easier it is to attract more high paying clients who can rave about your hotel.

When you know who you are trying to meet, you will concentrate on appealing to these groups with your marketing and sales activities.

The alternative is to engage the general public in the hopes that they will at some point want to stay in your hotel.

And while this approach can give you some bites, it’s essentially not a sustainable long-term strategy.

• Efforts to market and sell can be both more efficient and easier to quantify. 
• You ‘re going to be able to invest in highly coveted apps, offers and improvements that guests already know they enjoy. 
• You’ll draw more customers and raise sales per customer.

There’s plenty to be learned by segmenting the pool of potential visitors, as you can say.

If you’re wondering where to get going, you can start by organizing your list into some tried and tested segmentation groups of hotel targets on the market.

Conclusion

It is crucial to identify and target customers. One must identify the locations from where guests are visiting.

Know the reason for their visiting your hotel, whether for leisure or business purposes. What is their age group, etc

And then accordingly you must identify and target customers to gain a competitive advantage over others.

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