What changes will be there in Hotel Marketing in 2019? And how we prepare ourselves for it?
These are the two most prevalent questions for every hotelier as we are at the end of 2018. But before taking any decision and making any strategy we need to first analyze what will be the marketing trends that will follow in 2018.
2019 will be the year which will be a game changer in terms of technology. The new technologies which emerged in 2018 or earlier will come out from their beta phase and will become part of our lives.
Techs like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Visual Search will be so much dominant that we have to take them under consideration before planing our Hotel Marketing strategy for 2019.
So let us have a look at some of the trends that will have a great impact on Hotel Marketing in 2019.
Programmatic Advertising is basically the use of sophisticated software solutions to automate the purchase of digital advertising.
The main advantage of Programmatic Advertising is the gargantuan increase in efficiency.
Traditionally, the human ad buyers and salesforces buy and sell digital ads. This is more expensive and undependable than the programmatic ad buying.
The technology will decrease the human efforts in the whole process. Hence, making the process more efficient and cheaper as well.
Tasks, like sending insertion orders to publishers and dealing with ad tags require lesser skills. These tasks will be given to technology.
While humans can concentrate on more important things like planning strategies.
Social Listening is a method to track what people are talking about a brand or industry on social platforms. It is used for community building and management, and reputation management.
In the social listing, the and web social platforms are crawled to search for all the mentions of that particular brand.
You can get to know what is the reputation of your hotel on in the community and what are the talks about you in the market.
There are many ways a guest share his feelings, experience, and feedback regarding your hotel. Social Listening will give you an idea about these feelings. And you can optimize your hotel accordingly.
The content was a sidekick for the traditional efforts till now. But in 2019 the content will become the leader of all your marketing efforts.
Your content is your online facade and you should be very serious about it. Your content opens doors for the interaction with your past and potential guest and hence, also promoting the user-generated content.
The interaction with the guest is very important for your hotel, it will make you a part of their lives. And hence, earning you a loyal customer.
So at the start of the year 2019 plan your content strategy with the highest priority. The aim of your content can be lead generation or SEO, whatever your aim and strategy are, document it. And make sure that you follow it for the year.
Artificial Intelligence will have a greater impact on our Hotel Marketing in 2019.
It is a myth that AI will replace human intelligence, the real use of AI is to amplify human intelligence. AI will help you in collecting data, data processing, business analysis, and guest services.
So automating your Marketing will be very important in 2019.
In Hotel Marketing, there are many low-value repetitive tasks that can be easily automated with the help of AI. This will allow humans to focus on what’s important.
Apart from that chatbots will also be very effective. With the help of chatbot, the customers visiting your hotel website will get an instant response. That will make your support more effective. Chatbots will also be very effective in increasing the conversion rate of your hotel website.
We are producing content in different formats. It gives the audience a better understanding of your hotel and services. So as a Hotel Marketer we should make sure that our content is ready for this trend.
The visual search is there for a long time. And let me quote something from a Google blog here,
When Search first began, our results were just plain text. But on February 24, 2000, something changed. It was the day after the Grammy Awards, and we noticed people were searching like crazy for Jennifer Lopez’s green dress. It was clear right away that people were looking for visual information, not just plain text. In the years that followed, the growth of mobile devices and small screens made it even more important to be able to quickly scan visual results.
But the latest changes in technology and the increased effect AI will make these searches more prevalent.
And this is not only good for your guests but also for Hoteliers. So be ready to tout about your beautiful hotel services and other services through videos and images.
The new year is on the verge and we should be ripe for the new strategies for Hotel Marketing in 2019. This year, we will witness many great changes in terms of technology. And because of that, the marketing techniques will also change to an extent.
Obviously, I was not able to cover all the points in this article. But I hope that I have covered some of the best points that should be talked about.
Drop your thoughts in the comment box. Also, any of your suggestions are most welcomed.
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