What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
digital marketing strategy is an overarching marketing plan which outlines the approach to reaching your marketing goals using digital methods. It involves understanding your target audience, evaluating your budget, defining which channels and content strategies to use, setting specific goals, monitoring performance, and continuously optimizing the strategy.
Ultimately, a digital marketing strategy should help you reach your desired outcomes more efficiently and effectively.
Based on our experience working with the hotel industry, we have collated a step by step guide to creating an effective hotel digital marketing strategy:
Business Goals
ssess what it is that you want the hotel to achieve through digital marketing and setting measurable objectives. For example, digital marketing could raise brand exposure, educate guests about your hotel, increase direct bookings – or all the above. Identifying core objectives set the direction for all digital marketing efforts and spending. It also makes it easier to measure specific KPIs and gives direction to which trends in the industry are relevant to your hotel. Ultimately, setting clear goals and targets will help you plan a more effective strategy.
Digital Personality
igital branding relies on a brand’s personality, mission, vision, and voice, it equally relies on visual elements like colour schemes, logos, and fonts. Essentially, these digital branding tools tell your consumers who you are. Your hotel's digital marketing strategy should define how your hotel speaks, acts, and engages with your audience. This will form the foundation for marketing tactics such as SEO, content production, and lead generation.
Budgeting
udgets are extremely important early in the development of a digital marketing strategy to ensure funds are not exhausted on irrelevant platforms or campaigns. Start by deciding on a budget to allocate to campaigns, and then decide what percentage of the budget should be dedicated to each channel. It's also important to keep an eye on ROI (return on investment) - this will help you identify which areas are delivering the most value and help you make informed decisions about how to allocate funds.
Define Your Target Audience
his is vital in order to identify and understand who your target customers are and what they need from your marketing activities. Identifying the customer's wants, needs and preferences will help you tailor your digital marketing campaigns accordingly. For hotels, buyer personas help to investigate the platforms being used to access information and make buying decisions.
Relevant Content
his step involves creating a content strategy (link to article 3 - content marketing) that outlines the types of content to be produced and how it will be distributed. Content is audience-specific pieces of collateral such as images, videos, blog posts, or fact sheets so make sure to develop content in a tone, language, and multimedia format relevant to your dream guests.
Identifying Channels
nce your target audience is defined, deciding on which digital channels to use becomes easier. For example, consider which social media platforms, websites, or travel blogs are best suited to deliver your content to the right people. Additionally, you should evaluate which paid channels may be able to reach more of your target audience, and how you can use these channels to reach your goals.
Campaign Schedule
eveloping a plan for when and how your campaigns will be executed helps to set an actionable plan, which is informed by your business objective. Identify the key dates of your campaigns, such as the launch date and end date, and other milestones. To save time, make your schedule comprehensive by including time for research, content production, optimization, and testing. Finally, you should consider how often you will need to measure and adjust the campaign, to ensure it is achieving its desired results.
Leverage Automation
utomation can help you save time and money by streamlining common tasks, such as scheduling posts on social media or sending emails. It also helps measure the success of campaigns, by monitoring key performance indicators in real-time. Automating certain processes can help you optimize your campaigns and maximize your return on investment.
Monitor and Optimize campaigns
onitoring campaign engagement will indicate if your strategy is delivering the right content, on the right channel to the right people. Monitor metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, website visits, social media engagement, brand mentions, and conversions for each channel. This helps to adjust the campaign strategy to maximize its effectiveness.
Bookings and brand awareness for your hotel are direct indicators of a successful strategy and execution plan. These metrics give you room to improve, and as a hotel, improving the experience of your guest online and during their stay is paramount for overall business success.
Optimise Your Strategy
y analysing the data and insights collected you can determine what changes should be made. Consider which elements are working and which need to be improved, to make the strategy as effective as possible. Consider new channels, content strategies, or technologies relevant to the industry to increase brand SOV (share of voice) and increase engagement. By constantly reviewing and adjusting your digital marketing strategy, you can ensure it remains effective and successful.
An effective digital marketing strategy for hotels is necessary to achieve desired business goals, increase bookings and overall improvement of digital brand positioning. By having a comprehensive plan businesses can create campaigns that will effectively engage their audience and yield positive results.
Creating a winning digital marketing strategy for your hotel takes time, specialised skills, and experience in digital marketing.
So, why not invest in a plan to guide your digital marketing efforts? Not sure where to begin? That’s ok, we have extensive experience in growing our hotel clients’ businesses through robust strategy development and agile execution.
Let’s chat to see how WE can help your business excel in the digital world.
