Five Tips for Starting Your Hotel’s Marketing Efforts on Social Media

Every business needs a viable set of marketing strategies in order to attract customers and clients, increase sales and achieve adequate brand visibility. For ages, the hospitality sector has been relegated to using traditional marketing methods for reaching audiences, including the use of hoardings, newspaper ads and direct mail campaigns.

With the advent of the internet, a seemingly limitless number of marketing options are now available to hotels both large and small. In particular, social media marketing presents an effective, affordable and flexible digital marketing solution that hotels can use to their advantage.

For hotels seeking to launch a social media marketing campaign, let’s examine five tips that can make the process quick and easy.

Most individual hotels can extract an immense amount of ROI from their initial social media campaigns without spending large sums of money. For as little as a few hundred pounds, managers can deploy amazing ad campaigns that deliver meaningful results. Depending on the budget of your hotel and its allocations, you may need to borrow the funding up-front. Services such as BingoLoans can provide quick funding for hotel marketing campaigns and ensure you won’t miss the next seasonal or holiday opportunity for attracting guests.

Most social media platforms (such as Facebook) allow a variety of customisations for each ad set and campaign. The most effective digital marketing efforts for hotels make sure of geography when selecting audiences. Besides targeting audiences native to your hotel’s location, careful research of past guests may yield information on which cities and areas a disproportionate number of guests live in. By targeting the areas where your guests are, your campaigns will be more efficient.

Every traveller has at least one horror story about a hotel they booked without seeing prior. As such, there is a certain level of apprehension when shopping for hotels. As an effective marketer, make sure that your social media ads display clear and crisp photos of your rooms, and videos as well if possible. Even 360-degree virtual tours are a brilliant form of multimedia to include in promoted social media posts and/or on your landing pages.

All too many hotel brands focus on promoting the facilities and amenities of their hotels and rooms. While this is valuable information, social media ad campaigns have relatively little text-based real estate to utilise effectively (to see comparisons of features versus benefits, click here). Instead, focus on promoting the benefits of staying at the hotel: this may include proximity to city centres, walkability, multi-night discounts and noise-free neighbourhoods.

Nobody wants to continue to throw money into the aether on their marketing campaigns. This is why any viable hotel marketing effort on social media must review the performance of each ad campaign. Collect as much information as you can from the analytics provided by the platform, review commonalities in each campaign, and make changes as necessary. Sooner or later, you’ll identify key patterns that improve – or reduce – the performance of a hotel social media campaign.

Starting a successful social media marketing campaign for your hotel is easier than you might think. Getting started is half the process: by incorporating the five tips above into your broader strategy, your endeavours will be both successful and profitable in the months and years to come.