Why your hotel should embrace marketing automation
Marketing automation can be the engine to your hotel’s sales force. The technology is moving fast, but over the years hotel adoption has been a pretty slow process.
This gives you a significant edge to get all your departments in alignment. It could be that sure-fire leap ahead of your competitors.
According to Lenskold and Pedowitz Group, 63% of companies that are outgrowing their competitors use marketing automation.
The market is swamped with choice and dominated by the OTAs. Independent hotels need to regain power. Technology today can give you that power — the power to find new guests, grow relationships and nurture right through to a booking.
With marketing automation, you gain guest data insights and the ability to personalise communications. You save precious time by systemising your daily procedures.
It means you can attract, nurture and sell to guests in your sleep, and you can benefit from these same results over and over again.
The basis of this technology is so powerful, it means you can completely turn your marketing efforts around and start making a real difference to your bottom line.
91% of users agree that marketing automation is “very important” to the success of their overall marketing, according to Marketo.
With that said, let’s look in a little more detail at what marketing automation could really do for you.
Streamline and scale your processes
Marketing automation is all about working smarter and being better equipped to make informed decisions.
It relies on hotels being able to collect and unify data in one place to support a well-defined process. This means you can set every marketing method to automatic and allow more time for perfecting the guest experience.
Take for instance your presence on the Online Travel Agents. How long does it take you to update your inventory for each one? Or how about retargeting customers who didn’t book? How long does this take you to do manually? (If you even retarget at all, that is.)
These are strenuous tasks that eat up staff time and keep you stagnating at the same level. It’s difficult to scale your business when your resources are already completely allocated.
Look at it this way, marketing automation gives you more hours in the day. Instead of being tied down with old habits, technology gives you the power to function at full pelt.
Leverage guest data
By collecting and centralising guest data you have an extraordinary ability to understand your guests’ desires. This allows you to improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and budget.
When you know what your guests want, you can talk to them on a more personalised level and nurture guests through the sales cycle.
According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost.
The process excels when you segment your guests into sets according to numerous variables. This could be a specific time they booked, how many times they’ve stayed, how much money they spent or whether they booked direct.
Marketing automation allows you to segment these guest categories and send information that’s most relevant to them.
This allows you to nurture and qualify the most valuable leads and automate the whole messaging process.
Reduce staff costs
The amount of time your staff spends on writing emails, manually updating inventory and making sense of haphazard data is a cost to you. It’s time that could be better spent on nurturing quality leads and improving your guest’s stay.
Because marketing automation is highly intuitive and logical, it means you’ll realise the next step you need to take in most eventualities. For example, if X happens, you need to do Y.
There’s no floundering trying to figure out what to do or how to do it quickly. Marketing automation shows you the insights and the actions you need to take to maximise revenue potential.
This kind of fast-acting technology means you increase efficiency and allocate resources in the right places.
According to Nucleus Research, marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.
Marketing automation limitations
To be successful at marketing automation you first need a good flow of guests interacting with your business.
Marketing automation technology won’t work if you don’t have the guest data. You need people regularly signing up to your email list, engaging with your content and sharing with others. Only then will you have the insights to present information that plays on your guests wants and needs.
To build your guest database you need to attract guests, which is particularly effective through inbound marketing techniques.
If you’re not generating new, quality leads consistently, you may not be ready for marketing automation in a guest data sense.
However, adopting simpler marketing automation such as automated inventory management is spot on for immediately streamlining your processes. This doesn’t let you leverage guest data, but it is designed specifically for hoteliers to forget about updating prices all the time to focus on more guest satisfaction activities.
Marketing automation is taking businesses to the next level. Is your hotel ready to start seeing substantial changes?
The Booking Factory Team
