July 1, 2019
Hotel Marketing is complex. That’s because hoteliers have a million things to consider: who do you advertise with? What kinds of marketing products do you choose? And how do you know your chosen strategy will drive revenue?
Your answers to these questions have changed in the past five years, or perhaps even the past five months along with the ever-changing landscape of hotel marketing. Put differently, while objectives — like maximizing RevPar — may not have changed, the strategies to achieve these objectives, certainly have. We’ve written a Hotel Marketing Guide to help you navigate these changes.
How the Landscape Has Changed and Why It Matters
How travelers shop for hotels has changed dramatically in the last few years. For example, shoppers don’t visit just a few sites before booking. Instead, our Path to Purchase study reveals that in the 45 days leading to travel booking, travel shoppers make an average of 141 travel site visits prior to a purchase.
As the traveler’s path to purchase grows more complex, the hotel industry has to respond with increasingly sophisticated hotel marketing and advertising strategies. After all, shouldn’t your strategies be as savvy as the shoppers you’re trying to reach? And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how the changing demographics of the travel industry are affecting marketing strategies broadly. For example, we’ve discovered that millennial travel habits are transforming the travel industry and forcing brands to address millennials’ desires for activities and experiences. As a result, marketing strategies must be increasingly multifaceted.
All of this is to say, the hotel marketing world is a difficult one to navigate and it takes expertise and sophistication to steer through it skillfully. This may all sound rather challenging, but rest assured that we are here to help you. We leverage our years of hotel marketing experience to create strategic campaigns for our clients. We break down how we do this in our guide and I have outlined it below.
How You Can Navigate the Complexity
In my experience, there are three pillars that make for successful hotel marketing campaigns:
- Targeting a Highly Qualified Audience
- Products and Solutions to Drive Revenue
- Data and Reporting Insights
Each section of the guide takes up the above and gives examples of clients that have used them successfully. 
Target A Highly Qualified Audience: Know your audience—a timeless piece of advice that is more relevant than ever. If you don’t have a clearly defined audience in combination with a targeting strategy to engage that audience, your campaign will likely miss the mark. Avoid this by engaging targeted audience segments. Our digital media experts can help you analyze our first-party data and hone in on your ideal audience.
Products and Solutions to Drive Revenue: Choosing the right product or solution to meet your specific challenges (while staying on budget), is another way we help you achieve your goals. Our suite of advertising solutions, which are designed to drive revenue, include: display, social, email, audience extension, sponsored listings, and custom campaigns.
Data and Reporting Insights: Robust data leads to powerful insights and helps make your hotel marketing campaigns unique and revenue-driven. We analyze our first-party data and commissioned studies to uncover these insights and give you a competitive advantage. Of course, data insights are only as good as those who evaluate them and our data experts devote their time and energy to discovering the story beneath the data.
We’ve designed these pillars to capture and use the changes in the hotel marketing landscape — like shoppers’ behavior and the shifting demographics — to your advantage. Download the study to learn more about how you can create successful hotel marketing and advertising campaigns.
