Unless your hotel is fully booked all of the time, you’re most likely looking to attract new guests. Most hotels focus a lot on bringing repeat and new guests into their hotel. But how do hotels get clients?
Here are the most tried and tested, easy and popular ways to attract clients to your hotel:
Here are 8 easy ways that hotels get clients:
- 1. Appealing to emotions, creating a tribe
- 2. Creating share-worthy content
- 3. Strategizing loyalty programs
- 4. Running digital ad campaigns
- 5. Virtual tours and visualization
- 6. Adopting a digital environment
- 7. Going green with simple policies
- 8. Enhancing interiors, amenities, and locations
1. Appealing to emotions, creating a tribe
Hotels get clients with discounts and special offers, which in themselves are attractive. They are appealing to customers’ wallets. Effective marketing always speaks to the heart of a target audience.
These days, customers are increasingly valuing experience over price, and so hotel marketers are using different ways of designing services that personalize the experience for customers. In a way that delights, captures, and embraces their guest’s emotions.
This is especially achieved by training staff to give customers an emotionally connected stay at their hotel.
Through the delivery of uncompromisable hospitality, you can keep customers coming back and they’re more likely to recommend the hotel’s services to others through word-of-mouth.
So how do hotels get clients by appealing to emotions?
One term often used is “emotional motivators”. There are hundreds of these motivators that bring a customer closer to the brand. Some more modern terminology to this could be the idea of “building a tribe”.
Think about how Apple uses this technique to create a tribe around its brand. Many people are passionate about the company, the brand, the products, and even the employees.
Here are the top 10 motivators from the study that you could draw on for ideas on how to create your own “tribe”. We’ve added a couple of ideas alongside each one to help get you thinking.
Top 10 emotional motivators
You probably noticed that none of these motivators are focused on pricing and discounts. Pricing is of course important, but emotion is far stronger than pricing when it comes to targeting customers’ motivations.
Hot to use these factors for your hotel…
Convenience and ease of use is often a factor that clients look for too. So look to provide freedom of choice for your guests.
One way to do this is by enabling access from various areas in the hotel for guests to choose and purchase hotel services like food and beverage via a web browser.
Consider your geographical area, your target audience, their aspirations, and motivations. How would you like to appeal to a group of people who would make ideal guests for your hotel? Create your “tribe”.
“A company doesn’t have to have the emotional DNA of Disney or Apple to succeed. Even a cleaning product or canned food can forge powerful connections.”
2. Creating share-worthy content
One of the best ways hotels attract customers in modern times is by creating content that is worth sharing.
Be it any social media platform, hotels are increasingly producing creative marketing content that gains the attention of potential customers and persuades them of the need to get a hotel experience, even if they haven’t been planning one.
This has been proving to be a popular strategy to target infrequent customer groups.
Look at the popular social media channel of any leading hotel, you’ll be able to see they are composed of compelling marketing messages – be it videos, posts, or stories.
The majority of their marketing content happens to be those that viewers are excited to share with friends and their follower base.
Hotels are also making use of Facebook’s shift to a “video-first” approach, and other video tools and platforms to post appealing visual content that is more likely to get shared and attract customers.
Play to your strengths, create content that appeals to your tribe. Produce the type of media they want to see and will be emotionally attracted to.
Combine this with points 4 and 5 below.
3. Strategizing loyalty programs
They say that keeping and maximizing profits from your existing customers is easier than attracting new ones.
While this is true, naturally customers don’t always remain loyal to a hotel forever.
This is why hotels now, as both a means of attracting new customers and retaining old ones have introduced a unique way of strategizing loyalty programs. Loyalty programs are a great way to improve customer attraction and retention rates.
This is a tactic used by coffee shops and retail outlets all the time, and it can be adopted by hotels to attract customers.
While there are many ways that hotels design a loyalty program, most reward customers with financial savings (e.g. a percentage reduced from the package cost).
This is usually earned by staying for a certain number of nights.
Hotels get clients by leveraging loyalty
Loyalty programs are believed to attract customers simply to stay more, and keep them coming back to hotels – because they can benefit from the loyalty program.
Some hotels offer extra stays when customers have booked their experience for a specified number of times. This prospect of earning a reward can easily attract customers and even retain their interest in a hotel for the foreseeable future.
Adding this option to the emotional motivators listed above is a great way to cement a customer for the long term.
Let’s look at digital advertising next…
4. Running digital ad campaigns
Another effective way hotel marketers attract customers is through digital campaigns.
Digital campaigns are now a staple strategy that small and medium hotels use to attract customers.
In the digital era, we spend more time browsing the web and on the phone. One easy, and profitable means that brands can reach potential customers is through digital marketing.
Hotel marketers are running nationwide advertisement models that can attract potential customers from specific geographical locations. There are a wealth of mediums you can use to run an ad campaign.
Many hotels get clients by employing experts. Digital marketing agencies to ensure a more successful digital marketing campaign.
Even something as simple as urging guests to subscribe to your newsletter enables you digital access to potential repeat clients.
5. Virtual tours and visualization
How do hotels attract customers using digital tours?
Well, to attract customers, being able to show customers what their hotel experience is like allows them to visualize.
Thanks to technology, now this is made possible through virtual tours. With virtual tours, customers get an eye-catching experience on the amenities services and everything related to the hotel experience from the comfort of the home, before making a booking.
Visualizing is a powerful technique that draws a person closer to the experience by self immersion. This is often used on a personal level, but you can leverage the use of that vision with real-life tours.
The imagery on your website will already be providing this to some degree. Hotels are showing virtual tours on their websites to show prospective customers what they can expect from the hotel – and help build a vision for their stay.
This in turn is generating leads and driving sales. As a one-off task, similar to adopting easy-to-implement technology, you can gain additional revenue for years to come.
6. Adopting a digital environment
Many areas of our lives are now digitized, because of this, we enjoy a vast amount of flexibility. So, how do hotels get clients using this medium?
Hotels can embrace digitization by ensuring a large portion of their services are as digitally updated as possible. This will not only help customers …it will retain them.
Be it from online check-ins and check-outs to digital keys, customers prefer quick, flexible, and easy access to hotel services with minimal inconvenience.
With digital keys, customers can gain easy access to their rooms and not have to wait in reception areas for them.
The same applies to online hotel bookings, and/or virtual concierge services.
Consider digital check-ins. Customers can easily avoid a tedious check-in process at reception.
7. Going green with simple policies
When customers make purchasing decisions, “going green” is a growing customer preference.
As customers are increasingly becoming educated, they all want to offer a positive impact on the environment.
Often, guests don’t mind paying extra if a service abides by authentic green policies they can align to.
This is why many customers are considering green initiatives as a key factor that impacts their decisions.
An insufficient amount of hotels adopt a sustainable approach. This is something you can capitalize on.
There are a growing number of customers who are “conscious about green policies”. Adopting some simple and achievable green policies can appease a segment of your target market and set your hotel apart from your competitors.
Do some simple research and gauge what green policies your hotel can adopt that are both low cost, and achievable. Consider policies that you can use to advertise over your social media channels and other marketing platforms.
More on the visual side again, let’s look at decor…
8. Enhancing interiors, amenities, and locations
Hotels are an experience and many of their aspects are largely intangible. Hotels get clients by catering to that experience.
Creating an experience, rather than selling a product. Consider the ways you can reach and attract customers by giving them the experience they are seeking.
Customers choose hotels that match their style, their standards, their way of life, and their views on what an ideal hotel should be.
This is why bland hotels with no considered, attractive, and/or focused interiors or amenities struggle to attract customers. They are not memorable enough.
Hotels get clients by increasingly looking to enhance and redesign their interiors and amenities to fit the expectations of their target audience.
Hotels are also leveraging their location to attract different types of customers because Guests frequent hotels based on a variety of preferences. Examples might be hotel views, travel destinations, or sightseeing.
Hotel marketers are also making specific keywords, these words align with the expectations of their target audience.
Take a step back from your hotel. Look at the decor, the ambiance, the lighting, and all other design aspects. And ask yourself if this honestly attracts the type of customer you’re aiming for.
If it doesn’t, it may not mean you need to rip everything out and start again. Often a “sparkle”, and minimum outlay may be sufficient to start you on the road to meeting your customer’s expectations.
How do hotels get clients…
Start with our easy-to-implement, and easy-to-use web browser app. Hotefy brings your hotel into a digital age and increases sales by up to 30%.
Provide flexibility and freedom to your new “tribe” during their stay. Check out hotefy today, or simply check our demonstration site.