The main pillars of marketing, whether it be the four P's — product, price, place and promotion — or knowing your audience, remain the same, but the way that messaging is formed is constantly evolving as technology improves.
The use of artificial intelligence has been a popular subject of conversation in the hotel industry. Jason Pirock, head of marketing for Springboard Hospitality, said marketers shouldn't be scared of it, but should rather embrace it.
"I say that because the way that I'm looking at it is it's ultimately — it's been around for a long time. Whether [it's] machine-learning versus AI — it's been called a lot of different things. Obviously, it's had its sort of resurgence more recently, but I ultimately look at it as support. I look at it as an extension of what you do in order to be more productive, maybe more efficient," he said on the latest episode of the Next Gen in Lodging podcast, this month hosted by Davonne Reaves.
Kylie Chen, senior digital marketing manager for Twenty Four Seven Hotels, said she was among the people skeptical of using AI at first. But as the technology becomes more prevalent — such as Google unveiling its own AI tool — her team has been using it more to help generate descriptive content in their marketing.
"It's about a balancing act between using AI and also having our input," she said. "AI within technology is a really good start, especially for hotels and restaurants, kind of merging what our input is from the hotel side of things and then AI can fill the gap, so to speak."
Staffing issues brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic forced marketing teams to search for efficiencies, and AI is a tool that can produce just that, said Christos Perakis, co-founder and CEO of Wi-Fi marketing platform Zoottle.
"A lot of marketers were forced to do multiple jobs, and people that were marketers were in sales and marketing or they had to take on multiple properties, so you had to create efficiencies," he said. "So what I find with [machine-learning or] AI, it takes away friction of the technology, it increases efficiency."
For more from Pirock, Chen and Perakis, listen to the full podcast at the link above.
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