The hospitality business is often about making an impact on customers when they are on-site and experiencing your hotel firsthand. However, as consumers are becoming increasingly reliant on smartphones and tablets, a mobile strategy is quickly becoming an imperative aspect of marketing your property—even if it doesn’t have an immediate impact on revenue. Here’s a look at the real value of mobile marketing for your hotel.
1. You know you’re speaking to your customers in a way that reaches them. Smartphones and tablets have evolved from technology tools to highly personalized devices that consumers have come to depend on daily. Not only do consumers use their mobile devices as a way to store and carry highly personal information—including photos, business and contact information, and financial data—smartphones and tablets are quite frequently kept on their person.
Unlike a direct mail piece or advertising in a newspaper or magazine where your intended audience might not even note the tactic or message, there’s a high probability that if your target consumers aren’t already connected to a mobile device somewhere, they will be soon. According to some estimates, consumers check their mobile devices more than 100 times a day and spend at least two hours a day interacting with them.
2. You can put insights into context. One of the surface benefits of a mobile strategy may include the ability to geolocate strategies delivered through mobile advertising at the moment your customer is looking for a hotel like yours. But there’s a bigger picture. You can leverage the context to the mobile user’s activity and interests for a more relevant mobile effort, especially in the hospitality industry.
For example, some airlines have found success using branded mobile apps to notify customers of a gate change or departure delay. They then continue to keep the same app equally functional to the same customer for a different reason, such as guiding the user to various destinations outside the airport. Hoteliers can leverage the same type of contextual messaging to develop a highly relevant mobile strategy that reaches far beyond overt marketing to form a repeat interaction and a value-added relationship with customers.
3. The gamble is fairly inexpensive. Despite the fact that it’s often a challenge to isolate a true “read” on the return on investment with emerging and newer technology, mobile is accessible and cost-efficient, especially to smaller advertisers. Despite that, the Mobile Marketing Association estimates the average business dedicates less than 1% of its marketing budget to mobile efforts. Aside from potentially less creative involvement and costs than print marketing tactics, mobile marketing allows for experimentation: There is no part of a mobile marketing effort that can’t be tweaked, enhanced, changed and tested against in order to gain insight about a message, a strategy or segment of the audience.
Though mobile strategies might involve some experimentation in order to learn what works, the reality is consumers use mobile devices daily. The hotel marketer who makes a concerted attempt to understand the opportunities, costs and risks the tactic can offer to his or her business—even without an immediate ROI—has the opportunity to set the tone for how the tool can be used to shape consumer expectations and response. Though it might not be prudent to put more than 10% of your marketing budget into mobile if you have proven strategies through other means, it’s worth understanding how a mobile strategy fits into your business opportunities before a competitor learns more about your consumer than you do.
Though experimenting with mobile marketing might seem like a complex undertaking, it’s an inexpensive way to reach customers through the very tools they’ve come to rely on to manage critical aspects of their lives. By experimenting with mobile opportunities like responsive site design, apps and location-based messaging, you can test creative treatments, messages, pricing models and offers to determine the best use of your marketing dollars.
Kristen Gramigna is Chief Marketing Officer for BluePay, a firm that provides support with accepting credit cards from customers in the hospitality industry. She brings more than 15 years of experience in the bankcard industry in direct sales, sales management, and marketing to the company and also serves on its Board of Directors.
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