Since our hotel marketing analysis service have been published, I am getting a lot of questions about what it actually covers and how we do it. In this article, I will share some information about our marketing analysis.
Brand presentation and brand communication analysis
We start with a comprehensive analysis of how your brand is presented online to evaluate the information and messages it delivers intentionally or unintentionally. This analysis covers everything that is visible online about your hotel or resort, including your brand website, OTAs, social channels and 3rd party publications.
The evaluation of these will highlight any issues and inconsistencies in the current marketing implementation of your hotel, focusing on mistakes that can turn off customers interested in booking with you.
Typical mistakes are a wrong tone of voice, inconsistent and poorly crafted messages, poor imagery, outdated websites and issues with social media content.
Sounds simple, but fixing the brand presence of a hotel or resort is essential before investing in further activities.
Digital marketing advertising & campaign performance analysis
Getting more technical, we will review your online advertising campaigns such as Google Ads, YouTube sponsored videos, Expedia TravelAds and social media ads. After the analysis, we will evaluate all your campaigns based on:
- How it contributes to your sales & revenue
- How it contributes to your brand development
- How efficiently it targets your key audiences
- How efficient it is compared to the advertising of your competitors and re-sellers
Depending on our findings, we will provide specific suggestions and action items to improve all these aspects.
Typical mistakes in digital advertising are:
- Confusing or uninteresting ad content
- Inappropriately targeted advertising
- Irrelevant messages for the target audience
- Poorly set up bidding strategies
- Unutilized advertising features
- Poor competitive metrics
- Low or sub-optimal budget allocation on specific channels
During the analysis we will help to reveal all shortcomings and will provide action items to improve your advertising in every possible way.
Brand website performance analysis and evaluation
The brand website is a major asset for our hotel and resort clients. Not only it helps to promote the brand and get potential customers get familiar with the unique values of the property, but it is also a successful sales tool to capture direct bookings and get direct booking inquiries.
A successful website of a 5-star hotel or resort:
- Generates around 3-8% of the overall revenue with it’s booking engine
- Drives direct booking inquiries (emails & calls) between 5-10% of the overall revenue
- Gets media inquiries and partnership offers
If a hotel website does not do this then it can considered to be sub-optimal and there is very likely place for improvement.
A brief visual and stylistic overview is followed by a heat-map analysis to understand the flow and behavior of your website visitors, then we will set up goal conversion tracking to understand drop-off rates and exit rates better.
After the analysis is completed, we will provide a comprehensive evaluation and action items to get your website into shape, showing your team how to manage it better, or else giving suggestions to invest in a brand new website.
Digital marketing strategy, budget allocation and daily workflow plan
The final part of the analysis is a discussion with the hotel management and hotel marketing team to understand the current digital marketing strategy in place.
At this point we will be already familiar with the actual performance of the current online marketing setup so it will be easier to evaluate if the day to day implementation supports that strategy or not.
We often find that hotel and resort marketing teams either do not have a strategy, or they fail to follow it due to their lack of technical capabilities or execution skills.
After this conversation, we will have a full understanding of what is happening, all the strengths and weaknesses and we will be ready to complete our evaluation and suggestions. A typical strategic and execution plan we hand over includes:
- Revised digital marketing strategy that supports the key goals of the company
- Implementation plan for each suggestion we have made in the report
- Recommendations for day to day marketing activities and workflow
- Suggestions for continuous evaluation and corrections to keep daily activities in line with the strategy
This is how we do a marketing analysis.