Drive More Hotel Bookings With Intelligent, Personal Content

For the last 10 years, I have been helping hotels and revenue managers refine their digital marketing strategies to drive more bookings. As the hotel industry continues to evolve, I’m increasingly seeing the role of revenue management and digital marketing converge – a trend that will no doubt continue in the future.

So the question becomes, how do you create smart digital marketing campaigns that stand out from your competitors AND align to your revenue goals? The following article summarizes how I believe psychographics and personalized content can help.

Using Psychographics to Create Personalized Content

As hotel marketers, we all know the basic profile of our customers through standard demographic information. Traditionally, we would use this to create content and begin telling the story of our property and how it stands out from competitors.

But in today’s competitive environment, we must get smarter. The challenge is to create campaigns that align with your property’s goals, and tell the rightstory to the right people at the right time. Whether your goal is to improve brand awareness, increase clicks, or (most likely) generaterevenue at the lowest possible cost of acquisition, make sure that you and your team are aligned on the end-goals.

Next, start to develop smarter, more targeted content. Demographics tell us where guests come from, their gender, age, location etc., but they don’t really tell us who they are. That’s where Psychographics come in. Now this term might sound scary and complex, but all is really means is being able to dig a little deeper and develop a more “lifelike” portrait of your target consumer. Demographics give us the dry facts,Psychographics give us the juicy details about a person (or target market in this case).

By studying things like purchasing and browsing habits, lifestyle, spending habits, hobbies and values, psychographics can help us uncover why a buyer makes a purchase. This, in turn, allows us to create more personalized and targeted content for them.

To effectively reach your target audience, you must understand both their Demographics and Psychographics. Combining both helps create a buyer persona, from which you can begin to tell a compelling story. For hotels, it’s not uncommon to have multiple buying personas (e.g. families, couples, singles, business travelers). Once you have identified your personas, you can start to build your story for them through social, mobile, email and desktop campaigns.

purchase. This, in turn, allows us to create more personalized and targeted content for them.To effectively reach your target audience, you must understand both their Demographics and Psychographics. Combining both helps create a buyer persona, from which you can begin to tell a compelling story. For hotels, it’s not uncommon to have multiple buying personas (e.g. families, couples, singles, business travelers). Once you have identified your personas, you can start to build your story for them through social, mobile, email and desktop campaigns.

Increase bookings through personalized offers

Personalized offers, targeted at your buyer personas, are a compelling way to drive bookings.This can be done by analyzing your demographic and psychographic data together.

You can obtain psychographic data in a number of ways; by interviewing your clients through email, online or on-site surveys, or by investigating your web analytics and seeing what has or hasn’t worked in the past to get people to click, call or buy.

As an example, say you know local guests tend to book either on weekends or on public holiday long-weekends. You create a “stay-cation” offer for these travel periods that includes an attractive discount, but the promo doesn’t really take off. Could it have been that the discount wasn’t attractive enough? Or was it because the offer had no perceived value for the buying persona (local guests)? You can measure this by looking at the number of clicks, views, bounce rates and bookings it drove. You could even run an A/B test of the promo on your website to give you greater insight into the effectiveness of this offer.

Based on your findings, you might determine that this buying persona isn’t interested in discounts, but instead values quality over price, enjoys spending time with family, and wants to disconnect from work. Based on this, a more attractive offer might be a free upgrade to a more expensive room, with a jetted tub and more space to relax, or a credit to the on-site spa or nearby family attraction. This kind of personalized content might generate the clicks or revenue (end-goals) your team is after.