When it comes to managing a hospitality business, you understand the importance of having the right industry tools and technology, and how different business tools and technology terminologies can help develop and grow your business. For starters, without marketing tools, you cannot expect to sell or promote your products and services. The first thing that needs to be addressed is the importance of developing a hotel marketing strategy.
So, here are the best tools for marketing in a hospital business.
Website Building Tool
Whether you manage a chain of luxurious hotels or run a vacation rental or operate a bread & breakfast, you understand the importance of an impressive and user-friendly website to showcase your property to potential customers.
But what makes a website appealing and attractive?
With 75% of customers admitting that they judge the business’s credibility based on the company’s web design, investing in an aesthetically beautiful vacation rental website design makes sense.
The famous saying, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” fits perfectly for a website because unless you like it, you’re not going to stay on the website for long.
Psychology supports the idea that people are drawn to beautiful things and are inherently attracted to functional designs.
Therefore, it becomes easier for hotel managers to attract customers with a well-designed website.
Excellent and attractive website design is one that applies the standard elements like shape, size, and colour in a way it creates a consistent visual language.
Recommended tool: Lodgify
In short: A good website design guides your customers’ eye and tells them to see things which you want them to see.
Social Media Listening Tools
In the social media world, everyone has a voice, and your customers are free to voice their concerns and even acknowledge your hotel’s service.
Customers don’t require your permission to talk about your hotel.
So, you need to become an even faster listener who is capable of filtering out relevant information.
But, it’s easier said than done.
With billions of users on social media, how can you listen to every conversation about your hotel?
This is where you will need a social media listening tool that gives you access to what customers are saying about your hotel, competitors, related keywords, or topics, followed by an in-depth analysis of the data to provide fruitful insights about the customer’s demand.
The tool gives you analysis and trends around your hotel and the entire hospitality industry as a whole.
Using the social listening tool, you can understand why, where, and how these conversations are taking place and what your potential customers think about your services and offers.
It helps create future marketing campaigns, improves the content strategy, outpaces competitors, and build a strong professional relationship with the customer.
Recommended tool: Awario
In short: The only limit to the analysis you receive through social listening is your imagination.
Revenue Management Software
RMS (Revenue management software) is the hottest buzzword in the hotel industry because of the numerous benefits it offers.
Apart from automating the analytics process, it helps determine the right price for the hotel or vacation rental, thereby increasing the revenue.
With a revenue management tool, you can sell the right hotel room to the right customer at the right price on the right distribution channel.
Such a tool uses the demand signals, market triggers, and historical data to come up with the right price.
A good RMS makes automated and accurate forecasts, which allows you to determine the demand and supply over the next 365 days.
Due to the high accuracy, every department in the hotel can work in complete synchronisation and make smarter sales and operation decisions.
Investing in such software is the need of the hour because it enables hoteliers like you to price competitively and confidently.
It will help you sail through the rough and uncertain times when the demand is on the lower side.
It will also give you a clearer market picture and boost confidence in the strategy you have selected.
Recommended tool: Hotel Tech Report.
In short: Look at the bigger picture because being short-sighted for a long time will cost the hotel a great deal.
Social Media Scheduling Tool
Social media is a ravage, making it imperative for a hotel to have accounts on all the leading social media platforms.
With 84% of millennials and 73% of non-millennials likely to plan their next trip based on someone else’s social media update, you can no longer ignore the power of social media.
If you’re looking to attract customers on social media, having a profile alone won’t suffice.
Building a loyal customer base on social media platforms is an ardent and time-consuming task – a luxury that most hoteliers don’t enjoy.
You no longer have to post updates to engage the customers manually.
Because social media scheduling tools make you work smarter instead of harder.
These tools are not just shortcuts for queuing the daily post.
Instead, it helps in the overall management of social media profiles.
These tools improve efficiency, and you have more time creating viral blog posts and connecting with the target audience in real-time.
Apart from scheduling, these tools give you a real-time analytics report to see your content’s performance.
Recommended tool: Hootsuite
In short: Social media is the lifeline of the hospitality industry, and with the right tools, it doesn’t have to be a time-eating monster.
Task Management Tools
Managing a hospitality business, or your duties as a professional can be tricky, especially when you have more tasks than you can remember. It’s essential to properly manage your workload by being organized so that you don’t forget critical appointments or duties. As a rescue, there are many task management tools present. Some prefer to use project management software instead. These tools make it easy to prioritize and organize your tasks every day, as well as track your progress of daily goals.Task management tools are not helpful only for you but can be used by your entire team for improved productivity.
For example, when your team is taking on a new project, you can use a task management tool to distribute duties to all team members. You can also use it to set priorities, guidelines, and deadlines. Some tools allow you to add comments that others can see and attach essential files. Then, there is the tracking feature, which shows how much work you’ve done and what’s left. Task management tools are vital for any hospitality professional, as forgetting one important duty can upset customers and disrupt the business flow. Some great task management tools include Trello, Asana, and SmartTask.
Email Tracking Tools
If you work with a lot of emails, especially in areas of customer service and receiving bookings for hotels, travel agencies, vacation rentals, and other hospitality businesses, you will need an email tracking tool to make it easier. Hoteliers have to send hundreds of emails every week, and travel agencies receive bookings through emails. Customers hate it when they aren’t responded to early because their message was lost in hundreds of other mails. An email tracking tool will make you more competent and responsible for reading and replying to all emails.
Apart from checking incoming mails, your outgoing mails are also important. Whether you’re replying to customers, making orders, asking for investments, or more, you need to know that your email was successfully delivered and read. An email tracking tool will show you if your mail was sent to the spam or if it was left unopened. If you’re into marketing for your hospitality business, an email tracking tool will give you an idea of how many messages you sent were considered. With email tracking tools, you can be well organized with your messages and be more mindful of your recipients. Many email services come with their dedicated tracking tool. You can use tools like HubSpot CRM, Streak Email Tracking, and Yesware for email tracking.
Survey Tools
Customer satisfaction is the core of any hospitality profession. Any professional knows that they must take the feedback and thoughts of the customer into consideration, and do their best to ensure that their clients are happy with the service. As a hospitality professional, you need survey tools. These tools are the best way to get honest customer feedback on your services. The tools make it easier and quicker, not to mention way more organized than knocking on doors and getting questionnaires. The use of survey tools can be optimized with analytical tools.
Additionally, survey tools make it easy to conduct market research on particular target audiences for your travel agency, hotel or vacation rental. With these tools, you can know what people want to see more from your services, what kind of promotions you should hold to increase traffic and customers, what people like about your services and what you need to improve on. When you know all these little things, it would not only improve your marketing strategy but make it easier for you and your team to provide satisfying services to new and old customers. You can use companies like Google Forms, Snap Surveys and SoGoSurvey for your business surveys.
Special Tools
Depending on the part of the hospitality industry you work in, there are special tools that you might need to improve the quality of the services that you’re providing. For example, no hotelier can run a business without an Online Travel Aggregator (OTA) which focuses on hotels, flights, car rentals, and activity packages. With an OTA, you can show customers all the offers available in the city they are coming to, especially the activities that they can enjoy close to your hotel. It allows you to target those that are currently travelling and creates more traffic for your hotel.
Another unique tool that hospitality professionals need is the Global Distribution System, which acts as the intermediary between the travel agent and airline or hotel reservation system. The tool is especially useful for travel agents, making it easy for them to book hotels, flights, tours, rental cars, rail tickets, cruises and more for their customers. With the GDS, you can provide high quality and excellent services to all your customers. With these specialized tools, providing friendly services to customers becomes more manageable and quicker. They also add more value to your business and work as a professional.
Conclusion
There are tools and technologies used to assist with marketing, branding and improving the bottom line of a hospitality business. The business strategy for hospitality is no different than any other industry – remain relevant and provide excellent service at all times.