No matter how good of service a business provides, successful marketing doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. In order to be successful, businesses need to carefully and methodically approach their marketing.
Successful marketing is done through executing the right blend of strategies — and doing so consistently. Finding the right formula for a business can be the difference between business success and failure.
Workers and business owners in hospitality know that reality better than anyone — working in perhaps the most competitive industry in the world, serving patrons with a wide range of backgrounds and high expectations.
Without taking a calculated approach to marketing that leverages an understanding of the importance of brand campaigns and how to make them work effectively, your hospitality business is guaranteed to be at a disadvantage. Moreover, if you’re starting a hospitality business, it is crucial that you factor marketing costs into your start-up budget.
One of the most effective forms of marketing is something called a brand campaign. In this article, we’ll break down the concept of brand campaigns, the importance of branding, what makes a brand campaign succeed, and how to think about hotel brand campaigns at large. Additionally, we’ll highlight a few alternative branding strategies.
What is a Brand Campaign in the Hospitality Industry?
Brand campaigns get the story and message of your business in front of an audience — with the ultimate goal being to widen brand awareness and grow the brand equity in the minds of potential customers or consumers.
A brand campaign in the hospitality world is a targeted marketing approach to promoting services. These campaigns cater to a specific audience for short bursts of time, moving towards a larger goal of creating brand awareness and trust. It is a tool for controlling the image of your hotel’s brand and its narrative in the public eye.
Through a successful brand campaign, a hotel or other hospitality business can separate itself from the competition, showcasing why and how it’s different from other similar services.
What Does Hotel Branding Entail?
Hotel managers should be asking themselves how their services differ from the competition. What separates your hotel from the hotel across the street? How is business done in a way that offers something unique to the guest? Who is the targeted clientele, and why does that matter? These questions help potential patrons understand and choose the hotel or hospitality service that fits their desired needs most.
Hotel branding is taking the answers to these questions, synthesizing them, and using them to sell your hotel’s brand to the right customers. With a distinct brand, guests will know exactly what your hotel brings to the table before booking.
How to Take a Holistic Approach to Hotel Branding
The most important thing to remember when executing a successful hotel brand campaign is to take a holistic and consistent approach. Let’s explore what that means and how you can implement these principles into your hotel branding.
Establish a Thesis of Hotel Brand Philosophy
As a business, decisions are driven by specific goals and aspirations, measured through metrics such as financial growth and impact. Business owners and managers utilize these goals for every decision made, ensuring the same thread runs through every business decision.
This type of approach is equally applicable to marketing and brand campaigns. By creating a playbook and brand rules, different avenues of advertising all come from the same united purpose.
What do you want your hotel to be known for? By understanding your own business, hotel marketing can reflect business principles. Marketing should help potential customers understand what a hotel stands for and why it would be a good decision to stay there.
Unify Hotel Advertising Strategy
A successful marketing approach is multi-pronged, taking advantage of all pipelines of information. While advertising across different mediums, a brand identity playbook ensures aligned messaging. This is vital to marketing success, as it allows a potential guest to immediately recognize your hotel brand, understand your offerings, and not become confused by conflicting messages across media channels.
Create a Sharp and Memorable Logo That Can Exist Across All Marketing Arms
As your hospitality business grows, patrons will come to identify your brand’s services and message with a simple image. Ensuring the logo of your business is uniform across all brand expressions is a simple but effective way to remind people what your business offers and encourage trust in your brand.
Hotel Presentation Physically Channels the Tone of Marketing Materials
Expressing your business in a way that matches your marketing strategy is a pillar for success in the hotel industry. If the tone of your marketing does not align with the reality of your property, that breaks the trust of the customer and could cause severe, long-term brand damage.
The Importance of Branding and How a Brand Campaign Can Transform Business
The best brand campaigns understand the fundamental importance of brand advertising. Businesses can’t be afraid to dedicate resources to creating a holistic brand campaign with specific targets and benchmarks.
A properly executed brand campaign can completely shift the outlook of a business. It’s an opportunity to build — or rebuild — the image of a business in the consumer’s mind. By understanding the importance of branding and its potential, these initiatives can cause a business to genuinely move the needle, not only generating interest but converting results.
What Are Alternative Branding Strategies for Hotels?
Hotel brand campaigns go beyond basic advertising strategies. The hotel experience itself is an opportunity for marketing — a way to ensure you are not only providing the best in guest services, but showing why it would make sense for a guest to return to your hotel in the future. There is an opportunity to further engage a guest in your hotel brand at every level of their stay.
Product Branding in Hotel Rooms and Honing Overall Look and Feel
When a guest enters a hotel, they become part of its ecosystem — there are various marketing opportunities at different points along a guest’s journey. Does your hotel advertise a modern and sleek experience? You will need to make sure the lighting is also contemporary — even something as small as the color of a travel shampoo bottle can impact a guest’s perception of your property. Because of this, it is important to establish what your hotel’s brand is and then create cohesion of this aesthetic throughout all aspects of your property.
Synergetic Collaborations with Other Brands in Similar Spaces
The beauty of the hospitality world is that like-minded businesses can work together and help each other grow. A hotel with a certain ambiance or approach might benefit from working with a restaurant or bar with a similar feel.
For example, a new and innovative cosmetic company might be looking for a way to get their product to market. Working with a hotel that has a similar aesthetic and price point can help both brands market towards a certain type of customer. This synergy is a way to increase the guest experience while marketing in a way that feels organic.
Leveraging Branding Strategies Will Effectively Establish Your Hotel
Effective brand strategy is the pillar of success in the hotel industry. There is much to think about when identifying a successful hotel branding strategy — but that careful consideration is necessary to ensure success. Don’t be afraid to conduct market research and detail all aspects of your hotel brand to target potential guests correctly.
Understand that your brand identity will play a significant role in how guests remember the hotel. What will they think of when they see your logo on social media? A holistic and cohesive strategy will ensure your marketing efforts create an unforgettable guest experience with your hospitality brand.
Most importantly, know the goals of your business and take realistic steps to achieve them. By utilizing a holistic brand campaign and leveraging alternative branding strategies, a hotel is sure to stand out.
Offering a strong WiFi network helps ensure guests who visit your hotel because of strong branding come back again. Reliable and intuitive WiFi offer unprecedented access to streaming, internet browsing, and social media for guests — helping your hotel even further stick out from the crowd. Discover how DG2 WiFi can improve your hotel’s brand today.
