4 Ways to Market your Hospitality Brand with Style
Xenia is the law of hospitality governing how we treat strangers in ancient Greece. Today, the practice of Xenia still lives on in the hospitality industry. Every hospitality venue is a hearth for the exhausted, an escapist reality embellished by premier comforts and luxuries. Every venue should immerse its clientele in a polished reality free from the inconvenience and modern troubles.
Providing an excellent experience is the first half of the battle won! But how does one market the quality of each experience to their target audience? The pre-requisite to understanding an experience is…. to experience it! To complicate things further, each venue has a different theme — different themes require different marketing strategies.
Thus, your overarching marketing strategy must leave a lasting impression in the imaginations of your clientele, qualifying your business’s expertise in hospitality. The entire customer experience must translate well in both visual and verbal marketing mediums, from your venue's atmosphere to its exemplary service. If not, customers would not be willing to fork out their hard-earned cash for a visit to a restaurant or hotel with a 50-50 chance of satisfaction.
This article explores four considerations that can help you successfully capture the hearts and minds of your target audience. Hospitality digital marketing is not a one-size-fits-all solution, but these tips will give you a great head start in the right direction! As you read this article, you will have an idea of how to successfully market your hospitality brand and create an experience that guests will remember long after they've left your venue.
Words Speak The Loudest
Words speak louder than… words! Writing may seem outdated, but words help customers to envision scenes in their minds. In the wonderful world of hospitality, a copy is arguably the most effective tool in your marketing arsenal. Every single paragraph and social media caption form a singular picture of your business’s reputation, and the experience it promises to deliver to guests.
The real challenge lies in crafting the right narrative with the right words. Generally, all organisations have style guides to ensure that all marketing copy is written and formatted consistently. More importantly, your style guide must succinctly condense your brand’s reputation, personality and values into one brand voice. By controlling the narrative, you’re ensuring your brand or service remains coherent in its presentation.
Therefore, your style guide should correctly capture the right atmosphere. If you’re the owner of a beach resort, your accompanying copy should promote a carefree, bohemian lifestyle. Conversely, if you’re the maitre’d of an opulent, palatial hotel, expect to use formal language to describe the haute experience that your accommodation promises.
What happens next boils down to how you follow your own style guide. A style guide is the starting point for copywriting, not its end. Witty wordplay and creative copy are solely dependent on your grasp of copywriting.
We strongly suggest hiring a professional copywriter to conceptualise and craft a nuanced narrative befitting your brand.
Picture a Scene
A picture-perfect scene demands to have… pictures taken of it! Scientific research suggests that 90% of all information processed by the human brain is visual. This rule-of-thumb applies to both video and static images.
What better way is there to show what your venue has to offer than by showing it virtually? A picture can show the type of ambience your restaurant promotes and the cuisine it whips up. A picture can also show the size and decor of each ensuite in your hotel. Regardless, images are the second-best option for experiencing the venue itself!
Having high-quality pictures taken of your venue immediately provides visual context to prospective guests (the adage that a picture speaks a thousand words rings true here). High-quality images reflect a business ready to welcome its guests with a warm embrace.
In contrast, low-quality and illegible photography reflect a brand uninterested in delighting consumers, opting for the bare minimum instead.
Given the preponderance of social media users (Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook etc.), images or videos are vital to seizing the waning attention spans of your target audiences. With targeted advertising capabilities, high-quality images and videos can successfully convert curious leads into paying patrons. Regardless of where they are being showcased, quality always outlives quantity.
But having these capabilities on board is an expensive ordeal. We strongly urge you to consider outsourcing your photography and videography needs to a creative agency in Brisbane.
Website Accessibility
One important aspect of your marketing toolbox is your website. A website, like your venue, should provide a seamless experience for your guests. In this case, your guests are your online visitors.
Upon entering the venue, your guests should always be provided friendly service with a smile. From start to finish, the entire experience should be shaped by the end user's experience and their perception of their entire stay/visit. There should be no obstacles in their way to prevent them from experiencing your business offerings as intended.
The same could be said about your website. When a visitor pays a visit to it, they expect to be greeted by high-quality information that is easily understood and a fuss-free and well-structured user interface. If a user wants to find out more about the business, he/she expects to be educated in mere seconds. If a user wants to book a table for two at your burgeoning restaurant, he/she expects to make one via a straightforward, online booking tool. In short, customers expect simple solutions to complex problems; your website is a secure vehicle to solve those problems for them.
A poorly-designed website is one that is impossible to navigate, where hyperlinks are not functioning as expected, slow loading times or illegible typography. Consequently, visitors are left with a bad taste in their mouths as they depart in search of alternative venues to fulfil their demands.
Designing a website that is service-oriented and technically proficient is a herculean endeavour for businesses with little experience in web design. That’s why hiring the services of a trained web agency in Brisbane can help alleviate your website woes. Our creative team is highly knowledgeable in WordPress website design best practices, providing your customers with an easy-to-use user interface (UI) and exceptional user experience (UX).
For more information on the importance of the user experience, you can visit our previous article on the customer journey.
Know thy Audience!
Knowing your audience is paramount to the success of any marketing or advertising campaign. Who does your venue appeal to? What do they like and dislike? How much are they willing to spend to acquire your budget? How do your service offerings acknowledge their pressing needs?
Steps 1 to 3 are rendered moot if you don’t know to who you’re peddling your offerings! So, it is crucial that your business reads the minds of the very consumers you’re trying to convince.
After conducting hundreds of brand-awareness meetings, we cannot understate how important it is to form detailed profiles of your ideal customer. This exercise is half speculative and half data-driven, with some informed guesswork taking place.
There are two ways you can go about gathering information about your clients.
The first way is more conservative. Assuming your business already has an established base of customers, segmenting them into their top three categories allows you to effortlessly identify the group that contributes the most to your brand's profitability. Once this has been determined, there’s no greater way to study your clients than to engage with them! Nothing beats going straight to the source, be it a focus group or an email survey.
The second way is more tech-focused. Social media can yield many noteworthy insights into how customers perceive rivals in your industry. For instance, the unfettered speed at which customer reviews and opinions are being shared online, be they supportive or dissenting, is staggering. By studying the responses of your rivals’ customers on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, you can identify what works and doesn’t work in their respective marketing strategies. While this method is by no means foolproof, it is nevertheless, a brilliant way to study how competitors and their clients think and behave. If your business has already been established, then you only simply need to aggregate the swirl of opinions accessible online. What they think, what they say and how they feel about your reputation speak volumes about the efficacy of your marketing activities and the strength of your brand identity.
How we can help
The tips we’ve discussed are only meant to form the strong foundations of your marketing strategy. How you choose to implement them is up to you, and it is contingent on the nature of your industry. If you’re a restaurant, then how you structure your entire brand strategy is specific to hospitality. Now that you’re equipped with the right mindset, it’s time to move on to the subsequent steps to elevate your namesake above your direct competition.
Vesanique is a full-service digital agency that specialises in innovative, branding solutions. Every single consideration that we’ve explored in this feature is covered in the wide package of branding and marketing options that we offer to all clients. Having grown over 50 brands under our wings, we work tirelessly to deliver and build lifelong brands for a progressive future.
But what truly differentiates us in the industry is our clinical eye for detail. Every client, every industry and every business has a disparate set of novel demands. Instead of just prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution, we take the time to curate and deliver a package of services to satisfy your chief requirements for the long haul.
Allow us to transform your brand into a Brisbane iconoclast, with eager visitors filling up your empty hotel rooms and dining tables. But first, let’s get formally acquainted over a cup of coffee.
Let’s talk. Don’t be a stranger.
