The solution? The data of your leads (sales opportunities) and your customers. If you do not know your potential customers, the buyer personas, it is very difficult for any of the online marketing strategies to have positive results for your business. So defining buyer personas is an essential step. Don’t skip it!
Know your customers, record information.
To get conversions to increase your hotel’s direct sales, you need to understand who your buyer personas are, why they come to you and how you need to treat them. You have to find out what their motivations are for traveling, what they expect from the experience, what concerns they would have about the trip, how much they would invest in their vacation, etc.
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The more data you get the better. And how can you get that information?
Conversion Path.
In order to convert visits to your hotel website into leads, you need to get the contact information of these users. Content is your best asset. Offer them a guide, an interactive map, an interesting calendar, etc. Content they can’t refuse because of its attractiveness.
CTAs or call-to-actions found on the web, in blogs, even in emails, are the buttons or banners that promote these offers of content in exchange for a visitor’s contact information.
In this conversion process, first the visitor clicks on a CTA to get the content offer that is attractive, interesting and of value. This call-to-action takes this user to alanding page, where he is given information about this content offer. In exchange for this offer he provides us with his data, fills out a form with his contact information.
2. Customer Relationship Management
To manage the relationship that your hotel has with the customer or potential customer these conversion activities (or any other contact) have to be registered. To make this process easier for you, a
software
CRM software for your hotel
will help you track the actions of visitors, leads and customers on the web. To know what they are interested in and how to address them at any given moment.
Having a database of all contacts will allow you to optimize future interactions more effectively, to encourage the conversion of leads to customers, customers to brand advocates and repeat guests. With a CRM you can manage the communication you have with your contacts at every stage of their buying cycle.
A CRM will also allow you to segment your contact base based on these buyer personas to think of personalized marketing actions that achieve better results than you were getting so far, since you will be able to better target the content.
How?
Nurturing interest with Lead Nurturing
With Lead Nurturing you will be able to create valuable relationships with the contacts in your database: those that you have segmented in the CRM. This strategy involves adapting content to each stage of their buying process(traveller’s journey) by building trust and offering value. In this way you get the contacts to advance in their cycle and reach the moment of booking. Your ultimate goal. To do so , you must incorporate different marketing techniques:
1. Emailing
Email remains important because 95% of online consumers use it and 91% check it daily and it allows you to create a highly personalized message.
- Use segmented lists to send targeted content campaigns according to buyer personas.
- Evaluate the degree of interest in the content based on the data you have recorded in your CRM.
- Personalize emails (and subject lines) for higher engagement. We like to be known
- Apply a responsive design, since 70% of users open emails from mobile devices.
- Incorporates other actions. Include links to other offers, CTAs… and allow your recipients to share the email on social networks.
2. Automation
Along with emailing, the automation of processes is fundamental to ‘nurture’ the interest and trust of our contacts. Automating processes and having a record in our CRM allows us to implement actions in a more efficient way and with greater control of specific tasks: generate automatic responses to new leads, inform or send content, create notifications for your team, etc.
Automations will allow both your sales team and your marketing team to work towards the same goals. By generating workflows you can not only schedule content delivery to segmented lists, but also send notifications and alerts to teams to monitor and analyze results.
Achieving sales through loyalty
One of the biggest problems for hotel chains is the registration of their guests in different databases. This is a problem that hinders the implementation of loyalty programs. And without these programs it is difficult to get satisfied, repeat customers. With a CRM as part of a global marketing strategy, this problem is solved.
The tourist experience is vital, since a consumer who is satisfied with the products and services of your hotel is the best person to build loyalty. Identifying these hosts is important. Registering their feedback in your CRM will allow you to devise loyalty actions and send them specially designed content. How?
- Working smart content through email marketing and social networks, so that your customer knows the advantages of loyalty.
- Helping you with automation to manage all your loyalty program efforts.
As you can see, boosting your hotel’s direct sales depends on implementing the right strategies in each conversion phase (as it is known in marketing, the sales funnel). These strategies based on the right data from your contacts will allow you to take the right actions at the right time. What you need is the right customer data recording system. You need segmented lists and the right CRM.
