First of all, you should keep in mind that traditional or Outbound marketing is also called Push marketing for a reason: it pushes the message to consumers, we could say, indiscriminately. Although there is always a market study behind it, the objective is to obtain the highest visibility and the target consumer profiles are not so fine-tuned when it comes to defining them.
Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is defined not only as attraction marketing, but also as Pull marketing. Unlike the previous one, it attracts or arouses a much more concrete and worked consumer. And the key to this is the use of relevant content. In other words, in this case, the content is what your hotel’s website can offer in a way that you can:
1. Provide value.
You may think that this is not really a compelling reason and, in fact, it is. Today, providing value is critical to attracting the right type of traveler. And why only the right one? Because who you need to attract is the kind of consumer who is most likely to book one of your rooms. And to understand these users you have to start a dialogue and gain their trust.
How? Creating valuable content on your hotel’s website and social networks. Through all your publications you can satisfy the preferences and needs of these users, segment them and get a database of potential guests that you can win over with personalized content so that they think there is no other option but to book at your hotel.
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2. Be more profitable.
For hotels with a long history or hotel entrepreneurs who have been in the industry for many years, it is difficult to think of leaving behind the classic ads in travel magazines, TV promotion or retargeting. And it is difficult only because they may not know that Inbound marketing has a cost per lead of 62% less than Outbound marketing, if we take into account the type of B2C companies.
Think again that traditional marketing reaches a wide range of people. Not all of them are really your target and even fewer are those who belong to the group of your potential customers. But with the Inbound methodology, your communication channels are relatively low cost and your main concern is the generation of relevant content targeted to a very specific sector. And this is what makes it profitable.
This does not mean that you cannot take advantage of a good audiovisual production. Videos are, after all, one of the best formats with which to present valuable content, and one that is highly consumed among Internet users, especially on YouTube. But on the other hand, you can save the costs of their promotion or the PPC of online ads.
Getting qualified leads that will eventually become your guests has a lower cost with Inbound marketing because among other reasons we assume that these consumers are in a buying cycle(traveler’s journey) that is inherent to consumers looking for content on the Internet. And if you provide the valuable content they are looking for, you will be getting the traffic that will lead you to gain more customers.
3. Create long-term results.
Yes, it’s true, with Inbound marketing you won’t get results in the short term. But you won’t tire users with unnecessary bombardment of ads that they don’t want to see because they don’t belong to your potential customer group. Do you know how that can negatively affect your reputation?
On the other hand, with the Inbound methodology, content delivery is not aggressive. Travel consumers come to your website because they participate in the same conversations as other users on social networks and because they have accessed your content through search engines.
Your publications, if they are relevant, do not have to become obsolete if you know how to reuse the content after a while and revive it with the right tools, such as social networks. It’ s all about delivering the right content at the right time to the right people. That’s what it’s all about.
Perhaps with Outbound marketing you will achieve results in the short term, but also for a short period of time. On the other hand, with Inbound, any content you deliver will have more longevity and will achieve more effective results over a longer period of time.
4. Improve ROI.
Inbound marketing helps hotels improve their return on investment (ROI). HubSpot, the precursor of Inbound marketing, has found in its studies that 92.3% of companies using this methodology have increased traffic to their websites, with blogging being the most effective method.
HubSpot has also found that Inbound has enabled an increase in lead generation by 92.7%, while the conversion of Sales Qualified Leads (SQL’s) has been 42.2%.
So as you can see, this methodology gives results, and very good ones, since measuring the return on investment or ROI, thanks to your data, is one of the best ways to determine if the online strategies implemented for your hotel are effective.
5. Generate engagement.
This is one of the biggest problems today. Engagement among travel consumers is difficult to achieve without best practices. Above all, stop to listen to them and understand them. Because the fact that you bring more to the table than your products or services means a lot to today’s consumers, who are not satisfied with little.
Building relationships based on trust is not so complicated with Inbound Marketing, because it starts from the knowledge of the needs and preferences of your potential customers. For example, with surveys on your landing pages, you can learn valuable information that will lead you to generate personalized content that can build long-term relationships. That is, to generate a reliable and lasting engagement.
As you can see, these are compelling reasons to implement the Inbound marketing methodology right now. But if you think you still lack reasons, we recommend one more post on how to increase your hotel’s revenue with the best online marketing practices that Inbound brings together.
