Your competitors are stronger than you think

This post is by Hotel Marketing Strategies contributor Allan Simpson.

Potential leisure customers don’t need to buy a stay in a hotel to make them feel good.  There are lots of other things people can do.

Hotels find themselves in a straight fight with everyone else who has in interest in the “disposable income” people have.  As we all know – there isn’t so much income that’s disposable these days, but there’s still some out there.

It may be a straight fight, but it’s not a battle of equals.  This is true David and Goliath combat.  Your problem, as you sit there in your hotel wondering where the next booking is going to come from, is not just that Goliath is a lot bigger than you.  You are also faced with the fact that Goliath is a lot better informed about your target market.  He knows how to influence buying decisions in such a way that even the buyer is completely unaware of what’s going on.

You see, the buying decision is not just which hotel or which location?  There are competing products out there – everything from new cars to boxes of chocolates and they are considerably better at marketing then 99.9% of hotels.

They can say to your potential customers “buy me instead”…and they will obey.

If you want proof, go and invest in the new UK edition of Wired magazine.

There’s an article on page 98 which talks about the following marketing tactics:

• Brain-scan research
• Phone location mapping
• Eye tracking
• Store location mapping
• Face reading ads
• Personality profiling
• Sensory marketing
• Loyalty card linked TV ads

…and many more.

The businesses competing with you for “disposable income” are using techniques like these.  They are very sophisticated.  They invest in their marketing and they use clever people to make sales happen.  Contrast this with the attitude in the hotel industry.  What’s one of the first things hotels cut when things get tight?  Marketing.  In smaller hotels, the person responsible for marketing is just as likely to be found polishing cutlery as planning the next campaign.

There are things you, as a hotelier, can do to improve your online sales.  Outside of this article in Wired magazine, there are things like Persuasion Architecture for websites (I bet your webmaster hasn’t mentioned that one to you recently – or am I wrong?).  It takes effort and costs money to develop, but in exchange you get a good chance of significantly improved “look to book” ratios.

I recently came across a hotel with an astonishing look to book ratio of 76%.  In a world where hotels regard the “average” as around 2%, this is a wonderful example of taking marketing by the scruff of the neck and making it work.  This particular hotel manages its marketing, it has invested heavily over several years and it maintains good people to do the marketing and selling work.  On busy days sales people don’t polish teaspoons.  Instead sales people are given the scope to make sure every day is a busy day.  Just like your competitors from other industries do.

Some hotels will update the copy on their website every year whether they need to or not. Other hotels still think that a one-off advert with the business name as the headline and a picture of a restaurant chair will have people flocking to the door…  Of course, it doesn’t.

If you’re laughing at that thought because you know better and you’d never be caught publishing an advert with your hotel name as a headline (or even worse – a price), take a look at the travel section in any Sunday newspaper to see how many of your industry colleagues are making a dreadful mess of this.  Then laugh a bit more.

If you’re not prepared to make the effort with your marketing, if you’re not prepared to change the way you do things, you won’t get the results you need.

The real competitors you’re up against as an industry are those who sell what are called “substitute” products and services:  As I suggested above, anything from cars to chocolate bars.

These competitors are very, very good – and they’re making marketing work for them by treating it as seriously as they can afford to.  An important point here, is that they can’t afford not to – there is so much investment goes into developing cars and chocolate bars that to skimp on marketing doesn’t even cross their mind.  Reaching out to attract customers with an effective sales message is an essential part of the business process.  Marketing is another stage in their investment, necessary to stand a chance of a good return.

Come to think of it, somebody invested in your hotel.  It might have been you?

How good do you want to be?  How hard are you making your marketing investment work for you?

Your competitors are constantly enticing and encouraging people to buy.  What are you doing?

In a world where people selling competing products are looking right inside customers heads in order to get them to buy, it looks like the hotel industry has a little catching up to do.

Allan Simpson is a hotel copywriter with UK-based HotelSphere.