Hotel Online Marketing Audit: Enhance Your Digital Strategy
A strong marketing plan makes all the difference to a hotel’s success, but this can only be achieved by conducting a thorough marketing audit.
An audit involves a detailed analysis of a hotel’s current marketing activities, calculating the Return on Investment (ROI), and analysing costings and lessons learned throughout the campaign to improve the strategy and optimise performance.
This is not a simple task and is often best carried out by someone with experience, but it is essential to understanding how to direct your marketing going forward. Businesses that allow for an unnecessary margin of error do so at their peril.
A flawed marketing strategy can cause huge problems in the long run and cost thousands to fix.
The most successful businesses conduct an audit of their marketing practices regularly, not just to analyse the results of a campaign and plan the next one, but to monitor how an existing plan is performing.
The Benefits of Conducting a Hotel Digital Marketing Audit
By completing a hotel digital marketing audit, you’ll be able to determine what has worked well and what has not. Which elements of your marketing strategy have become redundant, and which ones require more attention or investment? Where do you sit within the market, and what can you do to improve your position?
You can learn this by examining your market share and public sentiment towards your brand from review sites.
A thorough hotel marketing audit includes many benefits, among them, increased ROI, more effective strategy, and better time and budget usage.
In time, this can not only help a company save on costs but will also improve and streamline operations due to the clarity an audit provides.
Starting Your Hotel Digital Marketing Audit
The first thing you need to do before you start a hotel marketing audit is to ask yourself; how confident are you to conduct it? This is important because the quality of the data and how it was retrieved and analysed will impact the findings. Business owners are also emotionally invested in their companies, and it can be human nature to deny a problem instead of acknowledging and resolving it.
It is sometimes safer to trust this task to a qualified expert. Their impartiality and experience may not only deliver a more accurate assessment but also offer a deeper understanding of how you can improve. Make no mistake: a hotel marketing audit is a complicated and time-consuming task. But it’s also incredibly rewarding when done properly.
The 3 Steps of Performing a Hotel Marketing Audit
Property Analysis
This represents your internal audit. It involves collating your marketing activity, costings, response rate, and overall ROI. What marketing practices generate revenue, and are they proportional to the work involved in producing it? If not, you may need to change your strategy. This can be done by drawing data from your website traffic, social media, PPC, and SEO metrics.
Competition Analysis
This involves studying the practices of your competitors and assessing what they are doing better and worse than you. What lessons can you learn from their behaviour, successes, and failures? What is public sentiment towards their brand? This information can easily be obtained from third-party review sites.
Marketplace Analysis
This represents working out your hotel’s position in the market and the size of the market share you have attained. Evaluating this will require you to look at your entire digital platform – website, review ratings, social media channels, etc. It also involves analysing the impact of the local economy and world events on your business.
Take-Aways
Informed Decision-Making: A marketing audit replaces assumptions with hard data, giving you a solid foundation for strategic decisions. It helps eliminate guesswork, ensuring your marketing efforts align with actual performance metrics and market realities.
Strategic Insight: An audit provides a clear view of your hotel’s marketing strengths and weaknesses, offering actionable insights into which areas need refinement. By understanding these dynamics, you can prioritise efforts and allocate resources more effectively.
Competitive Advantage: By analysing your competitors during the audit, you better understand the competitive landscape. This can reveal opportunities to capitalise on competitors’ oversights and adapt successful strategies to fit your unique brand.
Market Positioning: The audit assesses your hotel’s standing in the market, highlighting how consumers perceive your brand. By identifying your market share and reviewing customer sentiment, you can devise tactics to enhance your reputation and attract more guests.
Cost Efficiency: Regular auditing can lead to significant cost savings by identifying underperforming campaigns and reallocating the budget to high-ROI activities. This cost-effective approach ensures that your marketing spend contributes to profitable growth.
Adaptability: A marketing audit helps you stay agile in a rapidly changing industry. It allows you to adjust to shifts in the market, consumer behaviour changes, and evolving trends, ensuring your marketing remains relevant and effective.
Long-Term Success: A thorough audit improves current marketing efforts and sets the stage for sustained success. You can maintain a dynamic and responsive marketing approach that drives long-term profitability by continually refining your strategy based on audit findings.
Conducting a hotel marketing audit is a crucial exercise that can transform your marketing from a cost centre to a key driver of hotel success.
It’s an investment in your hotel’s future, allowing you to build a robust marketing strategy that resonates with guests and stands out in a crowded marketplace.
