It is usual that as a professional of hotel’s marketing or commercialization we get a rough idea of what our audience is every time of the year and where should we find it potentially. Location, night rates and customer service are often decisive factors in the process of decision taking and therefore of the magic formula for determine what our customer or “buyer persona” is.
It is necessary not to make this segmentation process randomly or leave it to the subjective perception of a professional, since we might fall into many mistakes that distracts us from the objective and therefore lose time and money fishing in “fishing grounds” that are not representative of our clientele.
First let’s answer the most important question. What is a buyer persona? It consists on a semi-fictional representation of the ideal hotel guest.
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What does signify to identify the buyer persona of your hotel?
It signifies to have a clear idea of a guest that does not only help you with the personalization of services according to the specific need of a guest, but it is also the base for a marketing campaign. Many hotel directors do not manage to create a clear understanding between the marketing strategy and the target customer. A clear and specific customer profile makes it not just easier to get the objective with efficacy in the right place and the right moment, but more efficient to apply the marketing budget to the results.
Create the buyer persona of your hotel
This is a key moment; it is a moment to make you questions like: how is the prototype of people who book more? What is it they think about? What drives their behavior? What are their preferences and where are their data? Asking the employees, interviewing the current customers, looking the websites they visit are formulas to tune the representation of this subject. There is a Hubspot tool (Makemypersona) that helps to create the buyer persona. It is recommendable to start with two or three buyer persona and give each one of them a name or identity. After making this buyer character, it is important to use that information in the marketing campaigns to be developed. It is important also to adapt the purchase process and the marketing content strategy to locate the user in the purchase funnel.
The process of creation is a live process that improves and adapts with time, so it is convenient to always have it in account and renew it continuously, since the features of our customers also evolve with time.
Measure results and optimize the profile
This improvement looks for increasing the ROI based on a cost more adapted to the need every time. Questions like: Where is our blog generating traffic to? Are their landing pages converting? Knowing what is working and what is not, helps to optimize campaigns and get the most out of the investment. The establishment of clear objectives and indicators are the key of the return (KPI) and the KPI monitoring assuring that the actions are generating the expected impacts.
Catch guest’s data
It is important to collect as much information of the users as possible, taking advantage of that knowledge to improve your hotel’s buyer persona, and therefore the products/services associated to it. A landing page strategy helps in catching information of several social media and web traffic. Specific pages with unique content and centered in a specific action to satisfy a very specific need. It is of interest to place a CTA on these websites to get the most possible customer’s information.
After this small walk-through about the buyer persona of your hotel, al that is left for me to do is to encourage you to improve in your customer’s needs satisfaction strategy. Determine your segments with some of the indications given and if it is not clear enough you can always rely on us to help you in improving your results.
CEO y Responsable de Proyectos
