Now more than ever before, luxury hotels need to be able to create and execute strong and innovative marketing strategies. There’s never been a better time to plan for your upcoming marketing initiatives and focus on how you can differentiate your brand, offer unique experiences, and ultimately drive more direct bookings.

In an industry where only 18% of executives at travel and hospitality brands say they believe their company is a digitally mature organization, there are incredible opportunities to improve your marketing strategy and win more market share. Here we will assess advanced hotel/resort marketing strategies in detail, showcasing 10 strategies that can help your resort marketing plan bounce back.

1. Value Emotion

The hospitality/hotel industry is an emotional one - it seeks to provide comfort, enjoyment, delight, happiness.  It’s critical that your resort marketing strategy and promotion remains aware of this and works to provide a positive emotional reaction at the foundation of all marketing efforts. Today’s consumer is more exposed to digital advertising messages than at any point in our history, and too many of them are one-dimensional promotions. 

Luxury hotels and resorts have an opportunity to surprise and delight, and if you want to get the best ROI then you need to aim not just towards the lowest CPC but also towards the highest impact emotional reaction you can achieve. This can often be achieved through social partnerships, environmental initiatives or philanthropic efforts. But even in the simplest of ways, your choice of images needs to not only capture the design of your hotel but also capture the way it makes your guests feel.

If your luxury hotel marketing strategy manages to send a clear message to potential guests that they will experience these positive emotions, to the extent that they can feel this emotion when they view your digital marketing messages, you can be sure that you will achieve your revenue goals.

2. Showcase the Experiential Aspects of your Hotel 

In 2019, 60% of consumers were influenced by consumer generated content when planning travel, whereas the influence of professional brand images was only 19%. Experiences are often critical drivers behind the decision-making of vacationers, so don't just mention that you offer bungee jumping or horse riding. Instead, leverage the tools available to you to bring these adventures to life and show real and relatable people actually doing these things. Your audience will relate to other people more than they will to actors who are faking it.

As a great example of resort development marketing strategy that leverages real life experiences, take a look at Cabot Links. Known for being a world class golf resort, Cabot uses earned content related to featured activities on different pages of their website. For instance, their “Food & Drink” page includes a gallery of guests’ dining experiences, helping the resort to highlight the fact that Cabot Links has more to offer than just golfing.

Curating your Instagram feed and incorporating it seamlessly into your web pages is another effective way to achieve this, especially for a boutique property or if you have a resort real estate marketing strategy. Take a closer look at how we drove exceptional revenue growth at Ka’ana Resort using experiential digital marketing messaging.

3. Find Ways to Truly Differentiate Yourself From Your Competitors

As a luxury hotel, you need to offer something unique and distinctly different to separate you from the competition. Similarly, your luxury hotel marketing strategy needs to be equally unique. As with everything else in the hospitality industry, high quality customer care needs to be at the core of everything you do. Going the extra mile for your guests can be the difference between converting that enquiry into a booking, or converting that guest into a loyal repeat customer. Take a closer look at how we leveraged high quality creative concepts like Solar Cottages and Carbon Neutral Villas to help Itz’ana Resort & Residences deliver record breaking revenue.

It’s all about making sure you’re doing things a little differently. Operationally, this could be providing customers with a complimentary treat at check-in or turndown. From the resort property marketing office, this could be creating a list of local recommendations to send to your guests prior to arrival, or creating a beautiful lookbook of all local eateries, bars and adventures to help your potential guests fall in love with your destination and learn to trust you as their guide. In the past, we’ve turned these local recommendations into an illustrated map that’s instagrammable, or even an online interactive map that can convey a lot of information in a fun, visual way.

4. Invest in Personalization 

One of the best ways to stand out from rivals is to deliver tailored, individual marketing messages. Using different visuals for different segments and experiences that travelers seek is one great way to personalize your marketing to each customer segment. This is especially important for resorts and luxury hotels that serve significantly different client segments - e.g. international visitors, honeymoon couples, families, etc.

81% of travel respondents consider it very important for brands to provide personalized experiences to their customers. You can use your customer segments to further personalize email marketing, customer loyalty programs, and print materials. A good rule of thumb is to always create high quality visuals that reflect the audience you want to target.

Remarketing ads can target viewers based on a variety of factors. For instance, you could create an ad that features the specific room type they previously viewed on your website, serving as a specific reminder to them. 

5. Advertise on Metasearch Engines

Metasearch Engines such as TripAdvisor, Google Hotel Ads and Trivago have been experiencing massive growth in these past few years. Getting featured on these metasearch engines can boost your visibility and also improve your brand value.

Take Google Hotel Ads for example, which we’ve seen firsthand has proven to be a savior for hotels struggling to reduce dependency on OTAs. 

These ads could be your most effective tool if you’re looking to avoid the rising commission fees of the OTAs and to increase direct bookings from their hotel website. Critically, because these ads bring direct traffic to your website, they not only improve your hotel’s visibility but also help to build brand loyalty with your guests, helping to cultivate long-term relationships.

So, if you’re not yet listed on any metasearch engines, now’s the time to incorporate this strategy into your luxury hotel or resort marketing plan.

6. Commit to Regular Blog Updates on your Website

Hotel blogging is an excellent way for luxury hotels to take advantage of the content marketing opportunities in today’s digital world.  Blogging allows you to provide deep knowledge about specific elements of your brand offering, detailing your unique selling factors as well as the attractions of your greater destination.

Consider blogging a set number of times per month, and send your blogs out to your database via your email. It’s important that your audience gets comfortable with the amount of communications per month, so it’s less important to throw content out there and better to focus on what kind of messaging and storytelling will intrigue and delight your audience, helping to strengthen their engagement levels and build their level of trust in your brand. 

It’s a unique opportunity for you to showcase your luxury resort and control the narrative, and yet it’s difficult to find examples of hotel and resort marketing strategy that really commits consistently to delivering on this. Which means it’s a prime opportunity for differentiation! You can read more about our marketing services here.

7. Make Sure You’re Covering the SEO Staples

SEO takes a little time to deliver ROI, so now is an ideal time to assess your online content to make sure it’s working for you. Check your website to make sure you’re following SEO (Search Engine Optimization) online marketing basics like:

• Ensure your content is rich and relevant, with strong keywords and keyword combinations that give your website the best chance of being clicked upon. 

• Incorporate your SEO plan into your blog and online content creation so that at least some of your content is strategically aimed at building your domain value and increasing your organic traffic.

• When planning your hotel marketing SEO campaigns, be sure to combine your primary keywords with strong secondary ones like the name of your local neighborhood.

• Create a backlink strategy: Backlinks refer to hyperlinks in the text of other websites that bring users to your own website. It significantly influences the hotel’s ability to rank well in search engine results pages and should accompany any SEO strategy. The benefit of a backlink is long-lasting: up to 2 years.

  You may need some specialist SEO assistance to really take advantage of these opportunities, but it’s an investment that pays great dividends. Who doesn’t want free traffic? Your luxury resort digital marketing strategy needs to take these tactics seriously in order to succeed. Have a read of our fantastic guide on how to do hotel SEO.

8. Maintain your online reputation

The success of any business within the hospitality industry has always been, and will always be, heavily reliant upon delivering high levels of guest satisfaction. You NEED to know what your guests are saying about you. How else will you control your reputation and improve your services?

All your guests – current and potential guests - are going to check your online ratings and review prior to deciding on their stay with you, and they’ll be actively comparing you with your competitors.

It’s critical for any luxury resort marketing team to keep a close eye on your ratings and key review sites and have a strict marketing strategy in place to jump in if (or when) you receive an adverse review.

Set an objective of what you want your guests to say about your hotel once they leave, and create a marketing strategy to ensure that they are happy prior to leaving the property and that all follow-up communication is reviewed with an eye to optimizing the number of positive reviews you can receive. 

9. Focus on Adding Value, Not Cutting Prices

As a luxury hotel or resort, you risk degrading perceptions of your brand if you’re consistently offering significant discounts. This is undoubtedly difficult to stay away from during a recession or economic crisis, but there are always creative ways of offering value other than steep discounting.

Extra value can be offered in the form of dining credits, free gifts, suite upgrades, late check-outs, extra concierge services and other perks designed to appeal to luxury travelers seeking superior customer service—and a hotel that values its own property.

Hong Kong-based Ovolo are a great example of this. As part of their response to the HK riots, followed by coronavirus, they’ve incorporated a social hour trolley service, bringing complimentary cocktails directly to their guests’ suites. This has won them extensive media exposure as well as earning the loyalty of their guests.

10. Create Offline Efforts that Support Online Marketing Strategies 

What happens offline can have a big influence on how you perform online. It’s straightforward to suggest that promoting your hotel at shows, creating a media strategy that targets magazines, radio, etc will all deliver an uplift in searches for your luxury hotel online. But think more closely about things like the on-site events you host, the branded collateral and amenities you showcase throughout your hotel, even the type of packages you create for guests. These are often viewed as operational decisions made by the on-site team, but each has the potential to create a buzz that can really drive more eyeballs and enquiries.

What is resort marketing after all? It’s important that your definition is based around an holistic approach covering both online and offline, on-site and off-site, so that you can maximize the impact of your initiatives.

Download Your Free Marketing Plan Template

Digital marketing for resorts or hotel offers so many opportunities to win market share, raise awareness and grow loyalty to your brand. Now more than ever, embracing a more personalized approach and daring to try new and inventive ways of delivering your messaging can have lots of upside potential.

To get started, why not download our free marketing plan template now! It’s packed with all the detail you could possibly need to organize your upcoming digital marketing campaigns.