Over the past few years, social media has become a significant tool for delivering messages and communicating with people. Many brands also use social media platforms to influence their customers, from introducing the brand and selling to purchasing and sharing their experience with the products.
Social media is also essential in the hospitality and tourism industry as part of the sales and marketing strategy. Revenue Hub’s data shows that 97% of millennials share their pictures on social media platforms while traveling. Additionally, 71% of travel agencies have reported better consumer interactions through social media. As an industry heavily relying on customers’ reviews and word-of-mouth, these data show how much potential social media gives to the business.
Hospitality and tourism businesses can engage and give a lasting impression to their prospective customers through social media content. Social media plays a massive role in increasing brand awareness, improving customer engagement, managing brand reputation, and increasing the number of customers. Here are a few impacts social media has in the hospitality and tourism business and why it’s crucial to be applied in the sales and marketing strategy.
6 Social Media’s Impacts on Hospitality Business
1. Increase Brand Awareness
As mentioned earlier, social media is a powerful instrument that enables customers to discover and connect with hospitality and tourism brands through modernized word-of-mouth. It is perceived as a trustworthy platform for gathering brand information and learning about other people’s experiences. Customers’ online reviews and recommendations surrounding the hospitality businesses are critical to establishing and maintaining potential customers.
Social media also provides hospitality businesses the means to efficiently spread information to a broad audience, which cannot easily be achieved through traditional channels like broadcast, print, or offline events. A hospitality business can seamlessly share high-quality videos or professional photography across all social media platforms to heighten brand awareness. This dynamic platform enables effective communication and connection with existing and potential customers.
Additionally, it is essential not just to spread information and have one-way communication but also to create dialogues with the customers to maintain customer relationships and develop loyalty towards the brand over time. Various methods can be utilized, such as crafting posts or stories with questions relatable to the customers and triggering responses you can engage with.
2. Enhance Customer Engagement
Enhancing customer engagement can be achieved by actively participating in conversations, posing inquiries to understand customers better, and prompting them to share brand content, tag friends, and join discussions. Brands can further boost engagement through interactive content like giveaways and promotions.
Cultivating an engaged online community contributes to creating a positive online presence, increasing customer investment, amplifying word-of-mouth promotion, and establishing a loyal customer base. When customer queries are addressed promptly and effectively, it increases the likelihood of their return for future purchases and attracts new customers.
Engaging with users who comment on posts through prompt and thoughtful responses is recommended. This practice assists in establishing trust between the brand and potential customers while displaying appreciation for their feedback.
3. Monitor Brand’s Competitors
Through social media utilization, hospitality brands can leverage feedback and data to enhance their processes, providing outstanding experiences to customers. In an industry where customer loyalty is paramount, social media becomes a tool for brands to cultivate loyalty and garner exposure by maintaining customer engagement and showcasing their distinctive offerings. According to the International Tourism Research Center, 88% of travel marketers actively operate social media to promote their offerings and comprehend their customers’ needs.
For organizations in the hospitality sector, social listening is a crucial element for success. It empowers brands to track their audience’s behavior and keep tabs on their competitors. This information is vital for developing highly effective social media marketing strategies that tailor products and services to meet customer needs and interests, ensuring a competitive edge.
Monitoring competitors is an insightful approach to understanding the current industry trends, observing successful and unsuccessful strategies, and learning from their experiences. Social media is a personalized and interactive tool for reaching customers while offering brands a significant advantage over those who underutilize this platform.
4. Promote to a Targeted Audience
Social media marketing empowers hospitality brands to connect with potential customers based on their interests and demographic information. Promoting to a targeted audience enables brands to optimize their advertising expenses by creating impactful ad campaigns tailored to their market’s characteristics, such as age, income, location, language, gender, interests, hobbies, and more. This tool streamlines ad management for hospitality brands, efficiently allocating the marketing budget to ensure that the right audience sees the ads.
For instance, if a brand aims to promote a luxurious, pet-friendly hotel, directing ads toward pet enthusiasts who are also avid travelers with high incomes is likely to yield better results than a broad, non-targeted advertisement. Ad tracking tools facilitate the measurement of targeted ad effectiveness and audience responsiveness, which allows brands to evaluate campaign performance, identify areas for improvement, and make necessary adjustments for future campaigns.
Moreover, proficient tracking tools empower marketers to gauge the success of their campaigns, allowing them to make necessary adjustments for improved results in their next endeavors.
5. Brand Reputation Management
Unfavorable remarks on social media can swiftly impact any reputation. However, maintaining a positive brand reputation in an industry heavily reliant on customer experience and service becomes even more critical in the hospitality sector.
Brand reputation management is a practical strategic approach to oversee and shape how a hospitality brand is perceived online, meticulously monitoring every review, post, comment, or tweet. Ensuring that no negative comment goes unaddressed is vital.
Monitoring social media mentions and comments continuously to enhance customer sentiment would be necessary for any social media strategy. A positive brand reputation not only prolongs customers’ time to make decisions but also heightens the likelihood of them choosing a particular experience or service. Research indicates that travelers are 3.9 times more inclined to select a hotel with superior reviews than others in the same price range.
6. Increase Sales and Leads
Social media plays a pivotal role in boosting booking and sales rates within the hospitality sector, effectively maintaining visibility among the appropriate audience. With a significant 63% of customers utilizing social media to discover new restaurants, it has evolved into a valuable platform for customers to gather business information, including details about services, products, operating hours, costs, special events, and even hiring opportunities.
In the hospitality industry, leveraging social media is essential to capture customers’ attention through compelling content that encourages them to explore a business’s offerings more. The core of social media success lies in creating captivating content that captivates audiences and piques their interest in the offered services or products, leading to purchases or bookings. It is advisable to incorporate visuals like photos and videos, given their superior performance compared to text-based content, particularly on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook.
Another strategy involves tapping into influencer marketing by collaborating with relevant influencers with a substantial following among potential guests. These influencers can help amplify brand awareness through their channels while providing valuable insights into effective targeting strategies for different traveler demographics (e.g., families versus couples).
Hospitality and tourism brands should ensure a seamless user experience, guiding potential customers from social media channels to their website booking platform with minimal clicks, streamlining the journey from initial interest to completion of a purchase or booking.
Strategic utilization of social media is critical when aiming to generate leads within the hospitality industry. If executed correctly, it becomes an exceptionally effective means of directly reaching prospective customers.
In a Nutshell
Social media platforms must be incorporated into any comprehensive sales and marketing strategy. It is one of the main priorities if you aim to enhance the online visibility of your hospitality business while establishing solid connections with existing and potential customers.
You can learn more about social media in the hospitality and tourism sector as part of the hospitality and business internship program that RMC Asia provides!
Besides the hospitality and business internship, RMC Asia offers management training programs and contractual positions. Our programs provide participants with hands-on working experiences in the global environment of prestigious hotels and resorts, which take place across Asia’s stunning destinations.
Is it a challenging journey you’re willing to tackle? Let’s start a new chapter with us and join our successful participants now!
