Whether it’s booking a hotel, scheduling a tour, scoring early-bird convention tickets or hiring a travel agent, what’s the one thing consumers are really looking for when shopping for travel?
The experience.
And the customer experience begins not with the trip itself, but with marketing from potential service and accommodation providers. How a hotel chain or a cruise line or a travel agent communicates with prospective clients establishes expectations for the kind of experience they can provide — and gives those clients a sense of whether or not they want to spend their money with a particular organization.
Let’s take a look at just a few of the ways marketing — before and during a travel experience — can help hospitality groups attract and retain their target customers.
Consistency Across Every Channel
The foundation of trust between a brand and its audience is familiarity, which means showing up with consistent messaging and design across every platform — online, in print, and in person. When customers know what to expect from the marketing communication they’re seeing from an organization, they build trust in its ability to deliver on its promises.
This is important for any hospitality business, but it’s especially critical — and especially difficult — for larger businesses who may have distributed marketers working in different regions or on different teams. Think:
- Hotel and resort chains with properties — and regional marketing teams — across the country, or around the world.
- Travel agent networks with independent travel professionals leading their own teams under the network umbrella.
- Travel and tourism companies with offices providing vacation packages to travelers from all over the globe.
With dozens (or hundreds) of marketers spread out across the globe or brand representatives creating campaigns for their own audiences, maintaining brand integrity across every team becomes paramount — and it also becomes a full-time job for already-overloaded corporate marketers.
Unless, of course, they have the right systems in place.
TCMA Platform Benefits
The right through channel marketing automation (TCMA) platform is a game-changer for corporate marketers looking to ensure every sales rep, local marketer or distributor is on the same page about brand messaging. A TCMA platform turns local leaders into CMOs by making it easy to access, publish or print and distribute the latest, corporate-approved resources and manage local marketing campaigns — staying on brand and in budget without corporate having to hold their hands every step of the way.
The TCMA platform eases national leaders’ oversight burden while providing full transparency into every aspect of local marketing efforts, including budget tracking, inventory count, success metrics and more. The result? Higher quality, farther-reaching marketing campaigns with consistent branding and significantly lower stress for both local and national marketers.
Personalized Communication for Every Prospect
Just as important as consistency, consumers need personalized marketing from hospitality companies that want their business — particularly when they’re in the market for a luxury or high-touch travel experience. This includes communication targeted to their geographic location, tailored to their history with the brand and even customized with their names.
Consistency and personalization may seem like competing demands — particularly when brand integrity is at stake — but with the right local marketing platform, or TCMA, they don’t have to be. Rather than asking local travel agents, hotel managers or brand representatives to create assets from scratch (either on their own or by paying for one-off designer services) for their localized marketing campaigns, TCMAs enable reps to leverage modular content templates and automated approval workflows to drag and drop approved messaging and visual elements into their assets, customizing only the fields that need it and ensuring everything remains compliant with brand guidelines as well as any legal regulations.
Printed Assets Worthy of Your Brand
Print marketing is a valuable element of any hospitality brand’s multichannel marketing campaign. In fact, physical marketing assets from direct mail outreach all the way up to grand format printing are all integral to building brand recognition and moving potential customers down that funnel from awareness to purchase.
The quality of printed materials is especially critical for offerings like luxury cruises or high-dollar travel packages, whose customers often prefer the bespoke feel of high quality traditional print brochures, booking documents, etc.
To ensure that customers’ experience with your printed marketing communications is on par with your brand’s overall quality and standards, look for a print provider that can guarantee accuracy, quality, and on-time delivery (without busting the budget) on a wide variety of production types, from brochures to banners, and from snail mail to swag.
Bonus points if your distributed marketers can order printed pieces from your trusted corporate partner directly through the TCMA platform, eliminating the temptation to go out and find their own partners — risking both quality and budget in the process.
The On-Site Experience
From conference centers to hotel rooms to cruise ships, the marketing experience doesn’t end when the travel is booked. Rather, every piece of onsite communication guides and shapes a customer’s experience, contributing to a treasured memory of a fantastic time.
On-site marketing materials often serve highly practical purposes:
- Directional signage guiding guests around the event space
- In-room guides to hotel amenities, TV channels, room service, etc.
- Daily programming itineraries, event and excursion schedules
- Promotional items that take the experience to the next level such as luggage tags to VIP swag that adds that extra touch to the experience
That’s just for starters, and what all these things have in common is that they make guests’ lives easier. On a relaxing vacation or a high-stress business trip, your on-site marketing takes away the guesswork of where to go, how to get there or how to find what they need. No longer worried about the logistics, your guests can focus completely on their goals for the trip or event.
As with all of your other marketing communications, these pieces should uphold brand quality, design and messaging standards, providing familiar guidance to enhance the guest experience.
The Right Marketing Partner for the Job
Effective multichannel marketing for hospitality companies is an intricate web of digital vs. print outreach, personalization vs. consistency, and team oversight vs. empowerment. It’s a lot to juggle, but the benefits of a robust, well-executed strategy are well worth the effort.
Fortunately, hospitality marketers don’t have to go at it alone. At OneTouchPoint, we know the power of a perfectly executed marketing campaign, and we’re here to help at the global and local levels. With our high-powered TCMA platform, world-class print production facilities, full suite of digital marketing capabilities, and robust vendor-managed services, we help brands and organizations in the hospitality industry implement powerful omnichannel marketing strategies to turn potential customers into lifelong evangelists.
Contact us today to learn more about how OneTouchPoint helps hospitality leaders deliver flawless brand experiences, online, in print, and on-site.