The last few years have seen a number of changes in the digital marketing environment but there’s a lot more to come. Indeed, the growth is far from over – mobile technology is breaking new ground almost every year.
Here are some of the trends we expect to see shortly in 2016:
1. Growth of Mobile
When considering e-commerce traffic, mobile devices have accounted for over 94% of year-on-year growth in the overall scheme of things. And taking an average, around 21% of these hotel reservations take place on mobile devices!
2. Importance of Content
Having a robust content strategy that goes above and beyond the regular ‘Hotel details’ can help increase a property’s revenue – with 30-40% of the revenue being derived from the organic traffic that comes here! Blogs, social media and the website need to focus more on high quality, engaging content.
3. Better Targeted Marketing
Marketing success depends partly on the manner of presentation, and primarily on the audience’s interest – which is why it’s very important for properties to deeply analyze industry insights and study guest trends, their age group, income range and so on to derive as many factors as possible about the environment first.
4. Personalized Email
Guests are more likely to read the entire message when the email is personalized for them. In fact, this simple strategy can boost conversion and increase hotel bookings by as much as 12%! Seeing their name when asked to take an action triggers a higher response rate than generic, mass-mailing campaigns.
5. Landing Pages over Homepage
Landing pages deliver the message and action to be taken in a much more effective manner than a home-page. Users more often take an action when redirected to a landing page, rather than a home-page from where it’s easy to end up at other parts of the site.
6. User Generated Content
UGC is one of the boons of online marketing and must be utilized to its maximum – it’s highly effective, costs nothing, and generates a great deal of engagement. And with social media finding a bigger place in people’s lives than ever before, hotels can optimize their channels with contests and by connecting with users.
7. New Ways to Pay
Credit cards and cash may still be widely used but they’re no longer the most convenient payment options around – online services such as Paypal have been manifesting into mobile apps and guests now prefer these simpler alternatives. 2016 will see fingerprint payment also enter the mainstream.
8. Video Marketing
Video content is gaining prominence with businesses and a number of hotels regularly develop engaging video – and these clips are appearing on Facebook, Instagram and other channels beyond the traditional one like YouTube. And the number of channels is increasing every year.