*This is a guest post from our friend Katie Conroy at AdviceMine.com
Digital marketing dominates modern marketing plans. Digital marketing is instant, affordable, and delivers valuable data about customer behavior and ROI.
Despite the advantages of digital marketing, traditional marketing methods still have a place in the hospitality industry. Traditional tactics like outdoor advertising, direct mail, and word-of-mouth reach customers at the right place and time to capture attention and drive conversions.
Yet for hospitality brands, it’s not a matter of choosing one over the other. The most successful brands integrate the best aspects of traditional and online marketing.
What does that look like in practice? Here are three ways brands can weave traditional and digital marketing together for better-than-ever results.
1. Digital Out-of-Home
Out-of-home advertising like billboards and signage is a traditional way to sell experiences and deliver relevant information in the right location. Now, digital is adding new capabilities including personalization, geotargeting, and methods to track KPIs and conversions.
For example, you can use customer data to personalize digital signage for loyal customers, update signage according to weather, traffic, or events, or push special offers to travelers based on geolocation. Geotargeting also lets you monitor conversions by tieing cell phone pings near digital signage to dwell time at hotels, restaurants, and other desired locations. The ability to measure ROI overcomes the biggest hurdle to optimized OOH advertising.
2. Traditional Marketing: Direct Mail to Digital
The average hospitality industry email open rate is under 20% and click-through rates are hovering at a measly 2%. Compared to email marketing, direct mail is more memorable with response rates several times higher than email, paid search, and social media.
Why is direct mail making a comeback? Customers’ email inboxes are saturated, making it harder for brands to break through the noise. Meanwhile, direct mail volume has been steadily decreasing making direct mail one of the best ways to separate your brand from the competition. If your email is open and response rates are declining, try something different before customers check out entirely. ZenBusiness recommends sending promotional information, loyalty rewards, and special offers via direct mail reignites interest by making customers feel valued.
The key to converting direct mail customers is using digital call-to-action to drive customers to websites and landing pages. QR codes are an optimal way to accomplish this. By using QR codes to direct customers to a unique URL, brands can track KPIs specific to each campaign.
3. Amplified Word-of-Mouth
Word-of-mouth remains the most trusted form of marketing. While traditional word-of-mouth is organic, brands can harness the power of word-of-mouth through amplified referral and affiliate marketing campaigns. Rewarding customers for referrals drives loyalty and customer lifetime value while acquiring new customers for your brand. Not only do you gain a customer, but CLV for referred customers is 16% higher than non-referrals on average.
Affiliate marketing is similar to referral marketing except instead of customers, brands recruit bloggers, influencers, and brand ambassadors to promote their business. Affiliates’ high social currency leads to a broader reach than referral marketing.
Whether you’re using referral marketing, affiliate marketing, or both, you need a way to track results. Affiliate and referral tracking software like Post Affiliate, Talon.One, and Referral Rock provide a centralized place to track ambassadors, monitor KPIs, issue rewards, and optimize campaigns through A/B testing.
Traditional marketing isn’t obsolete. In fact, digital has made it better than ever. Using digital tools to boost traditional marketing campaigns overcomes the drawbacks of traditional hospitality marketing with improved targeting and data-driven decision-making. Instead of eliminating traditional from your marketing budget, use tactics like these to upgrade it for the modern era.
Enhance your digital marketing efforts with website design and development from the pros at MagnaSites. Call 941-538-7629 to learn more!
