Mobile Marketing for the Hospitality Industry
What was once a nice to have is now increasingly seen as a key plank of any marketing plan. Here’s why marketing for the hospitality industry is going mobile. Does your business have a mobile marketing strategy? If not, why not? More and more people are turning to mobile devices when choosing services, and the hospitality industry is one of sectors most likely to benefit. Understanding the need for a mobile strategy, though, is one thing. Putting it into action is quite another. Here’s a step by step guide to making the most of mobile.
Mobile friendly hospitality sites
Marketing for the Hospitality Industry
Understanding the importance
People are using their mobile phones to find pubs, restaurants and hotels. Bookings.com finds that half of all customer buying journeys start on a mobile phone. Research from Google backs this up. It says 70% of travellers have used their mobiles to research destinations.
Smartphones are everywhere and shows no sign of dying down. Estimates suggest mobile phone users could number 5.5bn worldwide by 2022. They are looking for you, but will they be able to find you. Having a mobile marketing presence is very different to a simple web presence. You need something which displays and works well on mobile devices. This will start with your website.
Invest in a mobile optimised website
In some ways we need to begin at the end. The final destination of all your mobile marketing efforts will be your website, so you need to be sure this is structured to be mobile friendly. Many of the open source content management solutions, such as Squarespace, are now optimised to display well on the full screen, but it pays to make sure.
Attention spans are short enough in the online world. With mobile marketing, people are even less patient. You only have a couple of seconds to capture their attention and if the site is slow to load, has clunky navigation or doesn’t display properly, they will be likely to look elsewhere.
Combine email and mobile
The chances are you already use email newsletters to market yourself. Make sure these will display just as well on mobile devices as on a computer. Use bold headlines, short, concise content, have an eye-catching image and ensure it contains a clear call to action with a link to your website.
Get ‘appy’
The must-have accessory for anyone who is serious about mobile marketing is a mobile app. This can make life a whole lot easier for both the management and customers. For example, a hotel app could allow a guest to check in online and save some time at the desk. They’re happier and so are your staff who can spend less time on fiddly administrative duties.
Remember social media
The proliferation of mobile devices has served to embed us all even more deeply into social media. This is a great opportunity to spread news of events, share pictures of your venue and attract new customers. If people enjoy their time with you, there’s also a good chance they will post their experiences online.
Get on your hospitality business noticed
A quick way to get your hospitality business seen to the masses and start getting people though the doors is to register with Google My Business. Indexing your business as a location which costs nothing and if easy to do, it will appear in a customers search engine results if they are close by.
Now the tricky bit
These are just a few of the steps you could take, but they all do require one thing: money. Whether you’re building a new website, developing a new app or hiring a marketing team to manage your digital strategy this will cost money. With profit margins being tight at the best of times, it’s not unreasonable for managers to feel they can’t quite justify the upfront expenditure.
Can loans based on credit card sales help?
One way around this problem could be Business Cash Advance UK. This is a flexible, low impact, way to get an injection of capital into your company to make these investments. A provider will give you a lump sum upfront which will be paid with a proportion of your future credit or debit card sales. Using your historic data from debit and credit card payments, they will decide how much money they are prepared to give you.
This is a flexible way to get the upfront capital you need to take your company forward. Repayments will vary depending on how much revenue you have coming into the company, so in theory you should only be paying what you can afford. It means you’ll be paying for this investment at a time when you’re already seeing the return on your balance sheet.
This can be a great way to overcome the obstacle of capital and take your business into the mobile realm. As such, it could prove to be a life saver. Digital technology is taking the world by storm. If you’re not investing, your competitors will be and that could give them a crucial edge across the board. Those which fail to invest could risk being left behind.
The hospitality industry is a seasonal business. Digital skills are needed when it comes to marketing for the hospitality industry after a certain level. Restaurant loans are a perfect solution to this issue to imply a professional marketer.
Need more help funding your digital marketing project
If your hospitality would like to know more about different funding options available. Simply complete the online enquiry form.