Hotel target market: how to identify and attract it

A hotel target market is a group or groups of people who already frequent your property. This may also be a type of client that you want to attract more.

Understanding the customer mindset is vital for creating an effective marketing strategy by:

• developing adapted offers for your target audience;
• creating a content editorial calendar for social media;
• better ads placing to maximize conversion;
• coming up with the distinctive unique selling proposition (USP);
• prioritizing promotional channels.

In this post, we will help to reveal your hotel target market and to take advantage of this data in order to target guests more thoroughly.

What to do to identify hotel’s customer segments

Collect guest data, build a customer base and profile them. Here are some ways to start the research:

1. Pull the data from your CRM software.
2. Study statistics on your audience on social media networks. Use Facebook Audience Insights to see Facebook and Instagram users that interact with your business profile.
3. Build guest profiles together with hotel receptionists.
4. Get a better idea of who visits your website with the help of Google Analytics reports.

5. Survey your guests with the list of questions that interest you the most. Do it automatically using email, verbally over the phone, or integrating it with the check-in/out process.

   Pull the email address database from the CRM. Create a questionnaire in Google Forms — a free service for survey creation and analysis. The most popular email marketing services are SendPulse and MailChimp.

6. See what online reviews on Booking.com, Tripadvisor, and Google say. There, guests elaborate on why they chose your hotel and what they loved the most.

When you collect the data, it is worth considering the following factors to profile your customers:

• Why they are traveling (vacation, anniversary, business trip, leisure);
• What is defining about them (gender, age, relationship status);
• Where they are from;
• What they pay attention to when looking for accommodation;
• How they book hotels (website, over the phone, OTA, social media);
• What they use to communicate with hotel representatives (phone, social media, instant messengers, email);
• How often they stay at hotels;
• How much they spend on trips and accommodation on average;
• What their hobbies are;
• What they enjoyed the most about your hotel (quality of service, prices, extra services, location).

Analyze data on your own or let a business intelligence agency do it. As a result, you will get one or several guest profiles.

How to attract guests knowing your target market

Once you know all the characteristics of your typical guest, it will be easier to promote your property. Here are some ideas on how you can do this.

• When setting contextual ads, determine to whom, on what devices, and wh ere your advertisements will be displayed.
• Have your property promoted on social media, for example in communities dedicated to certain hobbies. At first, the conversion will be rather low, but some people will engage with you. Later specify and improve your offer in another advertising campaign.
• Look for an influencer that resembles the guest profile the most to publicize the hotel. In this case, the blogger is likely to mention things that your target market pays attention to when choosing accommodation. Moreover, guests would rather rely on the opinion of someone to who they can relate to.

How to adapt an online offer to suit your target market

As soon as you figure out guest personas, their preferences, and booking channels that they use, use this knowledge for your marketing campaign. The formula of an effective special offer or an ad is giving a solution for one of guests’ problems.

Customers should relate to your advertising copy the moment they start reading it. In order to reinforce the effect, carefully select a picture. When writing a lead copy, built it with the 4 U’s formula: Urgent, Unique, Useful, and Ultra-specific.

Customers should feel like you personally know them and you are well aware of their demands. The better you tailor the customer’s needs, the higher the conversion.

Subdivide some personas further in order to target them better. For example, families with children are a rather broad segment, because parents of a 1-year-old and a 15-year-old need different kinds of services. Drill down on the subsections according to the age of children and provide separate advertisements. For example, one will be about high chairs, playgrounds, and babysitting, and another — about workshops and parties.

This is what you can do to get more bookings when targeting:

• When promoting a special offer, provide a link that redirects to a special offer page on the hotel website.
• Display special offer widgets on the website. They draw website visitors' attention and lead to a page of the offer or the rate in the booking engine.
• Add a USP section on your website homepage and on social media profiles to tell about services that are important for your target market.

  

• Set remarketing of website visitors.
• Launch email marketing campaigns. Remind travelers to complete a booking and to promote special offers in emails. After departure, send feedback surveys and give discount promo codes.
• Encourage guests to leave reviews on your property. Share them to win the trust of potential customers. Reviews of the target audience are likely to mention how its needs are met.

  

TravelLine Booking Engine allows setting a USP pop-up like this above the search box so that guests see it clearly.

Key takeaways

• A clear understanding of your guest personas informs your marketing strategies.
• Guests spend less reluctantly when they feel that you know what they need.
• There are questions that you need to ask before analyzing your customer base.
• The information that you get from booking details is not enough to segment your customers. Use other channels to acquire other data.
• Derive subsections from broad segments.