When it comes to hospitality, social media marketing can easily boost your success and help you gain new customers. Alternatively, it can blow up in your face if you don't know how to manage your social media presence. There are some common social media hospitality marketing mistakes that you need to look out for. There are also lots of social media strategies to take advantage of in order to gain a greater reach for your messages.
The Risks
Risk 1: If customers have a bad experience with your hospitality business, they will often take to social media to talk about it. This is a risk, as it may turn some potential customers away. However, it is also an excellent marketing opportunity to publicly share how you deal with customer hospitality issues.
First of all, apologize to the customer for the poor experience. Next, tell them what you're going to do to make up for the mishap. Simply offering the customer a refund, discount or special hospitality experience such as a free meal is often enough to get back into a customer's good books.
Promptly addressing the issue is great for your own marketing strategies. It shows other customers that you will deal with all hospitality issues in a professional and friendly manner. This builds customer loyalty and keeps customers happy and engaged with your business.
Don't ever get into an argument with a customer on your social media page. If the hospitality issue needs to be dealt with in depth or if the customer is still unsatisfied, take up the issue by phone or email.
Risk 2: The second risk is that you will not keep up with your social media hospitality marketing and your pages will grow stale and inactive. This is a common marketing mistake that many businesses make, and it is usually due to the fact that social media is time-consuming.
Businesses think they don't have time to update their social media pages, but you can easily automate the process. This saves hours of time every day while enabling you to keep your social media pages fresh.
Risk 3: One risk that many hospitality businesses face is using social media in completely the wrong way. This leads to a lack of visitor engagement. The reason for this is often that businesses use their social media pages to simply promote their own products and services. Traditional marketing is not the purpose of social media, however, and businesses that use it that way will not see much of a return for their efforts. You need new marketing strategies.
Social media is all about interaction. The rule for social media hospitality marketing strategies is that you should have about 80% informative or fun content and just 20% promotional content on your social media pages. It's alright to throw in self-promotion sometimes, but keep it limited.
Post hospitality promotions, contests, videos and pictures, stories of outstanding customer service, coupons, surveys, and more. Create a series of automated posts and they will be posted over time as scheduled.
The Rewards
Reward 1: One of the biggest rewards hospitality businesses gain from building a social media presence is widening their reach. Social media helps you reach thousands of new potential customers that otherwise may never have known about your hospitality business. If you know how to truly engage these customers, using marketing strategies such as the ones above, you will attract more and more customers to your business.Reward 2: Social media helps you build a stronger connection with your customers and create loyalty. Social media is a way to show the personal side of your hospitality business with brief staff bios, pictures of cozy nooks in your hotel or restaurant, videos of special customer experiences and so on.
Social media allows your business to promote a more casual message while still maintaining a professional image. This makes your business more accessible and transparent, giving customers direct access to interact with you. The hospitality industry especially is one where constantly interacting with your customers is essential.
Reward 3: Social media helps you keep a strong brand presence over multiple channels, increasing customer recognition and retention. Many companies only use email marketing to reach their customers. Email marketing, however, is so common that many people simply delete promotional emails before they ever read them.
Social media is a more dynamic way to interact with your hospitality customers. It is not intended to replace email marketing or traditional advertising. It is meant to add another aspect to your overall marketing strategies, increasing brand awareness and providing a fun way to interact.
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