Magazine advertisements, gaudy flyers, hotel directories, lavish press conferences and branded apps are only a few of the traditional tools hotel marketers utilize to draw customers’ attention. Traditional marketing is akin to throwing bottles in an ocean of information and hoping that people will receive the message inside, find it attractive and decide to place an order for more bottles. In other words, traditional marketing is a highly uncertain activity, and throwing more bottles to increase the odds of reaching more people can rapidly become an expensive endeavor.
In a world heavily saturated with branding, and hotels with ever decreasing budgets to spend on marketing, there is one technique hotels can employ to grow business without shrinking margins. Growth hacking is about growing a business customer base by using alternatives to conventional marketing tactics. Leveraging social networks online and offline, growth hacking solely focuses on the acquisition and retention of customers.
The following points are three ways to start growing your business while simultaneously staying in the finance director’s good books.
1. Newsjacking: Riding on someone else’s notoriety
Press conferences are to PR managers what newsjacking is to growth hackers. Newsjacking is about selecting a piece of news already receiving traction and jumping on the bandwagon to release your own spin. An apt example was the pop-up beach set up by the Hilton on the banks of the River Thames in London in January 2013. The hotel had skillfully set up the beach on Blue Monday — the so-called “most depressing day of the year.”
Consequently, the hotel was mentioned in several stories given its association to the “Blue Monday” angle. The result: more than three million people were exposed to the newsjacking campaign.
Sometimes however, a piece of news is not required to promote the hotel. To create the buzz around the opening of its New York flagship property, CitizenM used limousines as mobile billboards reading “free Wi-Fi is real luxury” and parked the cars in various locations throughout the city. The campaign went viral with thousands of people sharing the pictures of the limousines across social media.
Articles regarding hotels are rarely exciting on their own. Hotels should concentrate efforts on looking for popular news items relevant to their brand and creating an angle instead of pushing out half-exciting news stories via traditional media channels.
2. Inside-out marketing: Your customers are your sales team
Traditional marketers rely on sales teams to acquire customers in a linear way. Growth hackers practice inside-out marketing to leverage existing customer bases to grow exponentially. Inside-out marketing uses the loyal customers already in the base — no matter how few — and draws them in with incentives to help spread the word.
With its “Tweet a Coffee” initiative, Starbucks enables its registered customers to give coffees to their friends as gifts simply by sending a tweet. As a result, each coffee purchase is shared on the social media network.
Global lodging and accommodation website Airbnb’s referral program encourages inviting friends to register to the site by giving both the sender and recipient US$25 of travel credit. By creating personalized invitation vouchers and focusing on mobile user-friendliness Airbnb increased bookings up to 25% in certain markets. Drawing from Airbnb’s example, hotels could also incentivize customers to invite their friends to stay at the same property or brand by offering them similar travel credit.
Another way for hotels to use customers as their sales team would be to offer additional benefits when booking (room upgrade, airport transfer, etc.) on the condition they invite their social circle to also book a trip.
When it comes to selling your product, there is no need to shout about it. Instead, quietly inform your loyal customers: they will close the sales for you.
3. Co-creation: Merge your product with your communication
Traditional marketers work for months on the development of a new product/service in the hope that a big launch party will turn people into brand advocates overnight. Growth hackers think a launch party is the equivalent of playing roulette by putting all chips on one number and crossing their fingers to win the jackpot.
Growth hackers don’t dissociate product development and marketing. Prodigy Design Lab, a spin-off of a real estate developer, launched a competition to crowdsource the interior design of a new hotel in New York City. Irrespective of who won the competition, Prodigy Design Lab gathered together a crowd of people that felt involved in the project and would ultimately want to share its development with their respective networks. For example, restaurants could invite their clients to taste dishes before the launch of a new menu; clubs could involve their patrons to decide on the lineup of guest artists; and hotels could organize workshops to test, comment and improve mock-up rooms.
In other words, don’t spend too much time and money tweaking every component of your new offering. Remember, no customers will care about your business until they feel part of it.
A change of mindset
Newsjacking, inside-out marketing and crowdsourcing are just three examples of how growth hackers approach sales and marketing. More than a set of tools, growth hacking is a mindset that focuses on the use of non-mass-marketing tactics to grow, acquire and retain customers.
Youri Sawerschel is a strategy and branding consultant for Bridge.Over Group, Geneva.