3. Why do Marketing Managers compliment team members? Try to count 10 successful strategies of Hotel Marketing Manager?

1. Try to count 10 successful strategies of Hotel Marketing Manager?

2. Why do Marketing Managers keep the lines of communication open?

3. Why do Marketing Managers compliment team members?
1. Try to count 10 successful strategies of Hotel Marketing Manager?

With such a heavy focus on increasing group bookings at hotels, it’s no wonder that marketing often gets the short end of the stick throughout the hotel industry. It’s the same reason that you’ll see robust sales teams but skeleton marketing crews, or a director of sales and rarely a director of marketing.

Your best defense? Arm yourself with – at the very least – online hotel marketing basics that will build you a solid and substantial foundation for your hotel marketing efforts throughout the rest of the year. These hotel marketing strategy ideas are strong place to start.

How to create the best hotel marketing strategy:

1. Identify your hotel's audience.

Before you embark on any type of marketing, do this. You may think you know who your guests are, but often times, I see hoteliers have wishful thinking. They’ll say their biggest market is business travelers, when really it is fit. The error comes from the hotel wanting more business travelers. In other cases, hotels want to be something to everyone. The hotels with the most success in marketing are the ones that take the time nail down who their audience is. Take the time to write full customer profiles, complete with demographics, job title, travel habits, etc of your typical guests. Knowing your audience will provide the direction for all of your marketing tactics.

Better marketing strategy starts with this solution

2. Write down what you want your marketing to achieve.

Again – don’t skip this step. Too many hotels do that and end up missing the mark completely with their marketing efforts since they didn’t know what they wanted in the first place. So, set out your goals. What exactly do you want to achieve overall with your marketing? Identify goals for each marketing campaign you commit to. What do you want more of? Brand recognition, stronger brand loyalty, exposure to specific customers and markets?

3. Create enticing packages and market them consistently.

Entice potential guests with creative packages that will persuade them to book. Develop some tried-and-true packages, such as romance packages that include dinner for two and artisan chocolates. These are boring, but they sell.

Also, develop packages that are unique only to your property and that are based on destination experiences. Partner with a local cooking school to offer guests a cooking class using local ingredients, a scavenger hunt company to show guests your city’s secrets, or a food tour company that will take your guests on a one-of-a-kind tasting journey to local mom-and-pop owned restaurants. Then, push those offers consistently using all of your marketing channels – your website, social media channels, and email newsletters.

4. Choose your hotel's social media channels.

While hotel social media is now a necessity, it is NOT necessary to be on every channel imaginable. Find out where your audience hangs out online. Look at your comp set – do they have active Facebook pages abuzz with activity, while their hotel Pinterest accounts remain sadly dormant? Take a cue and get on Facebook pronto.

Social media allows your hotel to build a community of past, present and potential guests, while also giving your brand a place to interact with these customers. You can also push exclusive offers, survey your guests, offer destination help to guests, and address customer service issues.

5. Invest in quality marketing assets and media.

Whether you like it or not, travelers will ‘judge a book by its cover.’ To your guests, your digital assets, like your hotel photography or marketing videos, reflect your property and the experience they’ll have there. So, don’t go cheap on building your visual marketing assets by hiring your nephew who is dabbling in camera work (you’d be surprised how many hotel owners do this). Skip the grainy, poorly lit images and shaky marketing videos shot on your iPhone. Present the best side of your property by investing in quality vendors to create your marketing materials or else risk looking like a place people DON’T want to stay at. Also, shoot as many room types and public spaces in your hotel as you can. Hotel guests want to see exactly where they’ll be staying, the areas they’ll hang out in, and so on.

6. Develop a strategy for email marketing.

No matter how much attention social media is getting, email marketing still stands as a solid and incredibly powerful marketing tool for hotels. You can interact with your guests by sending them relevant details and helpful tips before they check-in, send out exclusive offers to a targeted audience (repeat guests, guests from certain locations, etc), and keep past guests updated on what’s new at both your hotel and your destination.

7. Teach guests what to expect at your property.

Travelers are hungry for details that will impact their stay. So, avoid being vague (“We’re close to all major attractions!”) and instead practice giving precise information that will help them explore your destination and make the most of their stay (“We’re just a 15-minute drive to Pike Place in downtown Seattle.”) Tell them what attractions are around you, within walking distance, driving distance, etc. Do the same with your hotel and its amenities. Offer up the details that tell the story of your property and better paint the picture of your experience. Instead of marketing your restaurant generically as “a fine-dining Italian restaurant,” describe the experience accurately with “Taste regional Italian recipes and locally sourced ingredients in our intimate restaurant that overlooks the Hollywood Hills.”

8. Nail down your hotel's search engine optimization.

According to a Google study, 65 percent of leisure travelers begin their travel search online, especially after a destination is selected. So, it’s vital that your hotel website gets noticed during a guest’s online search. Hire a SEO specialist and content strategist to optimize your hotel’s website with the right content, tags, pages, and backlinks.

9. Encourage – and respond to – guest reviews.

Travelers will always believe other travelers over you. So, encourage traveler reviews both during and after guests’ stays. Don’t let the amazing experience you offer guests go unnoticed, so encourage and ask for the feedback. Here are some ways to do that. Whether they’re crummy or glowing, reviews are the perfect opportunities to allow your customer to stumble or shine. Your responses will influence how future guests in the research phase see you and help them to decide if it is worth staying with you. Never know what to stay to an angry reviewer? Here are some brilliant ways to respond to negative reviews.

10. Bring your hotel marketing to mobile.

Today’s travelers are searching and booking on tablets and their smartphones, not to mention using their devices for virtually every portion of their travels. They’re checking into their flights, hailing a Uber or Lyft, receiving changes to their travel itineraries and booking their hotel for the night. So everything you have has to be optimized for all marketing platforms. In addition to your Website, this includes your booking engine, your email marketing, your sales pages, proposal forms, photo galleries, etc.

What marketing essentials would you add to this list? What causes you the most issues? Let us know in the comments below! And, up next learn all about magazine ads for hotels.

2. Why do Marketing Managers keep the lines of communication open?

Communication has always played a very important role in the way we do business. A steady flow of communication is what powers the stock market, improves upon technology and inventions, helps companies grow, and keeps people connected with one another and with the businesses they work with or choose to purchase goods and services from.

Today’s advanced technology has brought communication to the forefront of the world’s societies like never before, enabling people halfway around the world to communicate with thousands of others within mere seconds. Through social media platforms, VOIP systems, online web conference apps, and other advanced and intuitive communication tools, communication lines can stay open on a consistent basis, ensuring that the flow of information never stops.

As technology changed the way we communicate, so too did our demands for better, faster, easier ways to communicate. We are always striving to improve upon old technologies and develop new ones so as to keep up with those demands, and meet new challenges in the future.

Today’s consumers rely upon fast, easy-to-access information—they have communicated their needs to businesses, and smart, savvy companies have responded by ensuring that the consumers can easily access information through a variety of means, and most importantly, that someone is ready and able to communicate with the consumer in order to handle any issues and complaints, or just to make the customer feel more connected to the business, subsequently improving the consumer experience.

While it is a critical factor to be able to communicate with your customers and clients in a professional manner, it is no less important that interoffice communication is also efficient and open at all times. This is especially true in businesses and industries where many employees are not in one central location yet rely upon information from one another to complete tasks and projects.

Office phone systems are simply not a reliable means of ensuring consistent communication, because if someone is not in the office, then you have to wait until they return, check their voicemail, and find the time to call you back amidst all the other messages they received likewise with email. However, various web conferencing apps like Cisco WebEx, Uberconference, Go to Meeting remedy these problems by ensuring that you can contact anyone, anywhere, anytime, so long as they have their laptop or mobile device.

Web conference apps offer users more than just a means to communicate online. They can be used to hold seminars, train staff, troubleshoot with clients, and collaborate with team members in various locations. Many web conference apps also have advanced features that further help to improve productivity and efficiency in the workplace, as well as improve marketing efforts, delivering a strong ROI.

Many businesses have already realized the importance of being able to communicate openly and efficiently, and have taken advantage of easy to use yet highly advanced apps that allow managers, business owners, employees, team leaders, clients and customers to easily communicate with one another more openly, more effectively, and more reliably.

Not only does improving communication, improve the way your company does business, it is also more cost-effective than using other means of communication, such as the traditional business phone system. Additionally, it also eliminates the need for traveling to other locations to attend meetings, wasting time trying to get multiple parties together for a meeting, losing time while waiting for callbacks, and even on material costs for printing and sending documents, since many web conference apps allow you to easily share documents with others.

Time saved is also money saved, and as productivity improves, it also helps your teams complete tasks on time and on budget. Time is money, and the key to saving both is open and efficient communication.

When you factor in all the different advantages as well as the cost-savings that can be garnered by using new tools of communication and collaboration, it seems a no-brainer. At the very least, it is an efficient means of staying competitive, because you can be assured that other companies will soon be investigating the advantages and benefits of web conference apps, if they aren’t already.

Have you already tried using web conference apps? Which ones have you tried and why? Share your experiences and insight with others. If you haven’t already tried one, take some time to do some research on the various apps that are available, so that you can see firsthand what additional features are available. Then you’ll be able to make an informed decision and choose the app that best suits your needs and company goals.
3. Why do Marketing Managers compliment team members?

You might be thinking, "Managers work for their employees? Isn't it the other way around?"

Actually, a manager, like an employee, is more effective when they're an active team player.

But, while an employee's job is to fulfill tasks within a job description, a manager's job is to make his or her team successful. To do this, a manager shouldn't be afraid to chime in during meetings, assist on projects, or help their team grow or succeed in other ways.

At some companies, new employees rarely ever see -- let alone speak -- to the people manager that manages their own boss. This is something that's somewhat unheard of at HubSpot, where you might be seated next to an executive or vice president on your floor or at a meeting.

This ability to get to know and work with leadership helps employees feel like they can confidently talk to someone in a much higher role. It also makes them feel confident that these managers care about their hard work.

This visibility is something Andrew Mahon, a marketing fellow, noticed immediately when he started working at HubSpot.

"In my first month working at HubSpot, my desk was situated directly outside a meeting room. Directly across from me was my manager, VP of Product Marketing Meghan Keaney Anderson. One morning, her manager, Kipp Bodnar, stepped out of the meeting room."

Mahon says his manager greeted Kipp, who then stopped in his tracks and asked, "Hi, Meghan ... Is there anything you need me to do?"

Mahon valued Kipp's question because it could've been translated in multiple positive ways, including, "Are there any blockers I can remove for you?", 'Are you waiting on a decision from me on anything?", "Are you working on an idea that you want to share with me," or even, 'Is there something going on in your world outside of work that's competing for your time and attention?"

"I've been working in all sorts of businesses for over 30 years -- startups, Fortune 100, fast-growing and slowly-dying. -- I've never had a bad manager, never had to toil under a tyrant," Mahon explains. "But, also, I had never experienced such an orientation. Kipp, and all three managers I've had at HubSpot, consider that their primary job is to make me successful in my projects and in my career. It's as if they work for me, rather than me working for them."

Emotional intelligence isn't just a sought after soft skill in general employees, -- according to Emily MacIntyre, the marketing department's Managing Team Development Manager -- it's vital for any role that involves leading people.

"To me, emotional intelligence is the foundation of being able to work well with other people," says Emily MacIntyre. "It helps to self regulate so you can give clear directions and then it allows you to be empathetic to the needs of others."

But, what exactly is emotional intelligence? It's actually exactly what it sounds like. The skill requires you to understand your own emotions, learn how to manage them, and navigate how to respond to the emotions of others on your team. Traits of someone who's emotionally intelligent include curiosity, self-awareness, self-motivation, likability, and empathetic.

So, why is emotional intelligence, or EQ, so important? Well, in a high-stress or unexpected situation, emotional intelligence will allow you to stay calm while keeping your team from panicking on deadlines. It will also prevent you from making rash decisions as a leader or responding to a slight inconvenience in a non-productive emotional way.

If you feel like you struggle with the situations noted above, check out this blog post, which offers tips on how to improve your EQ.

As mentioned above, many bad bosses can have an over-aggressive or intense management style that causes employees to be scared of missing goals or even offering new ideas.

Meanwhile, great managers focus want employees to grow from mistakes and offer new insights that they might not have thought of. Supporting employees so that they can succeed at their job, confidently take initiative, and feel safe in their workplace cultivates a sense of psychological safety.

Improving psychological safety in your workplace or on your team requires emotional intelligence and empathy. While empathic leaders can identify with and recognize unspoken employee emotions, concerns, and fears, emotionally intelligent managers will also be able to respond to situations in a way that won't make teams feel threatened.

The ability to cultivate psychological safety is a critical asset that Jennifer Stefancik, a HubSpot Academy Marketing Manager, values in her own people manager.

"Feeling supported, heard, and understood is the foundation I need to be able to come to work every day with the right mindset to do good work," Stefancik says. "Genuine empathy and psychological safety are hard to fake, and it's something that I think everyone should master before they consider the people management path."

Research supports Stefancik's thoughts on empathy and psychological safety.

According to Harvard Business Review, some of the highest performing teams have a strong sense of psychological safety.

Additionally, a 2018 study of over 6,700 managers revealed that leaders ranked as more empathic had more productive and satisfied teams working under them than those that were seen as less empathetic. However, despite the benefits of empathy, less than 50% of employees report having empathic managers.

What can we take from the research above? Obviously, psychological safety and empathy are necessary for team success and employee growth, but mastering them isn't always easy or straightforward.

If you're a manager or hoping to be a better leader, take time to identify aspects of your management style or overall office culture that could benefit from psychological safety.

For example, rather than using language that makes your team members feel scared of missing deadlines or goals, keep an open and supportive dialogue with them so they can confidently come to you with successes, learnings from failure, or concerns while they're working on high pressure projects. Alternatively, if a team member is having trouble with a project, you should offer advice or assistance to help them remove blockers, rather than telling them to just get it done.

Supportive communication with team members allows them to learn from mistakes and grow as employees, rather than work tirelessly on projects because they fear that they'll lose their jobs.

Aside from strong communication with your team, you can also host meetings or create accessible ways for any employee to pitch or brainstorm new ideas to you.

While allowing employees to pitch ideas will make shy or new teammates feel like they can contribute to a strategy, it can also be beneficial for your company overall. In fact, Pixar, which encourages "candor" and "brain trusts," credits its success to its psychologically safe environment.

Growing Your Management Skills

Ultimately, a great people manager knows how to cultivate a psychologically safe work environment, listen to their employees, and motivate their teams to reach achievable goals.

Whether you'd like to become a people manager or a project manager who works with people, the skills above will be vital to your success and your team's retention.

To position yourself as a leader of any kind, it can be helpful to make yourself accessible to help your team. You should also be sure to leverage crucial skills such as emotional intelligence and empathy as you continue to work with or manage people.

Aside from the three crucial skills listed above, there are also a number of additional skills you can harness as you work your way up in your company. Check out this blog post which highlights a few other skills you might want to zone in on.