Automation software solutions are powerful – yet simple – tools for the hotel and hospitality industry, engaging your target market across multiple digital channels, eliminating time-consuming administrative tasks, and even analysing results. With the right automation solution, your business can increase its bookings, boost customer satisfaction, and ultimately drive increased profits.
Marketing Automation – Taking on Challenges in the Hospitality Industry
While automation software has taken off in recent years to become a best practice for many businesses, the hospitality industry hasn’t yet fully realised the opportunities these solutions offer, from generating a higher volume of better quality leads to personalising the customer journey to increasing click-through rates – all while taking a costly administrative load off your shoulders.
The reason for this hesitancy is understandable, as there are real and tangible barriers to implementation in the industry. Implementing a new technology can be intimidating to smaller, family-run, independent and micro-chain hotels, and poor past experiences with technology can often cast a shadow over the promised benefits of implementing an automation solution. In addition, the costs involved are not inconsiderable, and it will often take time for automation processes to show true results and ROI.
Despite these concerns, the fact remains that marketing automation is one change that is inevitable in this industry. And while it’s right to hesitate before plunging in, it’s a technology that the industry can considerably benefit from in a time when everyone needs to find an edge.
The Best Hotel Marketing Software & Tools
As with any technology, there are a wide range of tools and solutions available, many of which are designed for very specific applications. Looking through all the tools on offer can be an overwhelming experience, especially if you are not familiar with automation. That’s why we’ve taken the time to evaluate all the current solutions on the market to find the best hotel marketing automation software and tools available. Here, we’ve categorised them according to specific pain points for hotel or hospitality marketing.
What is the Best Email Automation Tool?
Email is one of the oldest, yet most effective and refined, digital marketing tools – and its power is amplified by using marketing automation. In fact, current data shows that combining automation with email marketing delivers twice as many leads as traditional broadcast methods.
- Active Campaign
This email marketing automation tool is an end-to-end solution, refining your email campaigns while saving you time. With the ability to create dynamic content, subscription forms, audience segments and more, you are able to engage guests through your content by appealing directly to the right audience with the right content. It even has testing features to help engage, nurture and convert contacts.
- Mailchimp
Mailchimp is the classic email marketing automation tool for businesses worldwide, and it’s easy to see why. While its features are not as advanced as Active Campaign, its easy-to-use interface is supplemented by a range of automation tools that make it ideal for all but the most sophisticated and complex campaigns. From sending out repeat emails on a set schedule, aligning your content with events, to segmenting your content for increased personalisation, it has all the basics covered.
What is the Best Social Media Management Tool?
If you’ve been struggling with how time and resource-heavy a strong social media presence can be, then these marketing automation tools are the ideal solution. Social media automation software not only helps to create a more engaged audience of guests, it makes the process of managing your social media content and reputation much simpler. The best tools in this category include:
- Hootsuite
This is one of the strongest all-round marketing automation software solutions on the market, and is a popular choice for businesses who want solid control of their social media presence combined with robust scheduling features to streamline campaigns. Hootsuite offers bulk scheduling for multiple posts along with customer social listening capabilities, allowing you to monitor trends and sentiment on relevant issues on multiple channels.
- CoSchedule
If you like to plan out campaigns well in advance and know exactly what your brand will say and when, then this software solution is a great choice. With a unique, birds-eye approach, you can see your campaign end-to-end, requeue posts that you designate as most important, and bring all your social media messages into a single inbox for rapid response times.
What is the Best Marketing Automation Software for Hotel CRM?
CRM has always been a critical differentiator for hotels, and having the ability to track your marketing efforts and leads as well as report back on what actions are having the most impact refines your CRM to have a real and measurable impact on guest experience.
- Hubspot
Hubspot has developed into one of the most powerful CRM tools in the world, and it’s easy to see why. It allows you to move from simple CRM tools like email list autoresponders all the way to setting complex systems that target specific customers or leads with specific content (email, live chat, web experience, etc.) at a specific moment. While the initial CRM experience is free, there are several pricing options available for different suites of tools that can get quite expensive but that cover all the enterprise level services you could possibly need.
What are the Best Hotel Marketing Automation Tools for Integration?
Successful digital marketing means omni-channel digital marketing – running email campaigns, social media campaigns, blogs, articles and more – and it’s easy for pieces of the puzzle to get lost in the flow.
- Zapier
Tracking each part of your digital marketing strategy and helping to make more coherent and impactful campaigns as a result is simple with this marketing automation solution. By using short formulas, you can integrate it with each channel your brand is running online along with your website itself, streamlining the processes for efficiency and saving you time. Zapier is the great integrator that can pull all of your other softwares together and ensure they work alongside each other.
So, Is Marketing Automation Software for Hotels the Right Investment?
With digital marketing becoming an increasingly critical resource for hotels and hospitality businesses, it is important to invest in solutions that – while they don’t do the work for you – offer ways to simplify and streamline your campaigns to increase ROI and decrease the administrative burden.
If you are looking for ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your hotel marketing, we can help. Speak with us to learn more about how we can boost profitability, engagement and customer experience.
About the author:
Colin Hannan is a Principal at Proven Partners, a hospitality consultancy that specialises in helping hotels adapt and reposition for more effective growth. Colin combines a wealth of hands-on development and operational experience with deep marketing knowledge to support Proven’s hospitality partners on their growth journeys.
