Taking a risk on Going Digital

One of the most common queries I receive on my YouTube show is asking me why hotels adopt digital strategies last. Hoteliers analyze every channel of publicity and marketing, conduct audits and post mortems before realizing the true value of investing in digital strategy. Sometimes, they jump on to the proverbial ’bandwagon’ which others are already using. I get asked regularly on Facebook, why I keep pushing Pinterest or Snapchat as a method or publicity. Does it have any value as a marketing tool for a hotel? Let the figures speak for themselves. Snapchat went from 200,000 to 4 million users in two years. If that's not enough of a reason to experiment with a channel for marketing your hotel, I don’t know what is. Small hoteliers can buy into the hype and the hysteria in their own area where everybody is talking Trip Advisor advertising or Snapchat or YouTube. Like many other verticals with almost everybody having a CMO and a marketing team, hotels seldom make distinctions in positions and responsibilities. Furthermore, for digital, there are even fewer specifically designated people. They take a long time to adopt digital strategies sine they don't have marketing teams or budgets to explore the digital space and are usually suspicious of agencies who approach them with new ideas, like marketing on a platform such as Pinterest. On the other side of the coin, not having a digital marketing team helps smaller hotels, as they don’t have a marketing manager, who usually analyze new ideas till they know when and how they give a return on investment. Opportunities to evolve and tap into revenues that remain unclaimed either due to lack of focus on developing new markets through digital platforms or rigid and conservative policies of gatekeepers who do not understand the nature of the beast, means hotels are losing out on maximizing marketing potential and revenues. I personally love sitting in on board and budget meetings with hotels. It’s a great feeling when I leave knowing I got them to ’insert’ a new column in their budgets. I often ask myself didn’t these hotel companies get to where they are by planning for the future and taking a risk on something before anyone else in the industry? The author is Chief Moghul @ Internet Moghuls.