Regardless of whether you’re Marriott International with a portfolio of 30 logos or a single independent hotel with a sign above the front door, you’re presenting a brand to your potential customers.

To win over travelers and turn them into guests, hotels must be inserting their brand across various touch points throughout the customer journey. Turning the purchase path into a customer journey and optimizing those touch points to best present your hotel is crucial in today’s landscape.

As such, Adobe, Tnooz and Valtech joined forces on a recent webinar to discuss how hotels can move from simply sitting on the shelf to inserting themselves into travelers’ conversations.

BRANDING IN A CONSUMER-CENTRIC WORLD

To start analyzing the power of your hotel brand, it’s important to understand that shoppers �" travelers, in this case �" often make decisions that “just feel right.” But do those choices feel right because they’ve had prior exposure to an object, and can we identify exactly what that trigger is?

This begins the journey of understanding the traveler.

“Brands that start solving for the customer experience will be the brands that make you feel good and will gain share over time,” says Julie Hoffmann, head of travel and hospitality strategy and marketing for Adobe. “All travel brands throughout the world are able to take advantage of this.”

After the digital explosion, much of the burden of a purchase experience was on the customer. There was instantly more information about travel brands than ever before, and it was often up to the customer to determine value propositions and decide what’s most important to them.

Social media leveled the playing field for all customers around the world, and now all travelers have a voice. It’s time for hoteliers to listen and react, Hoffmann said.

She said while social and content marketing are two areas where hoteliers have work to do, they both provide opportunities for first movers to get ahead of their competition.

WHAT DOES A CUSTOMER JOURNEY LOOK LIKE?

The next step along the customer journey is understanding what actions travelers want to take on each device, and how hotels can follow and improve that customer experience.

According to recent Adobe research, 52% of travel interactions are taking place on mobile, and 90% of survey respondents said they would find it simple to chat with someone on their phone about making travel reservations.

Joshua Eli Young, a senior VP at Valtech, a digital marketing agency, said hotels must build a brand strategy around a future-looking experience that encompasses multiple devices, even including digital signage around the hotel.

“Digital screens are a new thing we can control with a CMS,” he said. “You get a notification and an awareness of who they are.”

Young described this “contextual personalization” as identifying the things we know about our customers and customizing their experience at the time they’re engaging with us.

With regard to mobile, Young suggested personalizing the guest’s experience with your hotel’s mobile app, from suggesting restaurant bookings to controlling the in-room TV and accessing streaming content.

“Screen to mobile to [internet of things] devices like Amazon Echo, you want to follow the right value-add in each of these channels,” he said. “None of these scenarios include a desktop because that’s no longer utilized when you’re on your journey.”

One of the challenges to following the customer along his or her journey is that data often lives among separate systems. Integrating a customer profile across all channels can be a hurdle, but is possible.

Young suggested marketers rely on technology to “solve those gaps.”

Jason Q. Freed, Managing Editor at Duetto
Jason joined Duetto as Managing Editor in June 2015 after reporting, writing and editing hotel industry news for a decade at both print and online publications. He’s passionate about content marketing and hotel technology, which leads to unique perspectives on hotel distribution and revenue management best practices.

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