Marketing strategies for attracting new clients in hotel business

Introduction
When deciding upon marketing strategies to be used for a hotel business in order to attract new clients, a hotel must identify that which sets it apart from other competing hotels. The essence of any successful marketing campaign is the ability to differentiate oneself. Trout and Rivkin (2006) state that a company must “differentiate or die” (p. 2), meaning that if a business cannot do something to distinguish itself from the next nearest competitor it will never succeed—precisely because it has not been able to show consumers that it is offering something uniquely special. Thus, for a hotel, it is critical that it consider the things that define it and make it uniquely attractive. Whether it is setting, dining, history, environment, proximity, attractions, luxury, style, class, or some other feature, the hotel business’s first priority is to identify its strengths. If it finds that it cannot offer anything new to guests, its second priority is to find out what guests are needing or wanting that no other hotel business is offering and offer them that. This is called the “blue ocean strategy” (Kim & Mauborgne, 2005). It is based on the idea that “blue oceans denote all the industries not in existence today—the unknown market space, untainted by competition” (Kim & Mauborgne, 2004, p. 77). In other words, if a business cannot differentiate itself based on what it already has going, then it must hit upon something new to offer. A third strategy that hotel businesses can use to attract new clients is based on the idea that today travelers and tourists are part of the Digital Age where social media is the place to go for information. A hotel can use social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest to attract attention, create buzz, engage with users, and develop a following. This paper will discuss these three strategies and show how they can be used effectively by hotel businesses to attract new clients in the 21st century.
Differentiate or Die
The concept of marketing warfare is simple: a business must first know itself, then it must know the competition, and then it must know the consumer and which customers it can successfully target. In order to successfully target new clients, a hotel business must be able to offer them something new, something different, something no other hotel is offering—whether it is proximity to a nearby attraction, stellar service unparalleled by any other staff in the world, a unique dining experience, or perfect ambiance. Once it hits upon its own unique strengths, a hotel can identify a target market: this can be a niche market, a wider market, or a market it has never before targeted. When Carnival Cruise (basically a floating hotel) decided to go after a new target market of clients, it first examined what made it unique and what made it similar to its competitors. It then set about differentiating itself in small ways that clients would remember (Applegate, Kwortnik & Piccoli, 2006). This put it in line with the “Differentiate or Die” strategy: “if you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in” (Ries & Trout, 2009, p. 17). By differentiating itself, Carnival Cruise in small ways that stuck in clients’ minds, it was able not only to win new clients but to win back old clients as well. The trick to engaging in marketing warfare is this: find a way to enter into the market in manner that will ensure victory. Do not engage in battles that will be lost. For example, if a small independent hotel wants to target new clients that typically only stay at chain hotels, it is likely not only to fail to win these clients but also to attract the negative attention of the much larger chain which could easily move to put it out of business if it wanted through any number of ways—such as increasing advertising, offering lower prices (which won’t hurt its bottom line), or even erecting another competing hotel near the independent hotel in order to drive away its business. A hotel must be smart about how it engages in marketing warfare, and if it cannot win new clients who only stay in chains, it can seek out new clients in niche markets by identifying targets open to new concepts and independent businesses.
The “Differentiate or Die” strategy can also help a company to develop the right strategic square, as Ries and Trout (1997) point out: this is a way of deciding which approach to take when entering into a market. Depending on what kind of hotel business one has, the right approach will be: 1) defensive, 2) offensive, 3) flanking, or 4) guerrilla. Defensive positions are adopted by dominant players in the market. So if a hotel is already commanding the market, it does not need to do anything drastic in order to attract new clients. It can simply rely on strategies like word of mouth and traditional advertising to maintain its position. It can also offer promotions and other incentives that lesser hotels might not be able to offer because of their thin margins. For a hotel that is seeking to take away market share from a dominant player, the offensive strategy is the best approach. This allows the up and coming hotel business to challenge the dominant player directly by cutting prices, offering unique promotions, or using creative marketing strategies, such as funny commercials or online techniques to drum up new business. For a lower-tier hotel business, challenging the largest shark in the market is not wise, because it is bigger and can last longer at discounted prices than the lower-tier company. So it has to use the flanking approach, which means it must chisel away at the company’s edges bit by bit, taking new clients that the main player is unlikely to notice initially. The new company that is just setting out and has no market share will have to rely on the guerilla method, which is essentially the same thing as the blue ocean strategy which will be discussed in the next section. It focuses on finding new clients that no other hotel business is focusing on and going after them.
Such is the essence of the “Differentiate or Die” strategy. A hotel must be innovative and original in order to compete, just like any other business in the market. As Schewe and Hiam (1998) put it, imagination and innovation are what allow marketers to use the other tools of marketing most effectively. The other tools, of course, include the 4 P’s—price, product, promotion and place—which are other ways in which a hotel business can certainly differentiate itself in order to obtain new clients. For example, by setting the right price to attract new clients, by offering a product or service that is unique, by offering a promotion that catches the attention of new tourists and travelers, or by advertising proximity to a great place that few have heard of. These are just a few of the ways in which a hotel can distinguish itself.
Blue Ocean Strategy
The “blue ocean strategy” was developed by Kim and Mauborgne (2005) when they were working to develop a new way for their corporation to attract new clients. The basis of this strategy is that instead of looking at what all of one’s competitors are doing and trying to do it better or slightly differently, look at what one’s competitors are not doing and see if there is way to do that and attract new business by it. It invites one to be creative and to think outside the box. A hotel business could profit substantially by employing the blue ocean strategy in this manner.
Blue ocean refers to the great wide open sea of ideas that are not being looked at or used by companies when deciding how to market themselves. In that ocean are all manner of diverse fish and species ready to be lured and caught. Instead of seeing them, though, companies within a sector are all fighting over the same groups of fish using the same tactics, lines and bait. The blue ocean strategy allows a company to forget that competition and venture out into the great unknown to find new clients. For a hotel, it means finding new clients who may not have ever thought about traveling before, or who may have never known there was a reason to go sight-seeing in that part of the world where the hotel is located. This strategy allows a hotel to be inventive and find new clients that other hotels have ignored, focus on them through tactics that would appeal to them and engage them with incentives to try out their hotel.
One way to get to know this target market in the great wide blue ocean, is to conduct surveys of the people there. A hotel could do this online, through an email campaign, through phone calls, through incentives, or through the in-person method by stationing surveyors in areas where the target market is likely to be found—whether that is in malls, arcades, theaters, urban areas, parks, and so on. The key is to get to know the client so that the hotel can then build its brand around appealing to this client.
Designing a new brand based on what appeals to the clients out in the great blue ocean where is another important part of this strategy. It allows the hotel to envision itself in a new way and essentially build out its business model based on the data obtained through its surveys—or questionnaires or random sampling or whatever method it uses to gather data. Developing a brand that is client-oriented rather than business-oriented will not only allow it to appeal to new clients that no other hotel has ever thought of engaging before, but it will of course also allow it to substantially differentiate itself from other hotel businesses.
The Four Actions Framework is an approach that a hotel business can use in the blue ocean strategy. It was also developed by Kim and Mauborgne (2005) and focuses on four action-oriented steps that a business should do in order to be successful in the wide blue ocean of new clients. The four steps are to eliminate, raise, create and reduce. This means the hotel should be aware of what in the industry can stand to be eliminated because it is unnecessary or out of date. Technology and tastes are always shifting and a hotel that can put its finger on the pulse of current trends is one that already has a competitive advantage. The business should also identify ways to lift itself up above others, ways to do something new that no one has ever seen before, and ways to lower services’ importance in the eyes of new clients so that the hotel does not have too much cost covering or meeting a great deal of expectations. Kim and Mauborgne (2005) state that the Four Actions Framework can be utilized by simply asking four simple questions:
“1) Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated? 2) Which factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard? 3) Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered? 4) Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard?” (p. 114). Answering these questions will set the hotel on the right track to finding new clients by giving them what they want that no other hotel has ever thought to give them. In doing so, the hotel business builds for itself a new identity and a new brand that it can then promote through traditional marketing methods in order to secure its position among its new clientele.
Social Media
One way in which traditional marketing has changed is through the advent of social media. Social media puts the power of the media in the hands of clients, consumers and every day people. They freely share information with followers about what they like, what they don’t like, what they support, and where others should go to deliver their patronage. YouTube is a popular platform where people develop hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of followers simply by shopping for clothes and sharing their experience by uploading videos of what they bought and giving their opinion of the pieces. People do this with clothing, video games, movies, toys for children, cars, restaurants, and virtually anything that has any appeal to others. In many cases, businesses will use social media personalities to give reviews of their products or services. This style of marketing is new to the world and is completely non-traditional because it relies on third party personalities to do the work of the advertiser. The benefit is that it is low cost. The risk is that social media content and narratives are very hard to control. If a narrative gets out there that is damaging to the hotel’s brand, it can quickly become viral and harm the hotel’s business more than it was intended to help.
Nonetheless, social media is definitely a strategy that can work for hotels. Li, Robinson and Oriade (2017) note that technology can play a crucial part in destination marketing in today’s Digital Era world. They state that today there exists a great need for “rapid and expansive technological enhancement and innovations in destination management” (p. 95). This implies that hotels especially should be using social media to engage with travelers and tourists because it offers unparalleled direct access to them—access that has never before been possible in the history of marketing. Indeed, Jovicic (2017) states that “without using digital technologies enabling adequate public–private–consumer collaboration, it is almost impossible nowadays to achieve successful market valorization of destinations’ geographical attributes” (p. 1). The arrival of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest is a landmark in advertising. It allows users who frequent hotels or who have stayed at a hotel to share their experiences with others from around the world. People can post comments, reviews, photos, videos, direct message others and engage in real information sharing. Travelers will use Instagram, for example, or Pinterest, to get ideas about where they should stay, what they should see, where they should go, and which hotels are the best. A hotel business that is not utilizing social media to stay current and fresh in the public consciousness is a hotel that is asking to be left behind.
Wang, Park and Fesenmaier (2012) simply points out the rise of smart phone technology as a sign that hotels must embrace social media since every single person nowadays has a camera, a video recorder and an Internet connection right there in their pocket waiting to be used. A client can upload a positive review and share it with millions at the click of a button, or it can upload a negative review. In either case, the hotel business must be tuned in to what is happening on social media platforms so that it can get out in front of customer experiences, engage with them directly, thank them for their kind words or apologize and explain any inconveniences. The more active that a hotel appears on social media, the more legitimate it looks in the eyes of users in the Digital Information Sharing Age. Wang et al. (2012) state quite frankly that “the instant information support of smartphones enables tourists to more effectively solve problems, share experiences, and “store” memories” (Wang et al., 2012, p. 371).
The other reason that hotel businesses should be using social media is that their clients are using it—and if they want to connect with clients, they have to be on their wave length and know how to find them, where to find, and the manner in which to appeal to them. They must be able to speak the language of social media. For instance, a way to attract new business is to offer promotions or incentives or campaigns through a platform like Instagram or Pinterest, in which new clients are asked to upload images or pictures of their stay in the region and post them at the hotel’s page on the social media platform site. GoPro has used this strategy to great effect by inviting customers of the camera maker to post their videos to the company’s YouTube channel in order to show how great the cameras are.
Maurer and Hinterdorfer (2013) support this idea when they say that “travelers have to rely on images and descriptions regarding travel products and services” when they go to make informed decisions on where to go and what to see (p. 213). Travelers are making their decisions of which hotels to stay at based on the data that they are obtaining from photo and video sharing sites like Pinterest and Facebook. If a hotel business is not using these platforms as a way of advertising their own image and brand, they are missing out on a golden opportunity to strike while the iron is hot and attract new clients easily. Newlands (2015) finds that by inviting “guests to co-curate a customer travel itinerary through a Pinterest board” a hotel can lure new clients via a social media platform that users past clients’ experiences documented in the clients’ own pictures and video. This type of marketing and exposure is unprecedented and can yield substantial returns (Newlands, 2015).
In short, social media is the go-to marketing strategy of the 21st century and can allow a hotel business to conduct inexpensive advertising simply by engage with social media users, sharing photos and videos, taking part in the information sharing process and developing an online following so that more web browsers who are looking for ideas of where to stay when they travel can see that one’s hotel has a real presence and should be looked into since others have stayed there as well. Staying at a hotel is as much about keeping up with the trends and having an experience as it is about meeting one’s needs and convenience demands.
Conclusion
The three strategies that a hotel business can utilize in order to attract new clients are: 1) the “Differentiate or Die” strategy, 2) the “Blue Ocean Strategy,” and 3) social media. The first strategy enables the hotel business to focus on doing something unique that no other hotel is offering. It can be a restaurant in the hotel, a stellar staff that goes out of its way to make every guest feel like he or she is at home, a unique view, or proximity to a special event. Whatever it is, the trick to this marketing strategy is for the hotel to stand out. The second strategy invites the hotel not to look so much at itself but rather to look out at clients and see what it is they want and find new clients that no other hotel has ever thought to target before. It requires the hotel to think outside the box and find creative new ways to engage with brand new clientele. The third strategy calls for the usage of social media, which is an innovative and revolutionary way for information to be shared in the 21st century. Users of social media developing followers who respond to their uploads of pictures and videos, who share their experiences and comments with millions of others. Hotels must be able to get out in front of the social media phenomenon so that they can stay relevant in the future.

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