Should Hospitality Sector concentrate on Increasing Digital Footprint

Should Hospitality Sector concentrate on Increasing Digital Footprint: YES

The process of gathering and analysing information about customers has become a fundamental requirement for Hotels seeking to compete in the digital era. As the consumer’s data footprint expands, so does the opportunity for Hospitality Sector to understand their requirements in more detail. The four key components of a content marketing strategy namely Strategic Planning, Positioning, Value Proposition and Hotel Campaigns are channelized towards the Single Customer View (SCV). SCV seeks to consolidate and aggregate data to give a holistic view of the customer to maximise on past activity to predict future behaviour.  This can be exploited further by targeted marketing to elicit a planned response, the ultimate aim being to generate additional revenue through obtaining detailed customer insight.

Within the Hospitality Sector the adoption of an SCV is usually to assist the marketing function to drive sales by stimulating more visits, encouraging the customer to spend more or trigger lapsed customers to re-engage.  To do this Hospitality Sector can use the many digital touch points a customer has with a hospitality business.  A few of the more common data sources include, Electronic Point of Sales (EPOS), Wireless Fidelity (WiFi), Social Media Channels, Direct Marketing and data held within a Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Many SCV projects have been conducted by hospitality operators worldwide, they had a number of data feeds into their SCV, some were linked to EPOS (loyalty card) and some weren’t (WIFI login).  Using the SCV and the connected data, analysts are able to segment their customers to specifically identify lapsed customers that fitted a particular profile.  An email campaign was created and distributed to the targets identified. The day after a specific calendar event, analysts were able to quantify the effectiveness of the campaign by looking at the activity of the selected recipients.  The re-engagement of those lapsed customers was particularly compelling and the money that was spent as a result of the campaign contributed to the overall Return on Investment (ROI) of the project.

The SCV is therefore, not only a source for direct marketing, but direct marketing should also be a source for the SCV.  If a feed from the direct marketing platform(s) is used to update the SCV with the marketing activity a customer has received, then the effectiveness of it can be analysed accurately.  This can be quantified not only in terms of what the customer has spent as a result of the campaign, but also how receptive they were to the approach.  This provides the marketeer with insight to tailor more effective and targeted campaigns by utilising the information that has been gained from the SCV. Consequently the SCV becomes the master data for the customer.  It uses the dimensional data from the CRM and calculates the attributes and measures that are necessary to provide insight and segmentation for the marketing activities, this therefore means that the ROI for Hotels for the implementation and adoption of the SCV can easily be calculated.

B.A. Culinary Arts

B.Sc in Hospitality Studies