Automation can sound daunting, but in reality it is a simple and powerful process that can drive increases in group bookings, customer satisfaction, and revenue. Put simply, hospitality marketing automation utilizes technology to engage with your customers across multiple digital channels, automate manual processes, and track results.

Although the concept of automation is strongly integrated within other industries, it is still relatively young in hospitality, and many hotels struggle to understand all the opportunities it can offer.

While change is certainly worthwhile in the long run, barriers to integrating automation include:

• It can be an intimidating prospect for many, especially those who are family-run, independent or part of micro-chains.

• Past traumatic experiences with software implementation make some people look at the process with fear, overestimating the probability of something going horribly wrong (loss of data, staff retraining, etc.) rather than looking with excitement at the improvements the new technology will bring. 

• Integrations remain expensive, slow and complex processes, especially when hotels have legacy software that need to be phased out.

Despite these hurdles, automation remains imminent and inevitable. It represents an exciting opportunity to improve your processes and create more value for your end user. It can protect your company reputation, increase your levels of customer engagement and so much more.

The Best Hotel Marketing Software & Tools

While we’ve worked over the years with many softwares, there’s been an abundance of new hotel marketing software technology emerging in the last few years. So we took the time to go and test some of the most interesting new options, so that you don’t have to. Find below a breakdown of many of our favorite automation softwares for hotels, broken into the areas they assist.

Best Social Media Management Software

Using marketing automation to underpin social media activity will amplify a hotel’s marketing, as well as help create genuinely engaged guests. Marketing automation makes the whole process much simpler for hotels, giving them the tools to understand which posts work for their audience, schedule future content and assess engagement automatically through click-through and download rates. Using automation successfully will boost levels of interaction and brand awareness, so it represents a really important opportunity.

• Hootsuite is a popular tool for scheduling social media content, and has a bulk option for scheduling lots of posts at once. It also offers customer social listening capabilities, where you can monitor trends, keywords and sentiment on news sites, blogs, forums, and other public places.

• CoSchedule’s automation tool offers a great solution for planning and strategizing social media content in advance. By mapping out all of your content, including what you’ll say and when, it’s easy to get a bird’s eye view of your end-to-end social production. Their ReQueue feature reduces the time it takes to manage your social media by automatically re-sharing your most important posts. And their Social Media Organizer allows you to answer all your social media messages with a single inbox so you can engage and respond to customers without missing a thing.

Best Automation Tool For Advertising

According to Business.com, software automation can save advertisers 30% of their time. Not only that, but it optimizes your campaigns for higher CTR and lower CPC. Implemented to its fullest extent, automation helps streamline lead generation, lead scoring, customer segmentation, customer lifecycles, analytics processes, and more. This is especially important as your hotel business begins to scale.

• AdRoll is one of the best known digital advertising automation tools. Their software makes it simple to run ads across display, social media, and email. They also offer retargeting campaigns that pack a serious punch, so you can stay top of mind with new prospects and re-engage inactive customers. They even feature cross-device reach - whichallows you to reach potential customers regardless of the device they are using, including smartphones and tablets.

Best Email Marketing Software Hotel Promotion

Current data indicate that businesses using automation software generate twice the number of leads compared to those using just broadcast emails. So hotel email marketing software is definitely something that can offer you lots of benefits without costing you much effort on a day-to-day basis.

• Mailchimp offers a wide range of options in an easy to use format. For instance, features include the option of sending out repeat emails on a schedule, or based on events (like a planner filling out a form on your website). Ideal for all your basic email marketing needs.

• Active Campaign offers you the ability to create subscription forms, dynamic content, email segmentation, and split testing to help you engage and nurture your contacts. It incorporates more advanced features than Mailchimp, though it does tend to cost a little bit more.

Best Tool For Your Hotel CRM

To truly get the benefits of automation, you will need to track which of your actions are having an impact. Using a CRM system lets you keep track of your leads as they come in and has powerful reporting tools to see which of your efforts are working. Reports from your CRM and website analytics can tell you the story of which of your automation efforts are working, and where to spend your time in the future.

• Hubspot marketing automation functionality is one of the most powerful tools out there. They provide a free CRM which supports their full suite of sales and marketing software, and there are not many better places to go for a CRM. You can set up simple email list autoresponders, or build a smart and complex network of rules designed to target specific users with the exact right email, live chat, website experience, and more. Be aware that you may get hooked on Hubspot, and it does come at a price. So be sure to review all their pricing options before you commit.

Best Software For Your Hotel Reputation Management

Great guest reviews are essential for any hotel, as social proof generates new hotel bookings and encourages repeat guest visits. Hotel marketing automation makes it quick and simple to ask for reviews as soon as each guest checks out.  As well as contributing to social proof, this is another tool to increase guest engagement and loyalty. Using software to do this automatically makes it quick and easy.

• Revinate: Offers a variety of hotel-friendly features, for instance the option to have an email or push SMS sent to the guest asking for their feedback and highlighting how much a hotel values their opinion. Revinate is easy to use and requires minimal technical expertise so anyone can use it to drive loyalty and generate more revenue.

Best Tool For Integrations

With so many different software solutions that are worthy of your time and attention, it may get to the point that your biggest issue is how to integrate them all together. Luckily, there’s a software solution for that!

• Zapier is a powerful tool for connecting different pieces of your puzzle together, and is highly customizable. It works by creating “if this, then that” type formulas, and can integrate social media, email, and your website seamlessly, eliminating manual work and ensuring these processes get delivered in a more time efficient way.

In Closing

While marketing automation won’t do all of the work for you, it does help you automate repeatable, redundant tasks and gives you the time to focus on areas where your personal attention will maximize conversions. Technological innovations can help you increase your efficiency, and do more on tighter budgets, delivering better quality engagement and experiences to your guests. Is that something you can afford to miss?

If you’re looking for ways to improve your hotel marketing systems and processes, or would like some specialist support to integrate more efficient solutions, we can help. Speak with us to learn more about how our team can boost your bottom line.