In the dynamic landscape of global connectivity, social media stands out as a continually evolving force, wielding significant influence in today’s world. This has made social media optimization services indispensable for businesses across various sectors aiming to establish distinctive brands and foster client connections. The hotel industry is no exception to this trend. As marketing strategies shift from organic approaches to a pay-to-play model, hotel brands are leveraging social media platforms to maintain a competitive edge.
In this era of evolving marketing dynamics, social media platforms, particularly LinkedIn, have emerged as powerful tools for business-to-business interactions. For the hotel industry, LinkedIn offers a strategic avenue to elevate brand presence. With a well-crafted strategy, this platform proves immensely valuable in shaping and enhancing the identity of a hotel brand, ensuring it remains at the forefront of the industry’s evolving landscape.
LinkedIn claims over 930 million members in 2023 and stands out as a distinctive marketing channel that can significantly amplify the impact of hotel brand marketing efforts. While the hospitality sector inherently revolves around business-to-customer relationships, LinkedIn predominantly centers on business-to-business connections. Surprisingly, this powerful platform often takes a backseat to B2C marketing favorites like Facebook and Instagram in the hospitality industry. Many hoteliers tend to apply strategies more suited to consumer-focused social media networks, such as Facebook or Twitter, inadvertently overlooking the vast array of benefits that LinkedIn brings specifically for B2B content.
Identify Your Target Audience to Market Your Hotel
One major mistake that many hotel chains make is adopting a scattergun approach, wherein identical content is shared across all digital channels. Not only is this strategy time-consuming, but it also has adverse effects on your marketing budget. Conversely, directing and customizing marketing efforts towards a specific target audience significantly increases the likelihood of hotels effectively engaging with their distinct customer groups. This focused approach proves to be a more efficient and strategic use of resources.
The first step should be to identify your target audiences. Statistics indicate that over 50 percent of LinkedIn users fall into the upper management or decision-maker category. LinkedIn serves as a robust platform for business professionals to convene.
LinkedIn provides tailored advertising choices for reaching specific audiences. Hotels can leverage precise targeting criteria such as industry, job title, and location to effectively promote their services to relevant professionals. Consequently, for a hotel brand seeking to connect with or attract a corporate business audience, leveraging LinkedIn can be a powerful option.
6 Essential LinkedIn Marketing Techniques for Hotels
To get started, all you need is a LinkedIn account and a verified email address. Here are six vital LinkedIn marketing techniques for hotels:
- Create an Effective LinkedIn Company Page – The foundation of successful LinkedIn marketing begins with crafting a robust profile for your hotel brand. Build the page meticulously, addressing all queries and strategically incorporating keywords where relevant. While creating your hotel’s LinkedIn page, pay attention to the following:
- Make sure the name of your brand is correct: While it may sound straightforward, presenting your name differently than what your audience expects can create difficulties in locating your brand. Ensure consistency by aligning your name with other marketing materials, your website, and meta descriptions for search. Opt for your full hotel name without incorporating the location unless it’s an integral part of your brand identity.
- Use clear and attractive images: Your hotel’s profile page must feature a distinct and easily recognizable logo, properly cropped. Craft the cover image with a professional photograph showcasing your hotel, avoiding any overlay text. Consider a dynamic rotation of images, including shots of events, the hotel lobby, outdoor gardens, and other captivating areas of the property.
- Craft an attention-grabbing description: Avoid duplicating the company description from the website. Instead, utilize this space to concisely delineate the unique selling points that bring value to the target audience and distinguish the hotel brand from competitors. Showcase standout features such as corporate meeting spaces, expertise in sustainable events, or a recently renovated lobby—elements that captivate the attention of the target audience upon their initial encounter with the hotel.
- Leverage Personal Pages – Harness the potential of LinkedIn personal profile pages to showcase brand value and industry expertise. As LinkedIn inherently revolves around networking and building personal connections, there is a continual focus on expanding the capabilities of company pages. Utilize your personal profile page to connect with the target audience group, broadening the reach of your company page’s content. Opt for a professional headshot as your profile image, and incorporate the full brand name along with unique keywords into the company page’s headline and descriptions.
Illustrate your expertise within the experience section by sharing articles, videos, presentations, and high-quality images. The personal page serves as an ideal space to highlight events hosted by the hotel and marketing campaigns, or to creatively showcase the utilization of hotel spaces. Additionally, encourage hotel employees to update their personal profiles and link company posts when appropriate, thereby enhancing the overall visibility of the company page. - Participate in LinkedIn Groups – Effectively sharing your content with relevant audiences becomes notably easier by engaging with suitable groups. Consider joining LinkedIn groups tailored for hotels and hospitality, including those affiliated with the local chamber of commerce, location-specific tourism groups, and groups focused on event planning and organizers. Actively contribute as a member in a select few key groups, fostering meaningful engagement that significantly enhances your marketing efforts. Engage in group discussions, identify potential opportunities, and share your page’s content whenever it aligns with the ongoing conversations
- Publish Compelling Content – Consistently share engaging content to expand your LinkedIn following. Given the platform’s professional audience, the content should differ from that on other social channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Many hotels leverage LinkedIn for direct connections with business prospects, especially event planners and group organizers. Consider sharing posts about your hotel’s amenities, attractive deals, short videos, a virtual tour or so. Concentrate on providing valuable insights that interest planners, enhancing the profitability and attendance of their events. This platform is ideal for highlighting meeting spaces, conferences, and retreats.
Focus on promoting events, presenting new ideas, and improving events through visuals like pictures, videos, and case-study style articles. Utilize Pulse, LinkedIn’s long-form content platform, to deliver value through how-tos, trend analyses, news announcements, and event highlights. Initiate posts from your personal profile and subsequently share them on your company page, amplifying brand awareness within the hospitality community. Add 3-5 hashtags along with your posts to gain higher engagement, and include a compelling call-to-action with a link to your hotel’s website or event landing page to drive increased traffic. - Expand Your Follower Base – Building a substantial following on LinkedIn can be challenging, particularly for smaller brands and independent hotels that often hit a plateau around 750 followers. Your primary strategy to cultivate your community should revolve around organic growth. Achieve this by consistently sharing relevant and captivating content, engaging with comments, posing questions, and keeping your profile up-to-date with recent developments. send direct messages to your personal connections, encouraging them to follow your page, establishing a solid foundation. Run polls, share carousels, post an engaging story, and make an effort to use all the available marketing tools. Make sure to give timely responses, be it a negative or a positive one, and acknowledge feedback with a pleasing reply.
LinkedIn also offers some options for increasing your hotel’s following. You can allocate ad spend to boost your company profile page, enhancing visibility among your target audience. Additionally, explore the “invite connections” feature, allowing you to send targeted invites and further extend your reach. - Target Audience Segments by creating LinkedIn “Showcase Pages” – Similar to website landing pages, showcase pages target specific audiences to highlight business initiatives, products, or units. Positioned under the “affiliate pages” section of your main company page, they share posting options and analytics. Seize this opportunity to stand out among your event planning and group organizing audience. Leverage showcase pages to emphasize services, brands, or event types relevant to your B2B audience. Having separate showcase pages for these elements allows tailored images, messaging, and content for diverse audience segments. By utilizing different showcase pages for corporate retreats, weddings, conferences, and more, you can gain a creative edge that can significantly differentiate your property.
Harnessing social media marketing empowers hotels to establish an unmatched online reputation, vital to stay competitive in the digital era. LinkedIn, a potent yet underutilized platform for hotels targeting event planners, holds significant untapped potential. Despite its B2B focus, the hotel industry, including hostels, can derive substantial benefits by leveraging LinkedIn for B2B lead generation. Capitalizing on this platform allows hotels to fortify their brand presence and foster long-term business improvement. For hotel brands finding LinkedIn tools challenging, partnering with an experienced social media digital marketing company is an effective way for hotels to achieve their social media marketing goals.
