Why Use A Programmatic Performance Marketing Strategy for Hotel Brands?

The hotel industry sees a significant amount of business throughout the year, with its highest points being the summer months when vacations are most common and the end-of-the-year holiday season.

Competition can be fierce among hotel brands, especially in popular travel destinations. To reap the most from their marketing strategies, hotels need to make sure that their ads are most prominently displayed in front of those most likely to need them.

This is where implementing a programmatic performance marketing strategy can pay off for hotel brands. By embracing digital advertising trends such as programmatic marketing, hotels can place their ads directly in front of consumers who are looking for a place to stay while traveling.

Programmatic marketing covers more than just targeted ad placement, however; here are a few additional benefits that hotel brands may realize when choosing a programmatic performance strategy for their marketing approach.

Individual marketing

While it obviously isn’t true of all hotels, many hotels operate within larger chains.

A single hotel chain may have multiple properties within the same general geographic area, which should increase the company’s likelihood of securing bookings from people traveling to that area. The only problem with this assumption is that if different hotels are advertised based primarily from the chain’s perspective, then in a consumer’s eyes they might appear to be more or less the same. If the consumer sees two different hotels within the same chain as just being a Holiday Inn (for example), it could affect the perceived value that each presents and cause the consumer to favor the lower-priced option even if there is a difference in amenities.

With programmatic marketing, this becomes less of an issue.

The chain can target ads for the specific hotel that is most likely to appeal to the individual consumer instead of approaching from a brand-first standpoint that’s meant to appeal to a larger audience. This capability not only helps the consumer to find a hotel that they would actually prefer, but also ensures that the hotel chain’s more expensive properties don’t suffer from an association with the more economy-focused properties that the chain controls.

Precision of targeting

One of the biggest benefits of implementing a programmatic performance marketing strategy is the amount of control that it gives the brand in regard to who sees its ads.

This helps to eliminate advertising waste from ads that aren’t targeted toward a specific audience or that have too wide of a demographic in hopes of reaching the largest audience. Programmatic advertising gives brands a high degree of precision when it comes to fine-tuning a target demographic and will only display ads to individuals who fall within that demographic.

Cross-device reach

Another big benefit of hotel brands using programmatic advertising as a key part of their marketing strategies is that programmatic ads can target individual users across multiple devices.

This ability ensures that even if an ad doesn’t get a clickthrough or other interaction on one platform, additional ads that are targeted from a slightly different viewpoint can still reach the same consumer even if they switch from a PC to a smartphone, tablet or connected TV. This can significantly increase the likelihood of a successful conversion even if the initial ad view did not succeed in prompting an interaction.

Getting started

Starting a programmatic marketing push isn’t significantly different than more traditional forms of marketing.

A hotel company still needs to determine an advertising budget, define a target and decide on exactly how different properties should be portrayed. With programmatic advertising, however, there are additional considerations that one needs to think of as well. The hotel brand can use additional data to help control the factors that influence a booking decision, so a source of this data will be needed; the brand will also need an advertising partner or programmatic platform vendor to actually implement the ads.

Fortunately, each campaign run can provide data and audience analytics that can then be used to optimize the targeting of the next campaign.