Digital platforms are the mainstay of hotel marketing. Currently, most hotels across the world are plugged into large technology companies to harvest data on potential clients. But with stricter data privacy laws steadily creeping over the globe, times are changing.
Third-party data has helped hotels – and other companies – to learn more about target audiences by collecting data from platforms such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple. This includes names, email addresses, social media handles, purchase history and website browsing activities collected by third-party cookies. It helps track user behaviour and generate virtual profiles – the ideal recipe for hotels looking to target potential guests with ads and email marketing.
However, most tech giants are moving to protect user data by forcing apps to ask for permission to collect and share data, block third-party cookies, email tracking and other data gathering strategies. Without this data, hotels will find it increasingly difficult to meet the highly customised demands of today’s traveller.
This means, the hotel industry will have to focus on first-party data to build better user profiles by harvesting information from their own channels. These include information from your property management system, guest preferences during check-ins, online reviews, post-stay surveys, your website or mobile app, and your customer relationship manager (CRM).
Hotels can also combine old-school techniques with digital marketing to create a better overview of their clients. Corporate staff managers, meeting planners, event companies, wedding planners, travel planners and airline companies can help with first-party data, as do loyalty programme information, your website booking engine, pop-ups on your app and opt-in email subscription forms.
Data privacy laws can prove to be a silver lining against the black cloud. First-party data offers higher quality information on clients, a boon for times when travellers are looking for curated offers, incredibly personalised amenities, preferred rooms and locations that are just so.
Using first-party information to fill a customer data platform (CDP) can trigger data sets powered by machine learning. This will build a more holistic view of your client and allow you to cater to them more individually. A customer data platform uses business rule engines to automatically take actions based on data that can make miniscule but effective changes such as updating a guest’s telephone number.
By collecting better quality data, hotels can form a better profile of their audience and segment them more carefully. This will help manage guest engagement by curating better experiences and marketing them to the right audiences over the right channels at the right time.
In the same vein, it will be equally important to ensure protection of guest data as India looks to pass the Personal Data Protection Bill. The kind of data stored by hotels – names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, credit card details, passport and ID numbers, etc – makes them targets for cyber crime. The bill will aim to monitor how businesses collect, store and process an individual’s data while also putting in force rules on consent.
Hotels will have to restructure marketing game plans to ensure they are compliant with new laws while also targetting client segments more effectively.
