Digital Marketing And Customer Acquisition Strategy For Hotel Gotham

Communication Challenges with Customer Acquisition

The chosen brand, which will be focused on in this report, is Hotel Gotham, which is located at 100 King Street in the central conservation area. This hotel is considered one of the city's grandest listed buildings. It is a plush hotel with a presence of an exclusive club bar and dining venue.

Hotel Gotham offers all types of hospitality services to their clients, which includes, but is not limited to, restaurant, club bar, dining venue, rooms and valet parking. It is a five-star super luxury hotel located in the heart of Manchester (hotelgotham.co.uk). The report will be focused on the hospitality services that Hotel Gotham offers.

In order to be a success, hotel Gotham is required to deliver top-class services to the clients. Any deterioration in the services delivered can result in severe reputation loss for this luxury hotel.

In this report, a detailed discussion on the process of digital marketing that can be followed in this organisation for customer acquisition will be presented. Since this client is a plush restaurant, the main target audience for the acquisition will be the upper-middle-class and aristocratic class of the society.

Hotel Gotham is planning to implement a digital-first marketing strategy for client acquisition; however, there are certain communication issues and challenges that the hotel is required to consider. The following paragraphs present a detailed discussion of some of the communication challenges associated with the customer acquisition process.

The primary communication challenge associated with the customer acquisition process is capturing consumers’ attention. Without capturing the clients’ attention process, it is not possible to convince them of the acquisition.

Capturing clients’ attention is a major communication challenge, as in digital medium, a user (probable client) receives hundreds of similar advertising or marketing emails and messages. Since there is a huge flow of unwanted information in social media or personal messaging services, the users tend to ignore those messages (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick 2019). In such a case, if the Hotel Gotham is planning to send some customised mail and messages to communicate about their services and offers to their target audience, there are high chances that the clients will ignore the majority of those messages. This is a major risk that the organisation is required to consider in their digital marketing strategy and customer acquisition process.

In planning and implementing a digital marketing strategy, proper and clear communication has an important role. Communication is considered to be successful when it is two-way communication (Kannan 2017). Therefore, a marketing process or planning the customer acquisition process might fail if the advertisement or the mails fail to capture the attention of the customers. Therefore, the major communication challenge is faced when the customer does not respond or even acknowledge the messages.

Another major challenge that is faced in the communication process related to customer acquisition is the misinterpretation of the intended message.

In the digital marketing and customer acquisition process, it is necessary to provide the customers with an idea of the major services offered by the organisation so that they choose them instead of others. However, if the client misinterprets the intended message, the entire motive behind sending a message fails drastically, and the company will fail to reach the customers for acquisition. This is why this communication process is considered a major challenge in digital marketing, and this challenge can be faced by hotel Gotham as well (Kingsnorth 2019). This is why this particular challenge is required to be addressed by the hotel at this stage, to ensure their messages reach the customers and the customers are ready to give the services offered by Hotel Gotham a try, based on the digital marketing efforts implemented by the hotel. Since the target audience of this hotel are rich people, misinterpretation of any messages might result in the client turning to other available options and not choosing the services offered by hotel Gotham. Hence, this is considered to be a major challenge and is required to be addressed.

Digital-First Marketing Strategy

The third communication challenge is based on SEO, which drives more traffic than organic search.

Nowadays, there has been a rapid increase in the use of social media, and hence the customers generally try to get information over social media (Piñeiro-Otero and Martínez-Rolán 2016). Lack of proper SEO can result in major communication issues, especially for digital marketing.

The communication challenge that is prioritised is capturing clients’ attention. This is because hotel Gotham is a five-star hotel, and hence capturing the clients' attention is a necessary communication aspect that the marketer is required to consider; and hence this particular communication challenge is prioritised (Goldfarb and Tucker 2019).

Although this communication challenge is prioritised, there are certain issues and risks associated with this choice, which must be addressed. There is no denying that the customers are bombarded with many messages from different companies and brands over social media, which is why they choose to ignore those messages. If hotel Gotham is considering a similar approach to gain clients' attention, there is a risk that it can backfire, and customers might not actually show any interest in the product and services offered by the hotel.

A digital-first strategy can be described as the process in which a business strives towards organising a digital environment. Companies, who succeed in their marketing efforts, generally focus on how their content will resonate with the client (Olson et al., 2021). Every successful marketing strategy or process mostly start with the consumer or the audience. Hotel Gotham is required to consider the digital-first audiences as their target market for the digital marketing strategy.

The following paragraphs present a detailed discussion of the audiences relative to hotel Gotham.

The digital first audience to be targeted for the digital marketing strategy of Hotel Gotham are presented as follows-

• Audience 1: All the Visitors to Manchester who are on vacation
• Audience 2: Locals who want to visit and spend time in luxury hotel and/or for celebration on special occasion.
• Audience 3: People visiting the restaurants

Targeting only audience group 3 for the marketing strategy may not be much profitable as they are the ones to spent very less time in the hotel. It is more profitable to target those audiences, who intend to spend more time in the hotel at least a night in the hotel. For achieving the same, the digital presence of Hotel Gotham is required to be improved.

The report is focused on developing a digital marketing strategy for client acquisition. It can be described as a digital customer acquisition process (DCA). The DCA process can be described as an ambition to enable people to find the product they are looking for when they search on the internet (Visser and Kloos 2021). The digital acquisition process is largely based on communication. Proper communication with the clients is necessary for the acquisition. Digital marketing is one of the essential steps that can be considered for customer acquisition in this digital era, and in digital marketing, proper communication with the clients becomes necessary (Els 2020).

The primary acquisition communication objectives that are required to be considered by hotel Gotham are presented as follows –

The above-indicated communication objectives are expected to be achieved by hotel Gotham with their digital marketing strategy.

Target Audience for Hotel Gotham

An organic marketing strategy is mostly an effective generation of traffic for a business over time. Organic marketing is so-called as it is a type of marketing that does not involve any paid ads or advertising content (Visser, Sikkenga and Berry 2019). In the absence of paid advertising, it might be very difficult to reach a particular number of audiences over digital media.

In order to enhance the brand awareness of hotel Gotham and let the client know about the business offerings and the services that are being offered to the customers, a proper digital marketing strategy is required to be designed and implemented through the organic channel (Chaffey and Smith 2017). The organic channel and tactics that are recommended to be considered for hotel Gotham is discussed as follows-

The organic channel and the tactics that are suggested for hotel Gotham is the use of SEO. Search engine optimisation is an important aspect of digital marketing (Kannan 2020).

SEO is a recommended tactic as it improves the quality and quantity of website traffic. This is an organic channel and tactic of communicating with the probable audience or customer (Osei 2020). SEO is suggested in this case, and it mainly targets unpaid traffic rather than paid or direct traffic. SEO has an important role to play in digital marketing as it increases the chances of the client getting access to the company's information in social media search (Berry 2019).

Another tactic that can be recommended for hotel Gotham is unpaid social media posts. Social media presence and proper social media posts can contribute to enhancing the communication process with the client. It is a recommended tactic as, in this digital era, the majority of the VIP clients have a social media presence. This particular channel can help in fulfilling the objectives stated in the previous section.

Another recommended organic channel is the email newsletter that can be sent out to the existing customers to let them know about the services offered or the events taking place in the hotel (Lovrakovic 2020). This is one of the easiest methods of communicating with the clients and can contribute to increasing the customers' loyalty, which in turn can help in fulfilling the acquisition objectives.

The success of the digital marketing process suggested for hotel Gotham is largely related to the fulfilment of the acquisition objectives set.

In order to fulfil the acquisition objectives, some of the organic channels and tactics are suggested, which can help in addressing the communication objectives.

This section of the report aims in showing the relevant key performance indicators for both the objectives that are set in the previous sections of this report.

Objective 1: The first objective is related to improvement of brand image. This can be achieved through increase in the number of promotions through organic channels. At this moment the number of advertisements and promotions done through organic channel is quite less. The KPI set for achievement of this objective is set to increase in number of advertisements made per month by 2% the previous month.

Objective 2: The second objective is related to increase in customers’ engagement. The number of visitors in the website and social media page of hotel Gotham is quite less and this is required to be addressed. The traffic should be increased by at least 5% in each quarter The KPI set for achievement of this particular objective is presented as follows-

The marketing strategy and customer acquisition process will be considered a success only if the acquisition objectives are fulfilled. The extent to which the acquisition objectives are fulfilled can be easily addressed by analysing the above indicated KPIs.

References

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Els, M., 2020. Customer Acquisition, Engagement, and Retention in Online Advertising (Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University).

Goldfarb, A. and Tucker, C., 2019. Digital marketing. In Handbook of the Economics of Marketing (Vol. 1, pp. 259-290). North-Holland.

hotelgotham.co.uk. 2022. Hotel Gotham About Us. [online] Available at: <https://www.hotelgotham.co.uk/> [Accessed 9 January 2022].

Kannan, P.K., 2017. Digital marketing: A framework, review and research agenda. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 34(1), pp.22-45.

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Visser, M., Sikkenga, B. and Berry, M., 2019. Digital Marketing Fundamentals: From Strategy to ROI. Routledge