Running a successful online marketing campaign is pretty demanding. Most of us are juggling multiple social media accounts, scheduling new content, creating email campaigns, optimising for Google, constantly analysing data…the list goes on. With so much to handle at once, it’s not surprising a lot of marketers find themselves slipping into less than ideal routines over time.
The key to turning around these unhelpful patterns of behaviour, as with breaking free of any bad habit, is self awareness. Once you know exactly where you’re letting things slip, you can take the necessary steps to change.
Are you guilty of any of these 3 common marketing pitfalls?
1) Overlooking Calls To Action
Making it ultra-clear what you want your guests to do next at every stage of engagement can be the difference between securing and losing a booking, but industry data suggests many businesses are still not consistently including calls to action throughout their brand messaging online. This is crazy – especially because CTAs are so easy to incorporate into almost all the content you produce across all channels, from embedded custom CTA buttons on Facebook to prominent CTAs on landing pages and microsites.
Don’t get so caught up in researching, creating and scheduling great content that you neglect to include one of the most important components of good marketing of all– a compelling call to action that will drive your audience to take engagement to the next level.
2) Neglecting Your Guest Personas
The most effective marketing strategies are designed with a very specific audience in mind. The more specific, the better.
By constantly revisiting, developing and fine-tuning your resort’s guest personas, you’ll be able to create content that resonates with your audience on a more personal level, and generates more bookings as a direct result. If you can identify your guest personas’ motivators and challenges at every stage of the booking cycle, you can ensure your marketing efforts are as effective as possible for maintaining engagement levels, securing bookings and building lasting relationships with your guests.
Guest personas should be considered works in progress – review yours regularly so you can continue to create content that speaks to your guests’ needs and gets results.
3) Forgetting the Bigger Picture
We’ve all been there. That too-busy-to-think state of mind where you jump from one urgent task to the next, without pausing to think strategically about the bigger picture of your marketing efforts.
Concentrating on tactics without a clear overarching strategy to put these tasks into context is trouble, and usually results in a compromise in quality as you enter whirlwind mode trying to get everything done.
Working within clearly defined marketing strategy plans will help you stay focused. Every quarter, take time to evaluate and record your progress, then set new objectives for the coming months and decide on the tactics that will help you achieve them. Be ambitious but realistic about these goals, and mark important strategy benchmarks on a calendar so you can constantly monitor how you’re spending your time working toward your resorts’ larger objectives.
Have you fallen into any of these bad habits? Got anything else to add? Let us know in the comments below!
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