What is growth hacking? Does growth hacking apply to hotels? Can hospitality actually implement growth methodology and an active experimentation framework? How can you and your company profit from it?

Growth hacking is a new way of doing things in the marketing field, which focuses on company growth. This highly effective methodology consists in quickly testing ideas that can improve the customer experience before investing a lot of resources. Effective ideas are copied and repeated, the rest are abandoned.

To apply growth hacking methodology we need metrics able to measure the growth of our hotel  corporation. The key metrics should always be the ones that best deliver growth to your hospitality business, like enterprise clients, the number of  contracts or quality in our product.

Once we know which metrics are the most important ones, the next step is to set goals. Goals should be SMART, and these are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely, such as increasing the number of annual repeat customers by 15% or increasing the number of occupied rooms by 10% in the next two months.

When we already know what brings us growth, which KPIs to focus on and also, what are the SMART goals associated with them, it is time to design or ideate growth drivers. Growth drivers are hypothetical ways to achieve our goals, and we will be validating or rejecting them through small campaigns, called experiments

Customer insights are everything. Marketing strategies in the hotel industry will now have to consider customers’ insights into their marketing activities.

The success of the reception agency depends entirely on the customer´s perception. If a malfunction is found, customers will not be afraid to share the various problems they have encountered with other online customers.

Focusing on customer service and seeking ways of improving in the hotel industry is one of the keys to continued growth.

Therefore, when conducting any hotel industry market research, the hotel must determine who its customers are and their needs in terms of service and entertainment, so that as a business, you can make improvements in these areas.

As long as the hotel asks the right questions, customer insights can be easily implemented.

The fact today is that the importance of technological progress to the hotel industry is greatly increasing. Embracing technology is the key to staying competitive today. Unfortunately simply listing your hotel online is no longer sufficient. In this digital age, ensuring that you have a strong digital image is crucial. Therefore, social media must become a crucial marketing strategy.

To ensure success, every hotel must now invest in a high-quality website that can also facilitate online bookings. Your hotel website design should be of the highest quality. In short, for potential customers, this should be a visual pleasure. Nowadays, review sites such as Trip Advisor play a vital role in influencing consumer decisions, so it is important to participate in them to gain market share in the hotel industry. 

All this is easy to say, but 

• how do you achieve these goals for your company?
• What are the most effective methods?
• Could you use remarketing?
• Perhaps SEO planning to position your website. 
• How can you ensure you’re targeting the right audience?
• And what revenue can I expect from these strategies anyway? 

All these and more questions are what we have to answer to find the right marketing strategy, answering them from small tests that allow us to have a global vision of the most important thing: What can make us GROW.

Once the previous steps have been completed, the lessons learned will be compiled. This is a fundamental phase, otherwise the information would be forgotten and in the future it is likely that we would have to repeat the experiments.

Want to know more about how to apply growth hacking to your Hotel business? Sign up for Hypertry and ask for a one to one session!