Hospitality is a diverse industry and is getting more competitive day by day. The hospitality industry consists of hotels, homestays, restaurants, pubs, bars, theme parks, and other services that are dedicated to providing hospitality to the customer. It also includes the intermediaries such as travel agencies, revenue management agencies and other related services.
Hotel brands have to use effective marketing to stay in the game. One of the many marketing strategies is to collaborate and partner with brands in the same industry. This is where partnership marketing for hotels comes into the picture.
Partnership Marketing For Hotels: What It Is And Why Its Gaining In Popularity
Partnership Marketing for hotels involves joint efforts of two hotel businesses to boost sales and market share. When multiple brands pool their resources, they can great coordinated strategies, develop better products, get more customers, and extend their services. Hotels can collaborate with other hotels, restaurants and other companies to enhance their services.
For example, a hotel can collaborate with a glamping resort and they can promote each other's brand. The hotel can promote the glamping resort on its website and reception. The glamping resort in turn can offer special discounts to the hotel's loyalty program members. This will increase each other's business.
Another example is a beach resort collaborating with a craft beer brand. It will help the craft beer brand get more customers and also help the beach resort stand out since they are offering something unique.
The hospitality industry is getting competitive by the day, and if brands come together and collaborate, they will be able to help each other grow and work on their strengths. A brand can’t offer everything. However, if partners up with brands that do offer those things, then the brands will neutralise their disadvantages and gain additional strengths. This is why partnership marketing for hotels is a great strategy.
The Benefits Of Partnership Marketing For Hotels
Partnership Marketing offers several advantages to hotels. Some of the advantages it offers to the hotels:
Expands Your Reach
New partnerships can increase your reach and gain more customers into the fold. Through partnership marketing, you can reach out to customers through your partner. For example, a hotel can partner up with a glamping tent company and offer glamping accommodations with that tent, with the name of the tent company promoted.
With these, you will be able to work on each other’s strengths and grow your business. You will be able to target unique, niche and popular segments of the hospitality industry with partnership marketing for hotels.
Helps Getting In New Ideas
When you work with different partners, you can gain more ideas and insights from those who work in different industries. They have experience in their fields. You can gain insights from them and apply them to the partnership and hotel business.
For example, if you are partnering up with a niche wine manufacturer. You can gain insights into the alcoholic beverage industry - such as demand, sources of raw materials, marketing trends and so forth. You can use these insights to improve your hotel bar and restaurant operations.
Helps In SEO
With the help of partnership marketing, hotels can promote each other's content with the help of blogs and website mentions. You can also share the website and page links on your blogs. Link sharing can help in SEO and increase each other's webpage ranking on the internet.
Save Markeiting Costs
Many hotels have to incur massive marketing costs with nothing to show for it. It can be due to low reach, improper marketing and trying to focus on everything at once, without a coherent strategy. Hotels cannot afford to spend an exorbitant budget on marketing since it will eat into their overall budget. Partnership marketing can help reduce costs for individual brands by coordinating their efforts.
When brands work together, they can work together to create larger promotions. These two brands can create a single campaign. For example, a beach resort partnering with a crafted beer brand can let the beer brand promote its product, while the resort can promote other things. This is how partnership marketing can be beneficial for hotels
The beer brand can advertise that they sell their product in this resort, while the resort can promote the beer brand. In fact, both can devise a single campaign and get each other's customers, saving costs. The partners can split the cost as well.
Strengthen Your Brand
Partnership Marketing For Hotels is a great strategy since you are strengthening your brands. Your hotel will be associated with a popular auxiliary brand, you will gain customers from these brands. In the same way, the other brand will get the benefit of readily getting customers from your hotel. This is the perfect win-win situation.
With these benefits, partnership marketing is a great strategy that can help your business grow through strategic partnership and mutual benefit.
The Challenges Of Partnership Marketing For Hotels
Partnership marketing for hotels offers several benefits. There will be many doubts and reservations about partnering up with other businesses. Some hoteliers wonder whether the partnership will work or whether the other business will end up taking their share. That's why, before getting into partnership marketing, hotels should evaluate the nature of their business and analyze whether or not their business will strengthen each other.
For example, if you partner with the same category of hotel in the same area, it will backfire since the customers will be split. However, you if partner up with a brewery in your hotel area, then it's a great business since the customers of that brewery will be attracted to your brand.
Things To Considering Before Getting Into Partnership Marketing For Hotels
Before one gets into partnership marketing, one needs to keep several factors in mind. These factors will ensure that you can implement partnership marketing smoothly without any hassles.
Identify Your Objectives
Before getting into a partnership, one needs to understand why they are getting into the partnership. For most hotels, the main objective is to attract the customers of the other brand to them, without losing customers from their side. From there you can choose partners to work with. Don’t choose partners that are identical to you and in the same location as theirs.
Choose A Business That Complements, Not Compete
You don’t want your partner to be your competitor and take business from you. For that, you need to choose partners that add on to your existing services. Like, you can tie up with a glamping tent company to offer glamping services, and market them for the partner's benefit. This is where partnership marketing for hotels in beneficial.
Define Expectations Beforehand
The partners need to be on the same page as to what to expect from the partnership. The businesses involved need to know what their objectives are. In case of any conflict, work out a strategy that will address these issues.
Partnership marketing for hotels is an emerging strategy for hotels. It can be a great marketing tool for the parties involved if it can generate mutual benefits and help each other’s business grow. The partners need to understand each other's needs and objectives and work out a strategy to make the most out of the partnership.
Read our blogs to know more about the hospitality industry and its various aspects, trends and concepts such as hotel marketing, revenue management, social media management etc.