Hospitality WiFi, WiFi Marketing & Analytics

Hospitality WiFi: WiFi marketing and its benefits to hotels

In every industry that exists, there is always fierce competition going on between players in the industry. The hospitality industry is no exception. Marketers at the small players in the industry saddle the huge responsibility of increasing booking rates and improving guest satisfaction. In a desperate bid to gain insight, many of them resort to handing out printed surveys to customers. Not only is this quite outdated, but it can’t do much in this modern world. And as time goes by, people will be more price-conscious than brand-conscious and this will be the case for the hospitality industry.

Digital solution as a tool to combat digital competition

Marketers in the hospitality industry are under pressure to deliver results in terms of improving the level of customer satisfaction, customer retention, and to make sure their hotels are full in the off-season, which happens every year. And with all these challenges, they still have to contend with increasing digital competition. Many marketers are presently demanding the best solution to this problem.

Conventional sense would reason that if digital tools are working effectively for the competition, it should work well for hospitality marketers. And so marketers are best served by shifting their attention towards more digital strategies. One of such digital tools is the guest WiFi analytics. Guest WiFi is already a norm in almost every hotel, both big and small ones, and so marketers at small hotels can exploit this to boost their marketing.

Even with the immense marketing potential that guest WiFi holds, many marketers have never given it a thought. This is chiefly due to ignorance. WiFi analytics is already breaking grounds for many other brick n’ mortar businesses that equally have online competition. The thing is, this tool is quite easy to use, and the best part is it is already up and running. They only need to collect the customer data and learn to interpret it.

Look at AirBnB for instance, they are already steps ahead of many small to medium hotels because they have access to a vast repository of customer data, which they have collated over the years. This enables them to clearly understand customer behavior. Patterns like which customers book accommodations in which location, the frequency of this booking (or any other booking), what time of the year they book, whether they post reviews, etc. can be easily gleaned from their digital platform.

The Digital Solution is in WiFi Marketing & Analytics

Hotel guest WiFi mixed with WiFi marketing and analytics data can be the rocket that shoots hotel marketing to a whole new level. WiFi marketing is simply a system for tracking, interpreting and utilizing customer experience and behavior via a guest WiFi system. The guest WiFi system in the hotel is the tool used to acquire customer data like time and frequency of customers’ visit, how often they use the internet, how long they spend when they visit, etc.

By using a WiFi analytics platform, hotel marketers can collate this data to study it and uncover customers’ behavioral patterns that may hold marketing opportunities. With this, hotel marketers can improve customer satisfaction and increase profit. Since small hotels already have guest WiFi running, they only need to take it a step further and make the most of it.
Simply put; guest WiFi analytics allows hotels to know: how frequently a customer visits any of their locations, the stats of each location to know which one is doing well/poorly, the average number of guests per day/week/month/year, etc. Combining guest WiFi data and analytics, WiFi marketing can be employed to offer incentives to hotel guests, create loyalty programs and encourage guests to participate, or used with email marketing to boost return rates.

Putting guest WiFi to work

Most WiFi marketing platforms are equipped with a variety of tools that can help strengthen the bond between the guests and the hotel brand. For guests to develop a bond for a hotel brand, they’d need to build a level of relationship or have pleasing experiences with the brand. To engender loyalty, the guest might have to be treated in such a way as to feel like they are the hotel brand’s favorite.

Since everybody likes something for nothing, offering free guest WiFi access could sway a customer’s decision to do business with you, instead of your competition. Of course it all starts with offering a fast WiFi network that’s equipped with the latest technology. But we’ll assume that this is the case.

To reinforce the bond between a guest and a hotel brand, marketers could incorporate the guest WiFi platform with their email marketing system. And as soon as a guest gets added to your network (as first-time visitors) you can send them messages like “Thank you for staying with us”, or emails about freebies for returning guests. You could also send them a “Welcome to our hotel” message when they step into the premises and offer them the in-room menu. Or maybe a message to prompt them of a loyalty program or an announcement of new referral program could be sent to them during/after their visit. It’s even possible to send a message asking them to rate your hotel. Depending on the score, they’ll be prompted to write an online review or provide you with offline feedback. This means it can also be used to boost your online reputation. The best part of all this is that it’s all fully automated! There are an unlimited number of ways hotels can use their guest WiFi!

The analytics are proof

While hotel marketers take advantage of WiFi marketing and churn out ideas, they’ll garner data that will help them understand the experiences and behavior of their guests. This data, processed by WiFi analytics, offer certain customer parameters that are used to measure, compare, and track how their marketing campaigns perform. And this data is very reliable because it is gotten directly from the customers.

This WiFi analytics data can also serve as a prophecy for how future marketing campaigns will turn out and can help to guide important decision-making processes in business.Many hoteliers may see their guest WiFi service as a burden that they just have to bear. However, it is important they change their views and see it as an asset that is capable of turning their business around by improving customer experience, strengthening the brand-customer bond, and promoting customer loyalty. And it can!

Combining the different WiFi tools

WiFi marketing, WiFi analytics, a guest WiFi network, gathering all your online reviews in one place and boost your online reviews on reviewwebsites of your choosing; if you think it all sounds like their are quite some tools needed to get this going, then I’m glad to inform you that you’re wrong. SpotOn has managed to house all these tools (and more) into one easy to use platform; social wifi. SpotOn’s social wifi platform allows you to easily manage your guest WiFi, email marketing, coupon marketing, online reviews and analytics. But maybe the best thing is that you don’t have to be a techie to understand how it works; they’ve made it very user friendly.

Curious what this looks like and how it works? All you need is a cup of coffee and 30 minutes of your time.