Marketing 2:40 Min read
What is social CRM? Know what the advantages are for your hotel
Social CRM is the strategy that includes your hotel’s social media accounts, networks where your customers and potential customers are.
More and more strategies are based on exhaustive knowledge of your consumers. With so much competition, especially in the tourism sector, you need to understand travellers’ consumption patterns well.
And in order to get to know these consumers, who are more and more demanding with their travel and stays, you need to be able to store information and analyse it. You need to be able to centralise it so it is useful for all transactions and strategies. And that can only be done with CRM.
CRM is and must be an essential tool for any hotel brand in the digital era. Customer Relationship Management is, therefore, a philosophy as well as software that put consumers and your potential guests at the centre of all strategies. They’re consumers you must know very well.
And how do you get to know your consumers?
Much of the information available on guests a hotel works with is collected through PMS. But, to attract more potential customers and increase direct bookings, you need to know how they move on the Internet, what they consume and how they do it.
The net is a huge showcase for many companies and there are many different websites marketing their tourism products and services online. Yet, social networks are the platforms where you can really get to know your customers: what motivates them to travel, what they hope to get out of their trips, what services they prefer during their stays at a hotel… And the concept of Social CRM arose out of these social platforms…
What is Social CRM?
Social CRM is the strategy that includes your hotel’s social media accounts, networks where your customers and potential customers are, to generate value that allows your brand to make them loyal. This loyalty is achieved by collecting relevant information to establish a long-term relationship with them. In short, it’s a relationship to increase your direct bookings.
As a strategy, Social CRM or Collaborative CRM not only implies the use of social networks as a form of customer service but it can also be used in areas such as a hotel’s marketing and sales. Social CRM as a tool collects much more solid information from consumers.
Remember that your potential consumers are social beings. These social customers spend hours and hours consuming content related to travel via social media. The quantity of information they see in these platforms is essential for all your hotel’s strategies.
But you must keep one thing in mind which is that traditional CRM can never be replaced as that is where you store all the relevant information on your customers and contacts, even those you get through social networks.
So, what are the benefits of social CRM?
1. Knowing new consumers better.
As mentioned, new consumers or social users generate and consume content via social media constantly. This content is essential to adapting the very services and products offered by hotels but it is also important to understanding what influences their buying decisions.
Social consumers want their opinions to be taken into account and for companies to adapt to them and their needs. In the hotel sector, knowing consumers will make it possible to follow the trend of personalizing rooms more and more all the time. Personalization is impossible without knowing your consumers’ preferences.
2. Improving the booking process.
Traditional CRM needs the valuable information collected by Social CRM. This information allows marketing and sales teams to know what their customers’ needs are to adapt online strategies to their preferences, adjust the value proposition offered by their hotels and improve conversion.
The strategies in this process adjust better to each phase in a guest’s journey; in other words, the buying cycle observed in a potential hotel customer involving pre-stay, stay and post-stay. Knowing potential customers through Social CRM makes it possible to start the booking process.
3. Make customers loyal.
Social CRM is also an advantage for loyalty programmes. Repeat customers are the best brand ambassadors for a hotel and using social media where you can monitor their behaviour in all phases of the guest’s journey is essential to making them loyal.
Social CRM allows you to increase engagement and loyalty among guests because the information you get from these platforms makes it possible to personalize communication actions, increase participation, improve retention and establish long-term relationships with a loyalty programme.
Enrichment with PMS of guest data collected through Hotelinking WiFi
Contracting a hotel CRM module is necessary to exploit and activate the data to generate email marketing and loyalization campaigns. The hotel CRM module can
easily and quickly segment them to personalize campaigns using a large variety of variables.