by Dan Fernandez
Hoteliers have an amazing collection of raw data, which when stitched together, form a digital trail of all the interactions that occurred during the guest journey.
Predictive analytics, a type of artificial intelligence (AI), uses that data to segment guests. This allows marketers to move past basic audience characteristics and discover more specific, and more relevant, audience attributes that are at the foundation for marketing engagement and personalized product offerings.
Connecting personas to offers
Armed with this data, hotels can create meaning and turn major audience segments into personas that connect lifestyles and life stages to the various guest experiences the hotel offers, both on and around the property. These include classifications like romantic getaways, family vacations, active lifestyle, sports, adventurous excursions, pampering and/or luxury.
With real-time insights about guest history, value, preferences, behavior, satisfaction, and intent at their fingertips, marketers can then build meaningful interactions throughout the guest cycle.
Lookalike modeling
Predictive analytics can also expand your direct channel reach. With look-alike modeling, hoteliers can target prospects who look like their most valuable guests, and assist with making ultra-targeted programmatic ad buying decisions.
Succeeding with predictive analytics
The most common barrier to implementing predictive analytic marketing is that the data is siloed in disparate systems, including property management system (PMS), point of sale (POS), central reservation system (CRS), call center, food & beverage, spa, etc. and it doesn’t get consolidated with the rest of the hotel’s extensive online data (email, web analytics, guest satisfaction surveys, and social media platforms).
To eliminate those silos, savvy hospitality marketers centralize their data in a CRM system that cleans, augments, and curates the data into a 360-degree view of the guest. This is also called the single version of truth.
The right technology partner
Building a predictive analytics marketing plan is a multi-step approach which gets more powerful and efficient with each new iteration. While this strategy taps into amazing advances in digital technology, it also goes back to the fundamentals of choosing core systems and technology partners you can trust that will turn your vision into reality.
