Here’s How AI Is Changing The Face Of Hotel Marketing

It’s game over for “spray and pray” marketing. The consumer is on to us and we better wise up.

If you’re still annoying your prospects with repetitive retargeting ads, it’s time to step up your game and get personal with AI and Identity Resolution.

Don’t take our word for it. Check out this recent survey.

U.S. digital shoppers and retailers conducted by Nanigans, 77% of consumers say they receive too many retargeting ads and 88% complain they still receive retargeting ads for products they’ve already bought. Not surprisingly, 57% claim retargeting ads do not persuade them to buy.

Thanks to Amazon, personalized marketing isn’t just useful, it ’s critical for marketing success in 2019 and beyond.

Remember this: Personalization just a few years ago (a name in the subject line of an email, perhaps) is a far cry from what we consider effective personalization today. Moving forward, the ideal state of personalization will continue to change as consumers’ expectations of how they should be nurtured will increase dramatically.

You better know your consumers and what motivates them or suffer the consequences.

It’s not that retargeting can’t be effective, it’s more important to understand poor retargeting is no more effective than 83% of retail marketers said they believe they would achieve the same sales results organically, without retargeting.

To make matter worse, poor retargeting can do more harm than good by driving prospects away with repetitive and disconnected messaging.

Gone are the days of relying on third-party cookies to inform retargeting efforts. Our ever-evolving multi-device, channel-hopping behaviors have rendered these temporary, browser-based data files relatively useless for targeting customers with timely and meaningful messages along buyer journeys.

Fear not. Help is here.

Enter Artificial Intelligence and Identity Resolution.

Thanks to advances in tech, hotel marketers now have opportunities to build customer profiles via their first-party data, including email addresses, device IDs and buyer behavior. By definition, these deterministic identifiers persist across any touchpoint whenever a customer logs in or authenticates via some transaction.

By leveraging this data, marketers can reach prospects at any moment of the buyer’s journey, across any device.

This simple, yet powerful element will unleash the real power of retargeting once again since the consumer will experience the right message at this right time. It’s the single and most potent strategy that is responsible for Amazon’s incredible growth.

Amazon knows what customers are looking for and what they’ve already bought, and it can retarget shoppers with messages that add value to their experiences, instead of annoying their prospects with annoying messages that are not relevant.

Marketers chasing personalization with cookies instead of establishing identity will only set themselves up for failure as omni-channel personalization becomes the new standard.

Are You Ready to Build a Personalization Strategy?

You first need to know your prospects are.

Armed with “the identity,” hotel marketers can recognize known customers throughout all stages of the purchase funnel and beyond — from awareness to consideration, to purchase, to loyalty — and retarget them with personal and relevant messaging that drives the ultimate ROI: high customer lifetime values.

The critical marketing element for 2019 and beyond is: IDENTITY

Without identity, you’ll miss vital parts of buyer journeys, resulting in imprecise targeting and irrelevant, disconnected and annoying messaging — all of which adds up to a colossal waste of ad dollars and a further decline in conversion.

NOW is the time to change that and here’s how.

Site Visitor Match can help build your personalization strategy.

Site Visitor Match is a form of Identity Resolution, which allows you to resolve the identity of over half your visitors, without a form fill. This is the same strategy Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook have all used to scale so quickly.

Best of all, it’s considered first-party data.

Here’s how it works.

When a visitor lands on your website, our technology can match that visitor with information we have in our consumer database. This allows us to resolve the identity of that visitor and place them on a list that is unique to you.

Some benefits include:

• Full & permanent control over your prospects
• Collect and analyze the behavior of your site’s visitors pre- and post-click
• Convert your hard-earned SEO rank to a permanent
• Retarget across platforms without relying on silo-ed pixels or expiring cookies
• Increased conversion and decrease costs by 25 - 50%

Bringing it home

Having a deep understanding of your website visitors – your hottest prospects! – Using identity resolution is going to propel your profits. With the demand for attention at an all-time high, you need to meet people at the moment with personalized messages. Site Visitor Match today is what SEO was 10-15 years ago, it’s a real game changer.