For hoteliers, business travelers are the gift that keeps on giving. Compared to leisure travelers, they’re less budget-conscious, make repeat visits, and generally keep to themselves.
So how do you reach this coveted demographic? The key is understanding the digital platforms where they’re engaging and then targeting your marketing efforts to get on their radar.
Arguably the most important online platform for business professionals is LinkedIn. With more than 630 million members, LinkedIn is the leading site for people around the world to network, find jobs, and highlight their career achievements.
It would make sense, then, that hotel marketers can effectively target business travelers on LinkedIn. Marketers can use the site to share content and run advertisements that are specifically targeted at their ideal audience.
If your hotel caters to business travelers, check out these three tips for using LinkedIn to reach a network of corporate guests.
Look for patterns among previous guests
When you’re looking to generate new customers, it’s helpful to start with the information you have about your existing ones. Run an analysis on guests who have stayed with you in the past year and identify any similarities among them.
Perhaps a majority of them have similar job titles or levels, company sizes, or industries. Maybe many of them come from the same geographic region. Once you understand your sweet spot as far as business travelers are concerned, you can replicate it to bring in new customers.
With LinkedIn, you can specify the precise demographic and firmographic characteristics of your target audience. For example, if you’re trying to reach executives of New York-based companies, you can select those options to serve your ads to people who fit those criteria.
Earn repeat customers
After you’ve created your list of previous guests, you can also use it to earn their repeat business. LinkedIn offers a feature where you can upload a list of contacts, and the site will automatically find their LinkedIn profiles based on their email addresses.
If you have a list of website visitors, you can also upload that file to find matching LinkedIn profiles. Since these people will already be familiar with your brand, you can focus less on brand awareness and more on a strong call to action (CTA) to book.
Check out upcoming business-related events in your area
Do some research into events near your hotel that will attract business travelers. Conferences generally attract thousands of professionals who fly in from all over the world to attend.
Once you have a list of relevant events, take a look at the conference website to understand what types of people will attend. Are they engineers? Or salespeople? Gather as much information as you can about the conference-goers and run a targeted set of LinkedIn ads to those types of individuals. Just don’t forget to end them after the event is over, otherwise, you might end up wasting your ad budget.
If you aren’t using LinkedIn to target business travelers, you could be missing out on new and recurring streams of revenue. With these tips, you can successfully keep growing your business customer base.
