Hotel Flywheel Marketing: A Guest-Centric Approach to Improve Sales

Hotel marketing is one of the current hottest topics in the industry. And lately, I have covered a lot about it.

Now, if you have read my previous article on hotel marketing trends, you must have come across “flywheel marketing”.

But I discovered that not many are aware of what exactly flywheel marketing is.

And if you’re one of them, then fret no more.

In this blog, I’ll be covering all the aspects of hotel flywheel marketing and how you could leverage it for maximum benefits.

What is Flywheel Marketing?

Marketing professionals would probably know the nitty-gritty of a sales funnel. Generating leads and then converting them into customers hold importance. And most of the time, no one bats an eye on what happens in between.

This is exactly where flywheel marketing comes into the picture.

It is a marketing model that self-sustains its momentum and generates qualified leads. It keeps the customer at the heart of it and focuses on delivering as much value as possible. And this in return, attracts strangers, turns them into prospects, acquire them as customers, and makes them your promoters. 

In simple terms, your marketing keeps spinning just like a flywheel. If you apply more force and remove friction, it will spin faster.

What are the Stages of the Hotel Flywheel Marketing Cycle?

Generally, the sales and marketing process focuses on maximum revenue generation through product sales. However, there’s a psychological grey area that no one pays attention to, i.e. ‘Customer Experience’. 

In fact, guest satisfaction is the base of the hospitality industry. But rather than providing it after they book your property, why not focus on it during various stages of the sales cycle?

That’s where flywheel marketing comes into the picture. First of all, we would create a hotel flywheel marketing model, as mentioned in the diagram below. 

Now, you need to check that the stages of sales are aligned with marketing tasks to ensure that you have enough force to get the flywheel rotating. The basic fundamental of this process is to gain enough momentum that it spins at a great speed. 

What I mean to say is that putting together the efforts of sales and marketing simultaneously will act as a catalyst in generating maximum sales and keeping the customer engaged throughout the cycle. 

Let’s study the steps which can help you to achieve this. 

1. Attracting Right Audience

We all are aware that every product needs to be marketed among the right audience, at an appropriate time, with an intriguing strategy to capture their interest.

Now, while going with flywheel marketing for hotels, the initial step is promoting your property to the right guests. And to do this, you need to focus on identifying your guest segments. 

It’s about understanding what type of guests your property caters to the most. Accordingly, you can create your marketing campaigns that would focus on their requirements. 

If you need more clarity on how to do it, here’s a blog that will help you out.

Learn Everything About Guest Segmentation in Less Than 10 Minutes 

After identifying your target audience, you need to deploy ‘n’ no of strategies to reach out to the guests. But don’t do it haphazardly or just go with a way just because it’s a trend in the market.

Instead, do your research first and then invest. This way, you will be aware of various marketing practices used by hoteliers and then choose the most effective ones for your property. 

To save your time in Googling about strategies, here’s a link that would redirect you to the library of our trending blogs on marketing in the hospitality industry. Do give them a read later on. 

Check Out These Blogs On Hotel Marketing Strategies and Stay Ahead Of Your Competitors

2. Pitching the Interested Leads

Once you start promoting your product to the right audience, your flywheel will start moving ahead slowly. Now it’s time to get your sales team into action. How to do that?

First of all, prepare a mind-blowing pitch that can keep leads interested throughout the call. However, ensure that it should give a personal touch to the guests. 

Post that, start pitching the inbound leads from marketing campaigns, understand their requirements, and note each and every detail mentioned by the guests. 

This step SHOULD be followed by sending across an email or WhatsApp message pertaining to brief details of the call and your hotel’s fact sheet or brochure (even if they are window shopping)

I know this would sound like a basic sales step, but trust me, I’ve seen many hotels not following it. Results? Losing the potential guests. 

Now, this part is quite crucial as you collect each and every information about your guests that would assist you in personalisation and is a base of hotel flywheel marketing cycle. 

3. Keeping Guests Engaged

To give your hotel’s flywheel marketing cycle more momentum, you need to keep your guests engaged. But, you need to do it gradually, as imparting them with too much information in a single go will make them lose interest in your property.

I’d suggest following a schedule. See, travellers tend to make travel plans mostly in the mid-week or at the weekend.

So, schedule marketing campaigns for such days. Showcase them exclusive deals, about your hotel’s loyalty program, last-minute bookings offers a mini-guide of your locality and such other things. 

For instance, if one of your leads is looking for a family trip on an upcoming weekend, you can promote your packages, activities, or any family booking combo. 

This personalised way of marketing is well-appreciated by the guests, moreover aids in improving their brand loyalty towards your hotel. 

4. Close Follow-Ups

As the marketing team is keeping the guests engaged, the sales team needs to be on their toes for rigorous follow-ups. Let me give you a pro-tip here, which is sure to bring in the result and reduce the drop count. 

The Three Call Rule: Tap the guests thrice in every three days. For instance, if you have called guests on Monday morning and they haven’t attended it, try once in the afternoon, and then finally in evening. Don’t forget to drop an email or a message at EOD. Repeat this process twice in a gap of 3 days.

If you haven’t received any update from guests after this step, mark the lead as uninterested, but do not discard it. Instead, send them your promotional emails. 

These lost leads act as friction in slowing down your hotel’s flywheel marketing cycle. Meanwhile, the ones that book your property give it good momentum.

5. Post-sales Services

Coming to the last step that will give the final push to your hotel’s flywheel marketing cycle, you need to focus on post-sales services. No, I’m not talking about the services. 

The post-sales activities are used to assist the guests in every possible way till they reach the property. This includes,

1. Assisting guests with their billing and booking confirmations
2. Working on guest requisitions
3. Offering them upgrade to higher room categories
4. Suggesting them to opt for local activities and sharing packages for the same
5. Cross-checking for any possible referrals

6. Retaining Them At Your Property

Now that your hotel’s flywheel marketing cycle has set into motion, it’s time to focus on keeping it steady and increase the speed. How will that happen?

The answer is retention. But that depends on two factors ‒ Services experienced by guests and the after check out approach.

The former one depends on the quality of services provided to the guests. It should match the expectations you set through your sales pitch. In simple words, ‘don’t over-promise and under-deliver’.

But that part needs to be handled by operations. As far as the marketing part is concerned, you need to invest in certain steps to ensure maximum guest retention. These steps are:

1. Sending a thank you note to guests post checkout
2. Greeting mailers and messages on special occasions, such as birthdays, anniversaries, and festivals
3. Personalised deals and loyalty program offers

How is Flywheel Marketing Better Than Sales Funnel?

I hope you are well aware of the generic sales funnel. If not, let me explain it to you. Basically, there are 5 stages in a sales cycle:

1. Lead generation and verification (Connecting with guests)
2. Product pitching (Offering different types of packages)
3. Regular follow up (Calls and visits at a fast pace)
4. Lead closure (Either guest will book or they won’t)
5. Post sales process

That’s where the sales funnel ends. Meanwhile, the marketing team focuses on bringing in more leads through various sources like email, blogs, social media, WhatsApp and so on. 

By implementing hotel flywheel marketing at your property, you streamline the sales and marketing process to work in cohesion. This gives you an opportunity to keep your guests engaged from start to end. 

Moreover, it increases the probability of continuous business generation for your guests through retention and referrals. In fact, it helps you identify the step where you lost the client, take necessary action, and pitch them again in a different way. 

On the honest note, if you ask me who would win in the war of flywheel vs funnel, I would say go with the former one. 

How can Hotels Leverage Flywheel Marketing?

Hotel flywheel marketing emphasises personalisation. As a matter of fact, it can be used to smoothen out every strategy you deploy to attract guests. 

Let’s take digital marketing for example. We all know that there are various components in it promoting on social media, email marketing, improving website content to facilitate direct bookings and so on. 

What I mean to say is that out of a gazillion tactics, you need to find suitable ones for your property. And for that, you need to go with a trial-and-error approach with a touch of personalisation in each campaign. 

That’s where you can use the hotel flywheel marketing strategy. In fact, you can use it in every marketing campaign to determine the factors creating friction in your tasks and eliminate them.

However, to make the most out of it, you need to focus on collecting and storing guests data. Without that, you won’t be able to go with the personalisation of marketing campaigns. 

You can take a cue from Marriott Hotels for this. They have reshaped their marketing strategy and made it guest-centric. Check out this article to know more. 

Marriott Brings Customer Hospitality To Inhospitable Digital Media