Hotel Branding – 7 Steps to Create an Unforgettable Brand

By: Frank DePino | May 18, 2023

Building a solid brand for your hotel is not entirely different from building close connections with clients. You will quickly lose friends if you bore them. Of course, it becomes a lot more complex than that. But hotel branding can build an excellent and enduring reputation by being interesting, reliable, genuine, and innovative.

The ultimate goal of developing a fantastic hotel brand is for tourists to feel instant affection and comfort when they hear about your hotel. You want visitors to not only remember your image and brand but also get a feeling of what a stay at your hotel is like and what they can expect.

Aside from selecting the best management, investing in hotel branding is undoubtedly one of the most critical decisions a hotel owner can make. So, let’s look at why it’s so crucial and how to create an efficient hotel branding plan.

What is Hotel Branding?

Hotel branding entails more than just selecting a name, logo, and primary value proposition in the industry. With the introduction, a comprehensive plan must now include storytelling not only to identify but also to express your values. You may develop a brand based on your value provision in this way.

Hotel branding also includes everything from your hotel’s personality and beliefs to your clients’ views, ideas, and experiences. It expresses who you are, everything you believe in, and how you prefer people to see you.

Moreover, in contrast to the brand identity, hotel brands frequently contain quality standards and specifications that each hotel part of the brand must follow. All of this leads to a more distinct brand identity.

Why Should You Have Great Hotel Branding?

Why is digital branding important to your hotel business, and what will be its consequences? In that regard, here are the four key benefits of having excellent hotel branding.

Creates New Revenue Channels

In a busier world than ever before, most people merely do not have the time or enthusiasm to consider your brand. As a result, your responsibility is to guarantee that your brand captures their attention, followed by enlightening them with your brand story in a clear and straightforward style.

Every hotel deserves a legitimate face, and hotel branding is frequently the face that attracts your target audience. Branding also excites people at each touchpoint of their experience and ultimately wins your trust. Creating a hotel brand identity is perhaps one of the most powerful ways to spread information about your company.

The more compelling your brand story, the more likely it will persuade your audience to stick with you and then return and stay over. Converting leads into guests into ambassadors is critical to the hotel business, and it is nearly hard to achieve without excellent branding.

Beat Out the Competition

According to research, people prefer to connect with companies with reliable, reputable companies rather than those who do not. With advances in offline and online technologies, the whole world has become your marketplace. However, to profit from this, your business must draw awareness and stand out from the crowd.

Half of the visitors (51%) click on the first two search results, and 92 percent click on the first page of the search results. About 5% of visitors reach the second page! On the other hand, most passengers are uncertain about the hotel brand to stay in (85%), and they prefer to arrange their trips using search engines (60%) over hotel websites (41 percent).

This suggests people use Google more than a particular hotel website or a comparison website. So, branding your hotel can increase your credibility, providing your clients with a reason to choose you over your competitors.

Build Consumer Trust

Whatever you feel about Starbucks, you can contest that they’re trustworthy. The Starbucks experience (and coffee) is essentially the same everywhere you travel in the world. It’s an offshoot of their identity. Hotels are everywhere. In reality, this is how bigger hotel chains build loyalty: they provide a consistent, dependable experience across several facilities.

Branding is also crucial for small and independent hotels. Consider that your hotel’s customer journey begins online. Creating a cohesive brand from pre-booking to post-stay can allow you to find the ideal guests — and transform them into returning clients.

The style in which you promote your hotel branding can either build or destroy your reputation. People have a high level of faith in OTAs. So even if you’re able to get that buyer onto your website, you still have to prove that you’re legitimate. A cohesive brand, social evidence reviews, and even live chat are all features that contribute to the trustworthiness of your hotel.

Turn Your Customers Into Ambassadors

According to Google Small Business, approximately 5% of word-of-mouth interactions occur online, while 82% occur in person. Therefore, good branding is the only method to impact your guests’ face-to-face interactions.

While not always simple to monitor, how can you expect your passionate supporters to tell your brand’s story if you don’t make it crisp and relatable? Investing in a captivating and clear brand experience will multiply the effect of your satisfied customers and provide you with a terrific ROI.

7 Steps to Create a Legendary Hotel Brand

Numerous things contribute to excellent hotel branding and lead revenues. Whether you’re dealing with a new or older business, expressing your brand concept to your customers is critical.

Here are seven insider tips for creating legendary hotel branding:

1. Consistency Counts

Understand what you believe in and stick to it: this is the first step of your hotel branding process. The ‘image’ of your company must be represented in everything related to your brand. It is thought that this comprises your name and logo, font, stationery, and meals, but go further than that. 

It also covers your music, accent and attitude, promotional campaign, and any social media or marketing emails to gain loyal customers. Each of these transmits a signal. Is that signal stating you’re a mediocre operator or that you have pride in your work? Think about it! 

When your hotel branding is consistent, more travelers will immediately recognize your marketing. The more people recognize you, the more powerful your brand reputation gets! Whether you’re selling an all-inclusive hotel or a cozy bed & breakfast, these advantages should be among your top priorities. To attain them, you must first establish a base of brand consistency.

2. Be True to What Your Hotel Is

Every human being has an inherent want to belong to and interact with a group. Hotels frequently forget that their consumers are people first and foremost before they are paying clients. The most successful hotels can display a relatable, sentient branding strategy that emotionally engages with customers.

According to Simon Gibson, brands must think and act like actual people instead of portraying accommodation as a functional utility.

Consider Airbnb. It was innovative not only because of the business concept but also because it gave customers the impression that they were receiving personalized experiences. For example, the places where visitors slept had history, charisma, and strange rugs.

Simon Gibson

Creating a relevant brand starts with a brand story because a hotel branding story will outlast any changes in employees or management changes.

3. Have a Niche

A niche is a specialty that targets a specific industry or group of customers. Finding a niche is critical for you if you want not only to generate consistent cash but also to build a reputation.

Benefits of Having a Niche. Let’s look at three solid reasons why having a niche in your hotel identity branding is essential.

• Low Competition: One of the primary advantages of a niche market is little or no competition. There are much fewer competitors offering the same item when you submit a small or particular target. But, there would be fewer customers searching for your products. As a result, you must focus on the correct clients.
• Less Spends on Advertising: Promotions are made much easier by niche marketing. In addition, marketing to a niche market is generally very targeted. Therefore, it is also expense-effective.
• More Revenue: Profit ratios in niche businesses are frequently massive. Customers’ particular needs are met by niche enterprises. Furthermore, buyers cannot obtain goods or services somewhere else. So, they are willing to pay extra for the services.
• Proficiency: When you provide a specific service to a niche market, you naturally assume the role of an expert in your industry. You are the ideal choice for obtaining the correct answers. It is challenging to be an expert in every topic. However, you can offer expertise in your own field. The ability to specialize in one field can help you attract more consumers by meeting their unique demands.

4. Create a Captivating Story

Given that around 75% of people do not trust conventional means of marketing. As we are bombarded with hundreds of marketing communications, you must find a way to break through the clutter genuinely.

A brand is more of a story than a sales pitch. It provides a story about what it’s like to stay at your hotel rather than merely presenting what it has to provide. The report should include the hotel’s past, philosophy, location, and esthetic. Moreover, the story also tells clients what the end-to-end journey feels and looks like both on and off the property.

According to HotelRez, “good hotel storytellers online are moving away from large portions of dull, normalized text and descriptions of amenities, and toward the use of large, stunning, bold pictures with fascinating narratives and convincing bite-sized videos, which are more suitable to today’s multi-device, multi-channel world.”

5. Sell a Breathtaking Experience

Apart from the basic facilities, such as the condition of the guestrooms, amenities, or service by well-trained workers, the best hotels should broaden their identity to include the essence of hospitality.

Hotels are in the industry of caring for people, and hotel workers should strive to provide guests with a revolutionary experience.

All great businesses start with a customer-centric mindset. Plus, experience mapping is a valuable tool for identifying and implementing universal touchpoints of hotel branding experience. Hospitality should leave clients with fond feelings, enrich their experiences, and become a part of their personal stories.

6. Provide Story-Worthy Services

Customer service is key to your hotel branding success. Because excellent customer services keep clients and derive more worth from them, give the guests something they’ll enjoy and remember you by. At the time, photo booths with ingeniously branded prints or branded biscuits, candles, wine bottles, or sweet goodies are popular options. 

On-site custom engraving or personalization of products can enhance the experience. Avoid providing “clutter” things, such as needles or magnets, typically thrown in the top of a cabinet or thrown out.

Hotel owners that provide excellent customer service recover their client acquisition costs and create a loyal audience. This audience refers to clients who act as case studies and gives feedback and testimonials.

To give a story-worthy service and value to all of your clients, you must be:

• Highly Responsive: Give response to arriving questions efficiently and quickly
• Accessible: Make sure everyone understands where they can get the details they want.
• Service-Orientated: Try to get feedback and deliver on requirements from guests.

7. Provide Unique Offerings

A unique offering means the unique advantage of a business, service, or item that empowers it to stand out from the competition. The characteristic that shows product benefits that are important to customers must be the unique selling proposition. It concentrates on explicit claims of innovation involving an outstanding verifiable quality.

A unique selling proposition is a crucial positioning signal a business or sales representative provides to prospects. Your unique selling point outlines why your service is more robust, better, or different from competitors. Unique offering also provides clear distinction, increased revenue, loyal customers, and easier selling in hotel branding.

Conclusion

To stand out in the hospitality market, you must always have a comparative advantage over your competition. According to statistics, the number of hotel reservations increased by 26% between 2005 and 2016.

It is a strong indication that the hotel industry is thriving. However, to guarantee that your hotel is among the many on-demand hotels, you must build a strong hotel branding.

You can also promote your hotel on social media. The global population of social media members has now topped three billion. As a result, it is a ripe industry.

Contact now Mediaboom to boost your hotel branding strategy.

By: Frank DePino

Frank DePino is Principal and Founder of Mediaboom. Since 2002, Frank has led Mediaboom’s award-winning staff of creative and technical professionals, building the most effective marketing and advertising solutions for its clients.