Resort Marketing – Strategies to Elevate Your Luxury Resort

The luxury resort industry is one of the most competitive industries in the world. It’s important to focus on showing off your resort’s top features with a high-end resort marketing plan. Of course, creating a lucrative marketing plan can be difficult, leaving you wondering where you should start.

There are several crucial factors to consider when developing a resort marketing plan to stand out from other resorts. These factors include communicating the unique aspects of your resort to your guests, elevating your brand with unique and engaging content, and influencing potential customers much earlier in the marketing funnel.

To help you on your journey, we’re going to provide you with an in-depth guide to digital marketing strategies for luxury resorts. Continue reading to learn more!

What Is Resort Marketing?

Every single year, millions of people go on vacation, traveling to luxury resorts to enjoy the atmosphere and the many amenities that they provide. With so many competing resorts, however, resort managers must market their best amenities to show travelers that what they have to offer is better than the next resort.

A great resort marketing plan includes a variety of marketing strategies, including advertising, public relations, promotions, sales, and any events or activities that promote a luxury resort.

Benefits of Luxury Marketing

There are several benefits of luxury marketing, especially with the rise of travel interest in the past year post-COVID. One of the most important aspects of luxury marketing is that it increases brand recognition, and we all know how well having a solid brand can help you stand out from the competition.

With a high-end brand reputation, you can command premiums with your recognition and increase bookings.

Plus, having the right marketing strategies in place will help you to learn more about who your ideal guests are, what kinds of content work most for them, and more.

Let’s look at a few strategies that you can use to build brand awareness for your luxury resort and turn more leads into paying customers.

Luxury Resort Digital Marketing Strategy Ideas

1. Go Mobile

One of the first things you should consider is going mobile before anything else. While mobile-friendly websites used to be a great suggestion, now, they are a must. Mobile devices are how most customers are interacting with the internet these days, and even Google’s algorithm ranks its websites in a “mobile-first” manner.

It’s important that you are able to reach your guests where they go first, and most guests are looking at their phones roughly three hours per day. It’s equally crucial that your mobile site loads quickly because you can lose visitors if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

2. Value Experience and Emotions

Whenever you come across a story that touches your emotions, it sticks with you. The same goes for marketing your luxury resort.

When you make an emotional connection with potential customers, you can differentiate your property from others. To consider how valuable their experience might be, they should see the major positive difference between you and your competition.

When coming up with emotional marketing strategies, make sure to focus on your demographics.

3. Online Reviews Management

When you manage your online reviews, you manage your online reputation, which is crucial for any business. If you have a bad review or multiple bad reviews, you can drive potential visitors away.

Doing so can hurt your business for years to come.

When you proactively manage your luxury resort’s reputation, you hold more power. It’s important to stay on top of websites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, though also crucial that you keep your eyes on less industry-specific sites such as Google Business Profile.

4. Social Media

You should ensure that your luxury resort uses at least a single social media platform to market your offerings. Social media is one of the most widespread forms of marketing in the world today.

Today, around seven in ten American uses social media, meaning you can’t afford to leave social media out of your plan.

If you want to market to younger consumers, you might consider heading over to Twitter or Instagram. Make sure your content is consistently updated and appeals to your customers.

Your strategy should revolve around user-generated content, wherein you share any content made by your visitors.

5. PPC Ads

PPC is another one of the most important strategies of luxury resorts. With PPC advertising, you directly advertise to customers and pay each time someone clicks on your ad. You can run PPC on multiple platforms, including social media platforms and search engines.

You can bid on the keywords that you want your ads to appear for. With a quality PPC ad strategy in place, you can elevate your online presence and gain more leads.

6. Advertising on Travel Metasearch Engines

A travel metasearch engine is a website that compares rates for different hotels using various internet sources, whether direct from hotels or from online travel agents. Note that these travel metasearch engines are platforms through which booking channels can make their services, not the actual booking channels themselves.

Travel metasearch engines are very similar to digital ad platforms, as they earn money through CPA (cost per acquisition), CPI (cost per impression), and CPC (cost per click.)

Consumers look at these search engines to make more informed decisions, which is why it is important for you to consider advertising on them. In fact, the metasearch sector has grown into a $6 billion advertising space, making up for a large chunk of the advertising pie.

7. Video Marketing

Hotels and luxury resorts find video marketing to be very effective. With this type of resort marketing, you don’t have to try and describe what your property looks like to your customers. Rather, you can just show them through high-quality video and video storytelling.

The beauty of videos is that you can repurpose them for multiple platforms.

For example, while you might have a long-form marketing video on YouTube, you could cut that same video into short clips for use in marketing emails or social media.

8. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a very strategic approach that resorts take by sharing relevant online material to attract guests, whether that is videos, social media posts, blogs, etc. With content marketing, you can stimulate interest in the services your luxury resort offers without explicitly selling it.

9. Email Marketing

Email marketing is still one of the most highly effective methods for maintaining existing customers and reaching out to new ones. With a good email marketing campaign, you can send out seasonal offers or give potential guests behind-the-scenes looks at upcoming events.

We recommend using email marketing to offer special discounts and deals during the off-season, as it can continuously remind us about the excitement that comes around during the on-season.

10. Differentiate from Competitors

The most innovative luxury resorts know exactly what it is that makes them different from other resorts. It’s important that you take the time to consider what separates you from your competition.

• Is it your location?
• How about your amenities?
• Is it the kind of service that your resort offers?

You need to let potential guests know why they should choose your resort over another resort, and the way to do that is by marketing what makes your resort so special.

11. Develop Your Brand

• What is your brand?
• How are people supposed to feel when they stay at your resort?
• Is it adventurous or serene?
• Is it about luxury and indulgence or relaxation and self-exploration?

As a luxury resort, you need a strong brand to compete. We wrote a whole piece on what makes brand identity so important in the world of hotels and why you should consider hiring a professional resort marketing team to optimize your branding efforts.

Hiring a Marketing Company for Resorts

While you can theoretically take on all of the marketing tasks above, your time is likely better spent worrying about the daily operations of your business and how you can continue to grow and evolve.

A strong marketing company can build you a high-converting website, post on your social media, manage your reputation, and create email marketing content that is effective.

Final Thoughts – Taking Resort Marketing to the Next Level

Here at Media Boom, we understand the challenges of the travel industry and the amount of work that goes into running a successful and well-branded resort. If you want to launch effective campaigns for your luxury resort, now might be the time to get in touch with an experienced agency that can give you the results you need. Contact us here today to find out more about what Media Boom can do for you.