Hotel marketing teams around the world tend to copy marketing practices from one another. Adopting tried and tested strategies is one thing, but blindly copying everything that seems like a good idea is not a smart move.
The Maldives is a great example. Most hotel photos and hotel websites look almost identical. A recent poll found that 8 out of 10 first-time visitors to the Maldives couldn’t tell a difference between a $ 400 ADR resort and a 2,000 ADR resort because the photos and videos looked similar.
Same story in Vietnam. Most hotels’ Facebook and Resort Instagram accounts look eerily alike. Regardless of the style of the property, they all look very similar. Some exceptions are 5-star luxury properties with unique architecture or a super professional marketing team.
Copying other hotels will not highlight your brand
Copying what other hotels are doing carries significant risks. Let’s look at a few.
You can copy a technique that looks good but doesn’t work. You can misrepresent your property, making it unattractive to guests who would have been genuinely interested.
Your hotel will end up being like any average hotel and losing the core differentiation values of the original concept. Everyone can do it better.
It’s easier than ever to understand what guests see positively and negatively about other hotels. More and more hotels are using the Competitor Analyzer to find out the strengths and weaknesses of their competitors.
Why and how do you conduct a competitor brand analysis?
As mentioned, Competition analyzer is a tool that has been gaining popularity among hoteliers in recent months. In short, the solution starts market research campaigns about your selected competitors.
A competitive analysis can provide key insights, including
- Brand awareness of your competitors
- Brand acceptance of your competitors
- Perception card with two selectable values (e.g. price / value)
- Brand perception of your competitors
The tool is suitable for professional competitor brand analysis projects quickly and inexpensively. All you have to do is enter up to 3 competitors with website URLs, specify the audience you want to get opinions from, set your research budget, and start researching.
This report makes it easy for you to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the brands of hotels in your compset and enables you to develop a branding strategy that addresses the untapped needs of your target guests.
If you still want to copy techniques from other hotels, Competitor Analyzer can help identify practices that work.
Learn about the weaknesses of other hotels and make yours look better
A report from Competitor Analyzer reveals all the weaknesses of a hotel brand. In most cases, hotels have low brand awareness, low brand adoption, and brand awareness is very different from what they are trying to represent.
This indicates incorrect positioning and has a very negative effect on both brand acceptance and brand perception. Should a competitor achieve poor brand acceptance, refrain from copying anything from them.
Combining the results of the competitive market analysis with related points in your hotel marketing implementation shows how well your marketing is working.
If you look at the shortcomings, you can see which practices work for each hotel and which don’t.
Find out what people love about other hotels and take advantage of these qualities.
Similar to how one can recognize deficiencies in hotel brand management, Competition analyzer can help you find best practices that work for your competitors.
Combining positive results with appropriate hotel marketing implementations makes it easy to find successful concepts. Hotels with high brand acceptance and predominantly positive customer perception have the right marketing communication in most cases.
High brand awareness can indicate that they are enjoying increased demand – which suggests that they are making good use of their marketing resources.
Should you invest in competitor research for your hotel?
Yes you should. Unless you have enough business intelligence to make reliable decisions, investing in competitive analysis is always a good idea.
The good news is that Competition analyzer is an inexpensive and fast research tool available to any business of any size. You can start a competitor analysis from $ 50 (USD). The cost of analysis depends on the number of insights ordered, the targeting criteria, and the number of respondents you want to take part in the survey research.
