As a multi-award-winning, integrated marketing agency specialising in the hotel, leisure and automotive sectors, we’re proud to be the prime sponsor of the Hotel Marketing Association (HMA) Young Hotel Marketer of the Year Award 2019. The award is an important accolade as the winner will potentially champion the hotel and leisure sector during the most technologically advanced and exciting period in the industry’s history.
In addition to the prestigious HMA Award, LAW Creative will offer the winning young marketer a day working at the agency with the creative, digital and film teams, and at the end of their experience he or she will be presented with the latest iPhone XS on which to practice their social and mobile marketing skills. We’re not only proud but also excited to support the HMA Award because, as an agency with 20 years’ experience in the industry, we know that fantastic scope exists in being able to pursue a marketing career in the hotel and ‘away from home’ experience sector.
Every day we work within the changing landscapes brought about by the rise of technology and the empowerment of visitors and guests through channels that are substantially different to those considered the norm only 5 years ago. Hotel marketing is a phenomenally fast-changing and dynamic category right now. Like the rest of the world, it is transitioning and developing in many ways, but the challenges of technology bring both problems to be solved and massive opportunities to be maximised. Only the best and brightest will move further along the success pathway at this junction.
Growing up in a tech-savvy and IoT age gives young marketers a head-start to rise to these new challenges, to pick up on trends using quantifiable data more easily, and to understand positive experiential recall better than ever before, because, during their own lifetime, it is what they have grown to expect. The service sector places great demands upon those who work in it and even greater demands on those whose function it is to grow it.
The use of travel – and hence the hospitality sector, too – is also changing, meaning that new markets grow from old ones like mushrooms on a wet lawn. Bleisure, for example – the blending of business trips with pleasure add-ons – is waiting to be tapped and grown.
Marketing opportunities that haven’t existed before are now put into play through a dizzying succession of powerful and motivating toolsets that mean marketing functions must be integrated into every experience that a visitor could have, to leave a lasting and highly positive impression.
Systems and interfaces are enabling a fundamental shift in joining consumer-facing interactions and back-office functionality together, optimising the overall guest experience. This shift will involve interconnected devices in the hospitality sector. IoT technology is already impacting both consumer interactions and back-of-house operations with a predicted 20.8 billion connected ‘things’ by 2020. This means real-time feedback on room facilities, keyless access, and guest control over some of the hitherto inaccessible workings of the hotel. Now, guests are not just coming to sleep for a couple of nights – they are forming and changing the fabric of how the hotel works, informing its future direction and providing hard evidence about what improves the product and experience and what doesn’t. For a marketer, this is an exciting place to be. Why not be the first to create a room from 4K video walls and let your guests choose which worldviews they would like to enjoy? Just because you can!
Whether your view of successful marketing involves VR, AI, stunning video content, chatbots, blockchain-based loyalty models, or more reliance on mobile-first indexing, your experience in finding out will grow a rich new seam of outstanding marketers for the hotel industry, built upon a platform of cutting-edge, tech-wise knowledge that you can make a massive contribution to.
A closer look into Law Creative
We are multi-award-winning business drivers for the hospitality and automotive sectors and can prove it through outstanding ROI results for our clients. We are ourselves an HMA Awards recipient for Best Campaign or Promotion, Most Creative Activity by an Agency 2018 and Best Internal Communications for high profile clients such as InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, Holiday Inn and Radisson Hotel Group.
If you want to talk about any aspect of hotel marketing that you find of special appeal, or need some advice about, just drop an email to [email protected]
Sources: HMA, Hotel Speak, Net Affinity, Skift, LAW Creative Global Intelligent Data, all 2018