Businesses in the hospitality design space have very specific and unique needs when it comes to hospitality design marketing. Here are some tips for marketing your hospitality design business online to help you stand out from the competition, generate more paying clients, and win more of the ideal projects that you dream about.
1. Differentiate Your Hospitality Design Company From Your Competitors
Whether you want to admit it or not, you have competitors.
If you don’t know who your competitors are, you can do a quick search with a tool like SpyFu.
To differentiate your hospitality design company from the competitors, evaluate things such as your value proposition, marketshare, branding, website interface, customer onboarding process, and existing customer feedback.
First you really need to define specifically what it is you offer that is different from your competitors
Ask yourself questions like this…
- Why should potential customers choose my hospitality design company over my competitors?
- What do we offer that the competitors don’t?
- Why are my potential customers choosing my competitors?
Examples Of Hospitality Design Differentiation
- Maybe you have custom project management system that helps you turnaround projects faster than other hospitality design agencies.
- Or perhaps you developed branding that attracts a very specific audience, allowing you to dominate that segment of the market.
- You could be the only hospitality design agency that has a unique and well defined process that your clients can comprehend before they even begin a project with you, so it puts them at ease knowing their investment is safe due to your proven process.
These are just a few of the endless examples of differentiating your hospitality design company from the competitors.
2. Solve A Unique and Specific Problem In The Hospitality Industry
Unique and innovate approach can be an unbeatable strategy for marketing your hospitality design business.
Solving a major problem for your clients will make you stand out from your competitors, and give your marketing additional value to attract new clients.
To begin you can research your competitors to see what their main “hook” is, what it is they push visitors to the most on their website, and what they emphasize the most in their marketing and advertising campaigns. Again, you can use a tool like SpyFu to see their websites, ads, traffic sources, budget, etc.
After you research your competitors in the hospitality design industry, you can begin to identify where you fit into the market, and understand the gap you need to fill in the market to stand out from your competitors.
3. Take A User First Approach To Hospitality Design Marketing
Its always a great idea to evaluate your website and digital marketing campaigns to see if you can improve the conversion rate of your traffic by providing a better user experience.
Taking a USER first approach to hospitality design marketing will ensure that your visitors can easily get to the information they seek with minimal effort, so they can decide quicker whether they want to work with you or not.
How Do You Evaluate User Experience?
If you have an existing customer base, you can ask them to participate in user experience research to give feedback on the current website interface to pinpoint problems with the information architecture and user interface that cause users to get frustrated.
User experience and conversion rate optimization are very important when trying to achieve a positive ROI when marketing your hospitality design business online.
Why waste money on advertising that doesn’t convert your traffic into paying clients?
That is exactly what you are doing if you don’t optimize your website and marketing campaigns to perform with maximum efficiency and provide the best user experience possible.
If you help your users get to the information they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible to make informed decisions, you stand a much better chance at retaining visitors and converting them into a qualified lead.
4. Generate Hospitality Design Leads at Trade Shows & Events
There are no true replacements for face to face networking, and building business relationships when doing hospitality design marketing. Trade shows are an excellent way to fill your pipeline with highly targeted leads.
You can setup your own booth, but don’t be afraid to socialize with other vendors, and networkers. Believe it or not, networking with someone that you know stands zero chance of becoming a client of yours is not necessarily a waste of time, especially if that person has connections in the industry that could open you up to more referral clients.
Make sure to log your qualified leads into a CRM system such as Salesforce or Pipedrive so you can manage sales activities related to each deal to keep them moving through your pipeline towards a closed deal.
5. Network On Linkedin
Linkedin is one of the best online platforms for doing B2B hospitality design marketing, and building a powerful network of potential hospitality design customers online.
As the owner of a hospitality design or FF&E company, you will greatly benefit from setting a goal of spending several hours per week networking on Linkedin to grow your connections and create valuable and high quality content to attract potential customers.
Some activities you should consider:
- Search profiles of potential ideal customers, and connecting with them.
- Engage with your potential customers content.
- Send personalized connection request, complimenting them on their content, business or making small talk to show things you have in common.
- Participate in groups, answer industry specific questions, and add value.
Final Hospitality Design Marketing Tip
Why are you losing projects?
Find out why, and formulate a solution to win more of the projects you are losing before going after new projects.
Converting more leads into sales = a better ROI.