This assessment will cover following questions:
- Digital marketing plan is the document that explains marketing goals needed to be accomplished. Explain different marketing channels and how they achieve communication objectives.
- Evaluate the communication objectives and justify the channel selection and integration in the context of Hilton Hotel.
- Design and provide a content which appropriate for the channel and communication objectives in the Hilton Hotel.
- Digital marketing plan elaborates methods for appropriate guidance in marketing. Elaborate the methods of monitoring and measuring digital marketing effectively.
INTRODUCTION
Digital marketing plan can be said to the document that shares relevant details for planning digital marketing actions addition to campaigns. In other words, digital marketing plan is a effective plan which maximises benefits of company concerned with data assets as well as technology focused initiatives (Chaffey and Smith, 2017). By developing effective digital marketing plan, organisations identifies the aspects that makes their business unique along with the ways for communicating messages to targetted audiences by opting wide digital channels.
For gaining insights for digital marketing plan, Hilton Hotel is selected which is international brand that performs operations in hospitality industry. The respective entity has amplified its digital leadership in various dimensions such as e-commerce leadership, social leadership addition to marketing leadership for building unique, new together with important competing advantages.
The present report covers demonstration of understanding challenges, opportunities and impacts related to digital environment within hospitality industry. It further provides critical assessment of key digital tools, channels addition to platforms by comparing an contrasting digital presence of the hospitality company. Further, a plan is provided for organising activities related to digital marketing in order to support organisational initiatives to build multi channel capabilities within luxury division and active holiday seekers. At last, it evaluates methods concerned with monitoring as well as measuring digital marketing in effective manner.
TASK 1
Environmental analysis for organisational digital presence through emphasising on opportunities, challenges addition to likely impacts the digital environment for the sector.
Hilton is one of leading brand within hospitality industry that operates worldwide. It is a hospitality entity which manages as well as have franchise of wide portfolio of resorts as well as hotels. The purpose of such organisational existence is to expand the activities of business at worldwide so to deliver best offerings to customers and earning huge revenues. Recently, Hilton administrative team has appointed digital marketing head who is responsible for developing report for digital presence of the business concern. For this purpose, environmental analysis is conducted that focuses towards opportunities together with challenges and impacts digital environment have on hospitality sector (Kingsnorth, 2019). The description of the analysis is underneath:
Environmental Analysis
A strategic tool which involves processes for determining internal addition to external elements that affects performances of firm is termed to environmental analysis. With this analysis, the digital marketing head of Hilton can develop a suitable digital marketing plan through communicating and coordinating activities with all decision makers. Within PESTLE analysis, diverse factoral types are analysed and all the opportunities and challenges are closely monitored so to form strategic determinations for upcoming that determines several ways for dealing with threats in effective manner. Hilton uses wide types of digital technologies for promoting the hotels and resorts online in order to strengthen its customer base. An environmental analysis is being conducted by digital head for monitoring the organisational digital presence (Dodson, 2016). The elements which are analysed are underneath:
Political
Diverse kinds of foreign trade policy, political stability, taxation policies, governmental policies and integrity of politicians are some of political factors which requires more emphasis of Hilton managers while working with digital techniques so to ignore interference of political systems of UK and other nations. With this, digital environment of hospitality sector is affected as companies in the industry are not able to work with technology related policies due to which transactions with other nations are not conducted properly that impacts negatively on digital presence of Hilton.
Opportunity
When digital head of Hilton considers all policies and programmes that are implemented by political system while utilising digital technologies then various growth opportunities will be created and implemented without any interruptions and barriers.
Challenge
There are various circumstances when organisations such as Hilton not able to follow code of practices in digitalised manner then it results in issues, for example, political party interference in operational performance which becomes challenge for the entity.
Economical
The factors which pertains within nations economy are economic factors (Simula, Töllmen and Karjaluoto, 2015). Economic growth, business cycle, unemployment level and entire economic system are the factors that required detailed analysis by Hilton managers at time time planning usage of digital technology for promotional aspects as they impacts in positive and negative manner. For example, rise in rates of inflation affects organisational pricing policies that results in impacting entire hospitality sector negatively.
Opportunity
UK's government supports business concerns that posses huge visibility on social media platforms, online websites addition to uses digital techniques for promotional purposes as it results in development on economic status of nation (Deiss and Henneberry, 2017). It is huge opportunity for Hilton as it uses advanced and unique digital techniques for grabbing attention of customers towards its hotels and resorts.
Challenge
Commodity prices are changed by managers as per cost incurred by company and using advanced techniques generally increases product prices. In context to Hilton, when prices of hotels and resort services are increased then it affects customer choice due to which they switches to another hospitality company that offers similar services at least prices and to retain them becomes challenging for the entity.
Social
Factors which are direct contemplation of society within which entity operates are social factors (Kotler, Kartajaya and Setiawan, 2016). These includes cultural beliefs, educational level, population perception, class distribution and age demographics that needs more emphasis by Hilton managers at the time implementing digital technological tools for purpose of marketing its resorts and hotels. It affects digital environment of hospitality industry as it is importance to consider customer preferences as well as attitude while marketing commodities and when these aspects are considered properly then execution of operations becomes easy that impacts positively in marketing commodities and services.
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Opportunity
The target market of Hilton is upper and middle class population and when the company works with digital technology tools then they analysis major preferences and wants of targetted population which provides diverse opportunities to attract mass clients through offering the services as per the analysed wants.
Challenge
When Hilton managers will ignore or avoid customers preference and choices then it creates challenge for company to grab attention of such audiences and sustaining in the inductsry.
Technological
Technological awareness and innovation level are few technological factors that are analysed by Hilton managers as these factors provides information about latest trends and techniques with the adoption of which Hilton can perform successful marketing. By having proper and detailed information about market then it assist entities to limit their expenditures on irrelevant technologies which impact positively on digital environment of the hospitality sector as whole.
Opportunities
Hilton has effective and competent information technology team that have huge knowledge about what digital technique to be used at what time which provides the entity huge opportunities to reach customers that are located at far areas and attracting them for its resorts and hotels.
Challenges
When technology becomes obsolete or introduction of new technique creates challenging environment for the entity as it results in huge burden for Hilton information team to overspend in technological enhancements so to sustain in industry.
Legal
Particular legislation such as employment law, intellectual property law, safety law and discrimination law are part of legal parts that requires huge concentration of Hilton managers for applying digital technology for purpose of promoting business. It is because it ensures fulfilment of legal requirements in proper manner or not (Chanavat, Desbordes and Lorgnier, 2017). When laws are not adhered by entities within hospitality industry then it impacts on digital environment within the sector as non-adherence results in inappropriate conduct of activities that impacts negatively.
Opportunity
By implementing digital techniques through properly executing activities by adhering with al legislations provides growth and sustaining opportunities as all these assist in meeting regulations that are governed by government and achieving success.
Challenge
When legislations are not properly followed by Hilton while marketing its services then creates huge challenge for the firm to enjoy competing edge and work in digital environment wherein hospitality industry operates.
Environmental
Environmental factors are concerned with natural disasters, changing climate and many more which needs more focus of management team of Hilton while using digital technological frameworks for promotional aspects as it influences the intermediaries or middle mechanisms which are opt for promotions. It could affect digital environment of whole hospitality industry as environmental changes generally results in impacting negatively on activities concerned with promotions that are heavily dependent on digital media.
Opportunities
When all the environmental factors are forecasted in advanced then Hilton can gain wide opportunities to plan programmes for dealing with upcoming complex problems promptly.
Challenges
The phase when managers of organisation are not able to properly forecast environmental factors then huge operations are affected which will result in challenges related to improper marketing for Hilton.
Thus, it is significant for digital marketing team of Hilton to analyse all the mentioned impacts, challenges and opportunities while formulating determinations for upcoming durations that will assist in working within digital environment of hospitality sector and achieving sustained competing edge.
TASK 2
Critical assessment of business concern by comparing contrasting digital presence.
In order to enhance the digital presence, there are wide types of digital platforms, channels together with tools that are used by the companies (Hanlon, 2019). The digital tools, platforms and channels provides diverse opportunities to business concerns. In context to Hilton, managers uses wide types of tools, platforms and channels so to enhance their reach and digital presence in comparison to other hospitality organisations. Some of the platforms, tools as well as channels that various hospitality entities uses for digital presence are as assessed:
Search Engine
It is one of effective digital tool that helps companies to promote their websites through increasing visibility or presence within search engine result pages via paid advertising (Spiller and Tuten, 2015). With this tool, Hilton managers searches as well as identifies frameworks in database which are concerned with keywords as specified by the clients. Google, Bing, Yahoo and many more are some types of search engine that Hilton uses for boosting and comparing its digital presence in contrast to other entities working within hospitality sector. The digital tool provide advantage of making offerings addition to web content visible that is important for digital presence and marketing for Hilton. At same time, the filters within search engines do not provide accurate reflections about real interest of users.
E-mail Marketing
It is a digital channel through which business concerns sends commercial messages to different group of population by using email (Popovic, 2017). With this digital channel, Hilton promotes its hotels and resorts through sending information or content for the services offered to different people by using e-mails and at same time, solves their issues or concerns. The digital channel promotes online presence of the hospitality firm as it helps in developing strong relationships with potential audiences and clients.
Moreover, e-mail marketing allows companies working within hospitality sector to improve awareness of customers as well as tailoring marketing messages for the mass customers that strengthens the presence on digital mechanisms in comparison with other entities. But at same time, e- marketing also involves spam emails that irritates the customers and various times poorly designed mails are not delivered that restricts digital presence of Hilton and other hospitality business concerns.
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Social Media
It is considered as prominent digital platform which is leveraged by business owners for the purpose of creating brand awareness about its merchandise and services (Floričić, 2016). By using social media platform, Hilton company reaches highly targetted potential audiences via person to person as well as direct responses. Digital marketing team of selected entity works with suitable social media platform such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn and many more in order to promote its diverse kinds of resorts and hotels to specific targeted audiences that improves its digital presence in the market.
In context to other hospitality businesses, they uses social media platform so to improve attention of customers towards the company. At same time, social media platform lacks emotional connection, conveys inauthentic expressions, diminishes understandings as well as thoughtfulness and creates skewed image while various times limits digital presence of respective entity in comparison to others.
Thus, digital marketing team of Hilton uses above mentioned digital tool, platform addition to channels for the purpose of enhancing its digital presence in comparison to the rival hospitality entities. With these mechanisms, Hilton has achieved its digital presence in almost all nations and made effective relations with customers that belong to far located nations.
TASK 3
Organising of digital marketing activities and building multi-channel capabilities in an organisation
In present time, every company wants to gain popularity on digital platform in order to maximise their sales and earn massive profit to reach the desired goals. Manager use to prepare effective digital marketing plan that help in increasing the brand image and make product reach to large number of audience. Digital marketing plan is an effective document that help to provide valuable and important detail relevant to planning of a company (Deiss and Henneberry, 2017). This will support to execute crucial marketing activities so that main objective are attained and overall customer base gets increased. This essentially addresses the specific elements: short, medium and long-term market objectives, it also addresses digital-level approaches and platforms that will be used.
Multi-channel method is related with the practice that is mainly adopted by the organisation to formulate the effective interaction among large number of consumer by using different channels. Channels like direct and indirect are primarily used to make customer aware about the goods which influence them to buy specific product or use particular service. Hilton Hotel is among the biggest brands throughout the hotel and service industries. It is therefore essentially necessary for Hotel to engage in digital development. This help to ensure that Hilton simply remain the highest position and maintain the loyal audience through the provision of high-quality and luxury services (Karjaluoto and Ulkuniemi, 2015).
In this regard, this leading Hotel has now come up with a digital marketing plan to undergo digital transformation within the organisational premises. This plan will assist the enterprise in effectively organising digital marketing activities as well as providing efficient assistance to company in development of multi-channel capabilities for its luxury business division. To complete the plan marketing manager of Hilton hotel makes a plan of digital marketing that contain several elements that are elaborate underneath:
Background: This is recognized from its clients as well as its dedicated team workers all over the world for its trendy and successful facilities. The Hilton Hotels represented and addressed several leaders and famous people. The Hotel is able to build its name and maintain a legacy by making sure that they provide valuable and luxury services by investing majorly in innovative services that satisfy the customer needs.
Initiatives: In this respect, in order to develop clear communication with consumers, hotel has develop official website where visitor can get any information regarding availability of rooms, special offers, additional facilities etc. Hilton Hotel has intended to experience digital innovation in which they have the aims to create maximum customer experience (Karwal, 2015). Thus visitors might get comfortable with the services and product that the Hotel supplies like, spa facilities, large concerts halls, luxury rooms etc. Head of digital marketing of Hotel is planning to use different social media platform like Facebook, Pinterest, You tube, Instagram etc. which help in expanding unique services in competitive environment.
In present time there are some other facilities and services which are offered by Hilton Hotel that includes Audiovisual equipment, faxing, modern and advance business centre and most important notary public for companies convenience. For comfort of children, they include babysitting facilities, pushchairs. They offer free art galleries, elevators, book-store, bar, multiple languages employees, baggage storage, washing, and deposit-saving among other comfort and luxury facilities.
Promotional Mix: In recent time Hilton hotel make effective use of promotion mix in order to ensure that activities of digital marketing are being executed according to the set criteria by Management team. It is done to insure the social media team meets its targets. A commodity can either be measurable products or intangible services provided to the visitors. Safety and quality of facilities are choices which come within this category (Gupta, 2015). The Hilton maintains customers to buy only the highest quality of services which keeps them safe and protected in any way. Some of the planned activities are discussed underneath:
- Advertising: This is among the most relevant and essential aspects for which respective hotel create a sustainable digital marketing strategy plan in which they illustrate the entity's brand and product range. They also highlight the unique selling point of the Hotel to promote a positive and influential identity in visitors minds. Manager also use email marketing in which large audience are provided with essential information about offers and packages. Important information related with additional facilities and special discount offers are delivers to customer on official website.
- Public relation: This is another key element that Hilton hotel uses to create a strong and successful brand identity and lets the business develop new goods in the Hospitality sector. This will be beneficial in improving the Hilton current market revenue and productivity and growing customer base in competitive environment (Malar, 2016).
- Sales promotion: It is an important tool and consider to be essential element of the advertising process that lets a business promote and grow sales. Company mainly based on short-term objective and purpose so they adopt different strategies to increase sales or invite more and more customer within a specific period. For example, on festive season in UK Hilton hotel provide additional costume facilities for visitors so that they can enjoy events as per requirement and culture.
In order to improve the experience of customer Hilton hotel has adopted omni channel strategy which is help to define that there have a segregation among the promotion, distribution ans communication platform. This provide crucial benefit to Hotel by providing higher efficiency and make more amount of profit in a respective year. It has been germinate in different manner that are discussed underneath:
- Improves organisation structure: The strategy of Omni-channel aids Hilton Hotel to improve their structure by making attract potential visitors to use different kind of luxury services (O’Connor, 2015). This also support in making valuable decision that enable in developing proper and correct brand awarenesses which makes customer to believe that Hilton services are far better than other Hotel. Therefore, with help of the approach of the respective company's omni channel advertising, their consumer base can become large which will support them improve sales and profits. Thus, they deliver services which provider a way to new tools, technology, advance thinking strategies and hard working team member that will help them to remain at top and attain the competitive advantage.
- Customer Centric: It is also important method of Omni-channel which means that customer preferences and demands must be regularly noticed that help in delivering most suitable and valuable services. In fact, members of the team of the relevant company monitor their consumer's actions by helping them to communicate their needs and requests.In addition the organization seems to have the opportunity to obtain loyal customers and keep their new customers with the aid of omni channel marketing. Thus the Hilton hotel is building a solid consumer base and gaining confidence, it will help them develop and expand. The performance advantage in consider to be an important integrated system that help in providing innovative solution and latest technology that combines together in order to increase the overall business and lower the cost with out compromising quality.
- Integrate analytics: In the context of Hilton hotel, omni channel strategy implies that the manager of marketing team must examine their consumers past records (Baker and Saren, 2016). The analysis can help management apply the information and recognise customer behaviour regarding the desire and preference for rooms and food. Thus it can be stated that with the support of omni-channel practice valuable services can be developed which will give maximum satisfaction to different visitors coming for different culture and country. The more details manager collects, the more possibilities are there to recognize customer satisfaction. In turn, the relevant Hotel often delivers valuable services and feedback facilities to their prospective customers by which they can enhance their connection.
Opportunities: Hilton hotel have the main opportunities to expand their present market share by effectively using more advance digital marketing tools and strategies. Such as Over the past 3 years, programmatic advertising networks have offered new consumer targeted possibilities to hotels (Malar, 2016). This has been used to devastating effect by several huge hotels and hotel groups and there are many hotels that still have to examine the advantages of this. Thus Hilton Hotels must put more effort into testing qualitative programmatic advertisements to attain potential customers in year 2020.
Challenges: The major challenges for respective hotel is that due to shutdown of internet because of several reason might lower the booking rate. There must be an effective team that regularly update the website as many time customer might gets confused because of old offers blinking on site that create confusion.
TASK 4
Methods of Monitoring and Measuring Digital Marketing
This is primarily important for a hotel like Hilton to track and evaluate the digital marketing strategy efficiently and address any area underneath the plan (Floričić, 2016). The primary reason for those assessment and tracking is it would support the organization in figuring out ways that are perfectly appropriate to its present problems and help to attract more consumers with its successful efforts and numerous new and existing goods and services. In order to reach the desired results some of the main techniques are discussed below in the context of Hilton hotel:
Key performance indicators:
It is consider to be the most important approach of digital marketing assessment is by developing appropriate KPIs to track the success rate. The Hotel Hilton is working on three important components of its online marketing thus KPI's will help to manage their efficacy according to the fixed standards (Gupta, 2015). Organization will essentially set standards for its content's opinions, comments, mentions, and re-tweets, and regularly evaluate whether Hotel Hilton will create more convincing and interesting content.
This would help manger of hotel efficiently assess the path in which its initiatives are moving and change their material according to consumer expectations sufficiently. Customer contact is yet another KPI that the business can use for the media content.
- Processes for Measuring Digital Campaigns:
To assess the efficacy of the initiative, Hilton could use Google, AdWords as a significant instrument to measure the progress of its initiatives toward hotel business. The method is useful for the enterprise as it efficiently handles PPC advertising for an enterprise (Spiller and Tuten, 2015). Therefore, it will be beneficial to give Hilton, a better scope to handle their marketing and advertising.
- Performance Measures via Online Metrics:
There are different online measures which act like indicators that provide exposure to a corporation's true-time performance on the local, regional, and foreign marketplaces. It's an important element that Hilton wants to assess the effectiveness of all its advertising on the internet. In addition to some KPIs, electronic metrics will view the results in statistical way, thereby assisting the company on issues that need to be addressed. To achieve efficacy in this, Hoot Suite is a measure that acts as an instrument for assessing an organization's total social media efficiency. It covers both the web content and communications with customers.
- Population Measurements:
Another important aspect to accurately quantify and track digital marketing is by assessing population that is affiliated with the business as well as its social-media posts. It is quite difficult for an organization to track each channel at the same time to achieve exposure to its output in real time (Spiller and Tuten, 2015).
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CONCLUSION
In the end of report, it has been founded that digital marketing is one of the most important elements which makes a company product and services get popular among the large customer base at global level. In hotel industries large Hotel like Hilton which have number of Hotel and resorts all over the world uses number of digital marketing technique to expand the types of goods ans services they provide. Social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. and promotional mix methods are helpful in reaching the desired audience at attain the top position in competitive environment.
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