The Role of AI in Content Marketing for Small Resorts and Hotels
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The Role of AI in Content Marketing for Small Resorts and Hotels

Unlike larger hotel chains with significant operating and marketing budgets, small and mid-sized boutique resorts and hotels are tasked with a balancing act that requires them to deliver the same standards of guest service excellence while managing a tighter overall budget. This means cutting costs wherever possible and focusing a limited marketing budget on tactics that best ensure bookings, glowing guest reviews, year-round exposure and repeat visits. Here’s how AI can help small hotels and resorts to that.

Enter AI

The hospitality industry, in general, including small hotels and resorts (and their marketing teams), is increasingly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance its multi-channel content marketing strategies. AI offers several advantages to smaller operations by how it can maximize what a small resort or hotel is already doing without substantially increasing marketing costs. With the help of AI, smaller hotels and resorts can deliver sophisticated marketing content and be less constrained by limitations on staff and budget. However, AI doesn’t replace experienced marketers and strategists; instead, AI supplements their efforts and assists in execution, enhancing guest service offerings and marketing deliverable capabilities while reducing turnaround time and human labour.

What’s Already Possible With AI

While the AI landscape is rapidly evolving, the current AI platforms already offer sophisticated tools that can help streamline operations, personalize guest experiences, and optimize marketing efforts.

However, smaller establishments need to balance the efficiency of AI with the personal touch that defines their brand. This article explores AI’s current and potential uses in content marketing for small resorts and hotels, along with its benefits, drawbacks, and strategies for effective implementation.

Current Uses of AI in Content Marketing for Small Resorts and Hotels

AI is currently being utilized by small hotels and resorts in several ways to improve content marketing efforts, such as:

  1. Personalized content creation: AI tools help create customized content that resonates with individual guests by analyzing data on past behaviour, preferences, and interactions. This might include personalized emails, tailored recommendations, or customized offers.
  2. Chatbots and virtual assistants: Many small hotels and resorts use AI-driven chatbots on their websites and social media platforms to respond instantly to guest inquiries. These tools can handle reservations, provide information about hotel services, and even offer local travel tips, ensuring that potential guests receive immediate assistance at any time of the day.
  3. Predictive analytics: AI can help forecast trends based on historical data analysis, assisting hotels in understanding guests’ needs better and tailoring their marketing content accordingly. This might involve anticipating peak booking times, preferred room types, or popular amenities and adjusting marketing campaigns to match.

Pros of AI in Content Marketing

  1. Increased efficiency: AI dramatically reduces the time and effort required to generate and distribute content. What used to require several hours, days or even weeks to draft can now often be done by one person within a small fraction of the time. AI automated tools can create and push out marketing materials quickly, allowing hotel staff to focus on other areas of guest service that AI cannot replace or replicate.
  2. Enhanced personalization + augmented concierge services: By leveraging data, AI can help craft messages and make suggestions that speak directly to a guest’s preferences and history, potentially increasing engagement, booking upgrades and loyalty.
  3. Flexible scalability: AI solutions can be scaled according to seasonal marketing needs, making it simpler for smaller hotels to expand their reach and marketing tactics as they grow—and without a corresponding increase in marketing costs from the need to hire more staff to manage content and execution!

Cons of AI in Content Marketing

While it’s easy for AI enthusiasts to get carried away espousing the possibilities and potential of AI, there are potential drawbacks that marketers must be aware of.

  1. Loss of personal touch: Over-reliance on AI can make your resort’s communications feel less personal and authentic, which could quickly turn off guests who prefer a more human touch and who have experienced more personalized service before your resort’s adoption of AI.
  2. Complexity and cost: Implementing AI solutions can be complex and costly, particularly for smaller establishments with limited budgets. The initial setup and ongoing maintenance require resources that might be scarce.
  3. Privacy concerns: Collecting and analyzing vast amounts of guest data can raise privacy concerns, potentially damaging trust if not handled with transparency and care.
  4. Quality gaps: As sophisticated as AI might be, the quality of AI’s output wholly depends on the quality of human input. AI in the hands of inexperienced marketers can result in content that lacks context, quality, meaning and, therefore, usefulness.

Best Practices for Utilizing AI in Content Marketing

Small hotels and resorts can adopt the following strategies to effectively harness AI’s power while mitigating potential drawbacks.

  1. Blend AI with human oversight: Use AI to help with rote, routine tasks and to draft content ideas, but keep final content decisions in the hands of human marketers who can inject brand personality and empathy into the messaging.
  2. Let AI collect while humans decipher meaning: Let AI do the heavy lifting when it comes to collecting and assessing large amounts of data, but have an experienced marketer analyze the data, interpret what it means and decide on how to utilize it in your resort’s overall marketing and advertising strategy.
  3. Focus on value-added personalization: Ensure that personalization efforts offer real value to each guest. For example, use AI to offer genuinely helpful content, such as travel tips and excursion suggestions tailored to a guest’s interests, rather than just personalized promotions. Boutique operators must maintain their boutique touch and remember why guests choose them over larger establishments.
  4. Maintain transparency around data use: Be clear with guests about how their data is being used to improve their experience. Transparency builds trust, and trust enhances loyalty.
  5. Include real people in your support model: While AI can help small operations offer 24/7 website chatbot support, ensure a real person is available when warranted–this could mean offering website visitors a field where they can enter their contact information and schedule a call back as soon a customer representative is available to help them.
  6. Affordably supplement your in-house marketing staff with AI expertise: Contracting marketing experts with a niche for utilizing AI in marketing is a viable workaround that doesn’t require investing in costly AI platform subscriptions and extensive training.

Forecasted Uses of AI in Content Marketing

Technology evolves rapidly, and AI is no exception. AI is expected to become more user-friendly and increasingly integrated into service models and marketing strategies for hotels and resorts of all sizes, offering capabilities that include:

  • More sophisticated predictive personalization, where content not only reflects each guest’s past preferences but also anticipates their future needs.
  • Potential integration with IoT (Internet of Things) devices to provide real-time, location-based content and services to guests during their stay.
  • Creating dynamic pricing models, where room rates are automatically adjusted based on demand, competition, and other factors, all communicated to potential guests in real time through personalized content.

To Wrap Things Up

While AI presents many opportunities for enhancing content marketing strategies in the hospitality industry, experienced marketers who understand how to wield AI, including its limitations and potential, are pertinent. It’s also crucial for small hotels and resorts to balance AI’s growing capabilities with a commitment to personalization and guest privacy.

What’s exciting is that by strategically implementing AI, smaller resorts and hotels can more effectively compete with larger establishments by improving efficiency, deepening guest engagement, and driving growth, all while maintaining the unique charm that attracts guests to small hotels and resorts in the first place.

Do You Have Questions?

Do you operate a hotel or other hospitality and tourism-related business and have questions about utilizing AI, boosting bookings and where to focus your marketing resources? We’d love to hear from you! Contact us online today or click here to schedule a call with us.

Additional Resources + Recommendations

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