Powering hotel brand growth through strategic communication

So your hotel brand is booming and you’re thinking about expanding to incorporate another property. Expansion brings exciting new opportunities, but also new challenges. Good communication is essential for keeping your team aligned and your guests informed.

By maintaining consistent messaging and ensuring a seamless guest experience across different properties – and through all your communication channels – you can tell the compelling story of your evolving brand. This helps potential guests truly understand the ethos behind your hotel, turning them into loyal customers who feel connected to your vision.

As a growing hotel brand, you need to use both internal and external communication to navigate these complexities and ensure your brand develops alongside your hotels. Here are some key elements to ensure effective communication across all touchpoints.

Building brand authenticity

With skepticism towards corporate brands at an all-time high, especially in younger generations, it’s never been more important for a brand to be authentic. That’s especially true during a period of hotel expansion when brand messaging can inadvertently shift. 

As you expand your hotel brand further, it is crucial to ensure that its core values, mission, and personality are clearly defined to ensure you remain authentic. Determine what distinguishes your brand from competitors and what unique promises you make to your guests. Identify what guests have loved about your original brand and ensure that these elements are preserved and carried across to new properties.

Establish your brand values

What does your brand stand for? What are your key values? It’s not just about stating them, it’s about putting them into practice. Make sure that your values are evident in everything you do. During expansion, ensure these values are integrated into every new property's operational DNA and consistently reflected in all internal and external communications.

Stay true to your origins

During a period of growth, it's easy to become overly focused on your hotel’s expansion to the detriment of your mission. It's crucial to remain grounded, remembering the core values and principles that were fundamental to your brand's initial success. When launching a new property, link its unique features or location back to the overarching brand story, reinforcing continuity and authenticity.

Maintain your brand voice

Your brand's personality is reflected through your tone of voice. Ensure it is consistent across all communication channels. While the delivery might adapt slightly for a casual social media post versus a formal press release, the core essence of your brand's voice must remain consistent. Avoid jargon, communicate directly, and be true to your brand's personality.

Seek feedback

Actively listening to guest feedback, both positive and negative, is crucial for understanding how your brand is perceived and identifying areas for improvement. Implement systems (like online reputation management tools) that aggregate feedback from all properties, allowing you to spot consistency issues across your portfolio.

Be transparent

Show customers you value their feedback by responding to their reviews, comments, and questions. This public display of accountability builds trust and demonstrates a commitment to excellence.

Preserve the guest experience

Effective communication in the hotel industry means thinking from the perspective of a customer. By putting yourself in their shoes, you can communicate with authenticity. Keep that customer in mind as your hotel brand expands and think about how to communicate any new developments in a way that will be appealing to them.

Invest in training

Your employees are your brand's most direct communicators. Providing regular training to staff is an opportunity to reinforce your brand values. Employees should be equipped to handle guest interactions in a way that aligns with your brand message.

Inspire your audience

As your hotel brand grows, connect with your audience on an emotional level by taking a storytelling approach. You’ll need to adjust your story as you evolve, to reflect how your brand ethos might have changed. An engaging story creates a connection and inspires guests to want to book their stay with you. You need to ensure that you continue to create those connections with a new audience or to adapt to a new property.

Some ways to create an authentic emotional connection are:

Create a blog hub

Create captivating travel guides, highlight local attractions, and share historical insights about the areas where your hotels (especially new ones) are located. This positions your brand as a knowledgeable expert and gateway to memorable experiences.

Dazzle with social media

Combine rich storytelling with smart SEO strategies to attract organic traffic, bringing new audiences into your brand's narrative. A picture says a thousand words. High-quality imagery captivates your audience and can be easily shared across social media channels, piquing interest and engaging guests.

Demonstrate with guest experiences

Your hotel brand storytelling should consistently position the guest as the hero of the narrative, demonstrating how your brand solves their problems and enhances their journey. From the personalized welcome messages and curated in-room amenities to local guides and unique curated activities, ensure every touchpoint tells a cohesive story of comfort, discovery, or luxury.

Foster employee engagement

Engaged employees are the best ambassadors you could want. Encourage your employees to share their own stories and embody your brand in their interactions with guests, improving the guest experiences and further humanising your brand. Recognise and celebrate teams and individuals who consistently deliver on the brand promise, creating a positive feedback loop that reinforces brand values.

Create a brand book

To ensure a unified and consistent hotel brand identity, especially during growth, developing a comprehensive brand book is non-negotiable.

Your brand book isn’t just a style guide, it is the heart of all your communications. It explicitly defines how your brand should represent itself across all channels and properties and acts as the ultimate reference point for every team member, from marketing and sales to operations and front-line staff.

This is all about consistency. Your brand book defines how to use language, visuals and messaging to ensure brand credibility and bolster trust, acting as a single source of truth for all brand information. It is essential for expanding teams, especially those producing marketing materials, creating content, or interacting with guests. New staff can be quickly educated about your brand using the brand book. And as companies grow, it’s important to ensure that its core identity stays intact, without shifting the message.

Select the right communication channels

By leveraging a variety of communication channels, you will be able to reach a wider audience. Also take the time to consider how your brand tone might adapt to different channels, situations, or target audiences. While maintaining the core brand voice, slight variations can be appropriate for specific contexts.

Know where to find your target audience

Conduct market research to identify where your target audience spends their time. Buyer personas can be helpful to figure this out. to Leverage them to identify preferred platforms and media consumption habits. Are they on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, or reading specific travel publications? Then adapt your hotel communication strategy to align with your potential guests’ communication preferences.

Use print advertorials

Traditional print media continues to be important, especially among certain demographics. Consider advertorials (advertisements designed to look like editorial content) in high-end travel magazines, local lifestyle publications in new markets, or industry trade journals. This is a valuable way to tell more in-depth stories about your properties.

Use press releases

An expertly written and distributed press release can effectively highlight your hotel expansion, new features and grand openings. Online press releases, when properly optimised, can be a particularly effective tool for incorporating relevant keywords and building valuable backlinks to your website, boosting your online visibility during growth.

Leverage social media

Engage with your audience by sharing valuable content in real-time on social media platforms. Develop a detailed social media strategy that leverages the unique features and targeting capabilities of each platform (e.g., short-form video for TikTok, aspirational imagery for Instagram, professional updates for LinkedIn).

Communication in hotel industry

As a growing brand, it’s more important than ever to leverage the power of communication. It's about meticulously maintaining brand consistency in both internal and external communications, ensuring every message aligns, informs, and drives growth.

At Peregryn, we offer comprehensive brand strategy services, specializing in guiding hotels through their growth phases. Our roster of experts — from SEO copywriters and brand identity specialists to content marketers and creative strategists — understands the unique challenges and opportunities of hotel expansion. We know how to sculpt your brand's story and ensure it resonates across every new market and touchpoint.

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