The Hotel Marketer's Playbook: A Guide to Navigating the Marketing Funnel
At a glance
- Report focuses on full-funnel marketing strategies for hotels to connect with spontaneous, adventure-seeking travelers in today's market.
- Emphasizes use of first-party data and customer behaviour analysis to tailor marketing efforts across discovery, booking, and loyalty stages.
- Covers channel strategy from social media and email to SEO and paid advertising, with emphasis on personalization and seamless guest experiences.
- Addresses building lasting loyalty through re-engagement campaigns, consistent brand touchpoints, and turning one-time guests into repeat advocates.
- Designed to help hotel marketers adapt to unpredictable traveller patterns and leverage multi-channel touchpoints throughout the customer journey.
What the report covers
Sojern's playbook is a strategic guide for hotel marketers seeking to optimise the full customer journey from initial awareness through post-stay advocacy. The report addresses how to build unified marketing strategies using first-party data and multi-channel approaches to engage increasingly spontaneous travellers. Published by Sojern, a travel marketing platform, it targets hotel operators and chains globally, focusing on practical tactics for direct bookings, loyalty programmes, and personalised guest experiences in an evolving cookieless and privacy-conscious marketing environment.
Key findings
Travellers today demonstrate greater spontaneity and enthusiasm for exploring new destinations, creating opportunity for hotels to refine marketing funnel approaches. The report identifies this shift in traveller behaviour as a driver for hotels to adopt full-funnel strategies that meet guests at every decision stage, from initial inspiration through post-stay engagement.
First-party data and customer behaviour analysis form the foundation of effective hotel marketing. By analysing booking patterns, preferences, and customer behaviour, marketers can tailor messaging and channel strategy to individual traveller segments, moving beyond generic campaigns toward personalized experiences that resonate at each funnel stage.
Multi-channel marketing requires strategic focus across social media, email, SEO, and paid advertising, with messaging and channel selection varying by funnel stage. The playbook emphasizes that different channels serve different purposes: some drive discovery and awareness, while others convert or re-engage existing customers.
Building guest loyalty extends beyond the initial booking and stay. The report stresses that creating memorable experiences, implementing loyalty programmes, and maintaining consistent brand touchpoints throughout the guest journey turns transactional transactions into lasting relationships, encouraging repeat bookings and guest advocacy.
Seamless, omnichannel experiences require coordinated marketing efforts across all traveller touchpoints from website browsing through lobby arrival and beyond. The playbook advocates for treating the entire guest journey as interconnected, ensuring marketing remains top-of-mind and aligned across stages to maximise conversion and retention.
Key numbers
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Report availability | Free download |
Figures as published in the source; forecasts and survey results are labelled as such in the note.
Why it matters
DMOs & destinations
Destination marketing organisations can leverage full-funnel strategies to inspire travellers and drive visitor traffic during the awareness and consideration phases. Understanding how to position destinations across social, email, and paid channels using traveller behaviour data strengthens visitor acquisition and advocacy.
Hotels & hospitality
Hotels face pressure to drive direct bookings and build repeat guest loyalty as commission-based distribution channels prove costly. The playbook provides actionable tactics for using first-party data and multi-channel marketing to convert browsers into bookers and one-time guests into lifelong advocates, directly supporting revenue and margin goals.
Travel tech & distribution
Travel marketing platforms and distribution partners benefit from understanding how hotels prioritise channels and data sources in decision-making. The report highlights demand for first-party data solutions, AI-driven personalisation, and cookieless audience targeting—key opportunities for martech vendors serving the hospitality sector.
Methodology and limits
This brief is based on the publicly available summary and landing page only; the full report content is gated behind a free email registration form and not included in the source text. Sojern, a travel marketing and data platform, published the playbook as a guide combining industry practice with their platform perspective. The summary does not provide quantitative research methodology, survey sample size, or specific data sources. Figures and empirical findings from the full report are not accessible in this extraction.
Official source
The report is © Sojern. This brief is an original editorial summary by TourismIntel — it quotes only figures published in the source and never reproduces the document.
Check the official statistics on Pulse
Related reports
A joint study by Mindtrip, Sabre, Sojern and MMGY Travel Intelligence reveals a significant gap between traveller AI adoption and destination marketing organisation readiness.
Sojern's 'Unlocking Revenue: How Hoteliers Build Profitable Guest Relationships' examines first-party data strategies and their impact on hotel profitability and guest experience.
Sojern's guide for hoteliers addresses website optimisation as a driver of direct bookings and profitability.
Sojern's Guide to Digital Marketing for Tours, Activities, & Attractions addresses the unique marketing challenges facing experience operators in an increasingly digital travel marketplace.