What do you think goes into someone’s decision to visit your hotel? Pricing is probably a notable factor. Location, customer service, and reviews from others who’ve stayed with you also likely contribute to the decision.
But what about your hotel’s commitment to ethics? Believe it or not, many potential customers become actual customers because your ethical values, morals, and social responsibility efforts align with their own.
Hoteliers must promote their commitment to ethical action if they want to attract modern customers and keep them coming back. The following tips will help you honestly and believably advertise your hotel’s commitment to ethics.
Define what your hotel stands behind
Recent corporate social responsibility statistics reveal, “77% of consumers are motivated to purchase from companies committed to making the world a better place, while 73% of investors state that efforts to improve the environment and society contribute to their investment decisions.”
Being committed to ethics and improving the world can benefit your hotel by attracting solid investors and repeat customers. But it starts with defining precisely what your hotel stands behind.
Document your hotel’s mission, vision, and ethical values. Ensure they align with your customers’ values, goals, and dreams. Then, post them everywhere for your internal teams, and ensure your employees understand them and can communicate them to customers.
Detail your sustainability and corporate responsibility initiatives as well. You want everything that communicates your commitment to ethics written down or digitally documented so you can highlight it well in your marketing campaigns.
It’s also essential to not just talk about what your hotel stands behind but to actually show that commitment in your everyday business operations.
Live by your hotel’s commitment to ethics
Creating a document detailing your ethical values, sustainability efforts, and social responsibility commitments is easy. But are you and your employees exercising that commitment in your day-to-day operations?
Your hotel’s commitment to ethics can’t just be a poster on the wall in the breakroom. Instead, you and your team should be walking, talking billboards for your hotel’s ethical, moral, and social values.
Living by your hotel’s commitment to ethics daily could be as small as committing to recycling and as big as volunteering to lead a new social responsibility effort. Just ensure ethics is embedded in your daily routine.
You should also use sustainability data in your marketing.
Use sustainability data in your marketing
As mentioned above, it’s easy to shout your commitment to ethics and principles that make the world better, but it’s hard to get people to believe you. Unless you can show it. One of the best ways to do that is through sustainability data.
You can show your dedication to ethics and sustainability by using numbers and quantifiable figures in your marketing campaigns that prove you’re doing what you say. You can use digital methods to track and enhance your corporate sustainability goals and measures. For example, you can use artificial intelligence solutions to collect real-time data on how much energy you consume, the waste you’re producing, or the water you’re wasting.
You can then honor your commitment to ethics by being transparent about these numbers in your marketing material to show how you’re improving and what still needs to be done.
Ensure your marketing tactics are ethical
The last thing you want to do is advertise your hotel’s commitment to ethics with unethical marketing tactics. Instead, your commitment to ethics should extend to your messaging in your marketing materials, your marketing channels, and the tactics you choose to experiment with.
For instance, let’s say you decide to partner with an influencer to spread awareness about a sustainability initiative you recently launched. If later you find out that the influencer isn’t at all committed to sustainability, the best course of action is to cease the partnership because their values don’t align with yours.
Everything you communicate to your customers about your commitment to ethics, and anything else about your hotel, should be 100% true too. Ultimately, it’s about ensuring that your marketing methods are just as ethical as everything else in your hotel.
Create exceptional content for social media
Social media is one of the most potent marketing channels for any hotel. In particular, Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok are generating some of the best digital marketing results hoteliers have ever seen.
As you use these platforms for the rest of your marketing efforts, use them to advertise your hotel’s commitment to ethics, sustainability, and social initiatives too.
For instance, if your hotel is in an LGBTQ+ friendly area, market that in your creative content to ensure this crowd visits your hotel frequently. Understand interests and passions in this community so that you can make them a part of your hotel’s foundation and further your efforts to attract LGBTQ+ vacationers.
Promote your social responsibility measures, diversity and inclusion initiatives, employee treatment, and ethical values through original, interactive content on your social media platforms. Livestreams, infographics, polls, quizzes, and videos are great to start with.
Conclusion
Advertising your hotel’s commitment to ethics isn’t as challenging as it may seem. The first steps are defining what your hotel stands for and showing those commitments in your day-to-day operations.
Then, create exceptional social media content to communicate your ethical values to your customers, use sustainability data in those materials, and ensure you’re marketing tactics are ethical in and of themselves.
About the author
Noah Rue is a content writer fascinated with the intersection between global health, personal wellness, and modern technology. When he isn’t searching out his next great writing opportunity, Noah likes to shut off his devices and head to the mountains to disconnect.
