Community management is the practice of building communities for your customers, fans, and even employees. It involves creating an authentic and engaging environment surrounding your brand. It is the process of diving deep into your audience, interacting with them directly, and bringing them together so they can interact with each other. Along the way, you’ll then be able to build loyalty and customer satisfaction.
How can community management increase your hospitality bookings?
Below are a few ways of how to nurture and engage with your community online, through community management, and then make exclusive packages just for your clients.
Gaining valuable insight into your target audience
One of the most important benefits of community management for the hospitality industry is that you gain valuable insight into your target audience. Market research can only take you so far-building a community on your social media channels can help you find out what your guests like, what they don’t like, what you can improve on, and what you’re already doing well.
Customer service
Critical to community management and business overall, is the ability to provide good customer service. You have to make sure that your customers can reach you, especially when faced with a challenge or crisis. One of the most convenient channels for your customers to reach out to you is social media. Ensuring that your customers can reach you and that you have community managers to assist them when they need it is critical to good customer service. This form of community management helps you stay connected, contactable, and transparent with your customers.
Monitoring
If you want to get real, honest feedback from your customers, the only thing you need to do is take a look at your social pages. Community management is a sure-fire way to keep on top of what your customers are saying and ensure that your services meet the needs of your target market and adapt and change as those needs change. And if something does go wrong, such as a faulty run, having a community manager checking your account on a daily or hourly basis will make sure things don’t escalate. When you respond to your customer’s reviews, whether positive or negative, customers will feel valued and listened to, and they will therefore be willing to make more bookings.
Builds equity and brand advocacy
Keeping your brand’s current users and customer base engaged is arguably just as important, if not more than acquiring new ones. Like many aspects of life, the more time or effort an individual invests in a product or service, the more they come to value it. The most difficult accomplishment to achieve in the brand equity pyramid is resonance, and the only way it can be achieved is by ensuring your customers have formed a deep psychological bond with your brand. Resonance is a term used to refer to building deep customer relationships. This is the ultimate level of the pyramid, which every company tries to achieve. Here the focus is on building strong relationships with the customers, thereby ensuring repeated purchases and creating brand loyalty.
Dedicated community manager
A community manager has more responsibility than just replying to comments – they’re a customer service representative, an expert, and a friend. On top of this, they’re expected to be timely and always on-brand. A dedicated community manager will help in gaining insights into your target audience, advancing customer service, as well as building equity and brand advocacy. A dedicated community manager not only improves your brand’s existing image, but they can also create active outreach campaigns to get your services in front of more people. The community manager’s strong communication skills and sense of creativity will help you engage new audiences through creative content and innovative marketing campaigns.
Your social media marketing strategy might be great, but it isn’t complete without building and maintaining strong relationships with your customers. Your online platforms should be a healthy space for your clients to come for support if you want to grow and keep your audience. At Hearts Agency, we are a niche community management agency that caters to your customer needs with a laser-sharp focus. Having good customer service will effectively and efficiently increase your hospitality bookings. Contact us today for more information, questions, and suggestions.