If you’re full of creativity and have a collaborative spirit, a hospitality marketing job may be the perfect place for you in the industry. Hospitality companies are always looking for sharp and innovative individuals to work on their marketing teams.
Restaurant groups, hotel chains, cruise lines: all these types of businesses need to market themselves to the public. And you could be just the person they need to craft compelling stories to persuade their customers.
But, first, you need to have the right set of skills.
What are the top skills you need in a hospitality marketing job?
While having a diverse set of skills is always the end goal for any professional, the following skills are the most important for success.
Creativity
This is perhaps the one skill that sets this department apart from other office jobs. To succeed in hospitality marketing you need to have a high level of creativity.
A marketing professional is only as strong as the ideas they generate. You need to be constantly coming up with new and innovative ways to market your company and their services.
People are becoming more and more aware of how much they are targeted by marketing everyday. This means you must be extra creative in your approach in order to cut through the noise and engage your ideal demographic.
Highly creative people are an incredible asset to a company. They can offer a unique perspective or solution to a problem that a less creative person may not be able to.
Research
Marketing isn’t all about coming up with the wildest ideas you can possibly imagine. Creative ambition is great but it needs to be implemented with a well thought out strategy that’s backed up by data.
This is why research is so important in marketing. It will give you solid information that you can then use to create your marketing plan.
Getting feedback from your customers through social media or CRM campaigns will help you understand how you can improve. You should seek to find both qualitative and quantitative data that will help guide you going forward.
Research is also incredibly important to learn what your competitors are up to and any potential gaps in the market that you could exploit.
Communication
Marketing is all about communicating clear messages to your audience.
Your team members, the key stakeholders within your organization, and your target demographic are all different audiences you need to consider.
You need to communicate your ideas clearly when collaborating with fellow team members. You have to pitch your marketing strategies to company leaders with a vested interest in the outcome. And, most importantly of all, you must be able to speak to your customers with engaging and persuasive marketing campaigns.
You can have all the creativity in the world but if you can’t communicate your ideas in a clear and compelling way, they won’t get very far.
Collaboration
Marketing is a corporate team sport. A great marketing campaign doesn’t come together without a group of people working together to execute it. If you want to get far in the field of hospitality marketing you need to have a collaborative spirit at work.
Depending on your role on the team, you may need to collaborate with a number of different people during a project. You may have to coordinate with graphic designers, writers, and video editors by the time you get to the final result.
This collaborative spirit should also extend outside of just the people on your marketing team. If you establish open lines of communication with the other teams in the company, your work will benefit from it. By talking to people in the tech & product, sales, or data analysis departments, you might be able to identify opportunities to work together.
Being able to align visions and collaborate with other teams will help you develop a more holistic approach to your hospitality marketing.
Working in marketing can be incredibly fun for the right type of personality. If you think you’ve got what it takes to succeed in the role, check out the open hospitality marketing jobs available on Hosco today!
