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Introduction
The past decade has seen a paradigm shift in the marketing approaches. With the substantial development of digital marketing tools and formats, traditional marketing methods have suffered a setback. However, the core purpose remained unchanged, which was the need to connect and communicate with customers well to determine their requirements and position the respective brand or company as a potential choice. The use of digital marketing tools has made it possible for hotel brands to connect with their target customer segments in a cost effective manner like never before. While the hotels that made good use of this evolving technology-driven approach have benefitted from a marketing strategy of using both traditional and digital approaches, the hotels that did not find themselves left behind.
The traditional marketing process used to be time taking for capturing customer attention, it was rather simple. Newspapers, Television, Radio, Print Ads, Billboards, etc., were the most popular tools for targeting customers. Hotel bookings could either be direct telephonic or through travel agents. Customers also had limited choices. The offline connection with the audience did produce fruitful results; however, it came at a huge cost and some other disadvantages, because of which all its formats were not wisely used (Gupta, 2019). On the other hand, with the rapid advancement of information technology and high-speed broadband, access to digital media got augmented. The customers became more informed than ever, seeking information through diverse search engines to make their purchasing decisions. Various new digital marketing means opened up which allowed more effective selling through more efficient channels such as social media marketing, mobile applications, search engine optimization, Google ads, online magazines, etc. This resulted in encouraging most businesses to inevitably enter the digital space and gradually adapt to the transforming ways of communication and marketing.
The past few years especially have seen significant growth from traditional to digital marketing and synthesized a new meaning of marketing. Every company has made a great effort to outperform its competitors in the growing era of technology proliferation and social media branding. The Indian hotel industry too witnessed a remarkable change in their marketing strategies for the past decade. According to the Indian Tourism and Hospitality industry report by IBEF (2019), India is one of the most...