Hospitality and Tourism Program

If you’re in the Pickens Technical College Marketing, Hospitality, and Tourism program, you’re learning the finer points of marketing tourism and hospitality services to interested customers. Once you’ve mastered the basics of providing top-notch hospitality services, you can develop marketing plans, which is the name of the game in the hospitality and tourism industry these days (or any day). Pickens’ course specifically introduces you to marketing strategies geared towards several different types of hospitality features, such as hotels, restaurants, clubs, and more.

You’re being grounded in the firm lessons of hospitality management and marketing, but don’t expect to stop learning and adapting once you graduate from Pickens. You’ll need to change on the fly to meet shifting market demands and customers. Social media is taking a larger role in hospitality advertising, and marketers are utilizing new features to change up the hospitality marketing game.

With 2019 in full swing, here are a few new wrinkles social media is introducing to hospitality marketing and advertising:

Video Scheduling on Instagram

Toward the end of 2018, Instagram updated its post scheduling feature to allow users to schedule video posts as well as images. The use of video is no longer a secret way to engage potential customers and draw eyeballs, but planning and scheduling video posts on Instagram will be a game-changer for hotel advertisers and other hospitality companies. This will allow marketers to plan to get their videos posted at peak times without dropping everything.

YouTube Updating Ads in Response to Shifting User Patterns

YouTube is rolling out a few new advertising changes this year. First, it’s testing two back-to-back stacked ads in its videos, leading to fewer commercial breaks and users sticking around to watch the full video—and all its advertisements. Second, YouTube is adding the ability for advertisers to target television screens with ad campaigns, as more users are viewing YouTube videos on game consoles or other TV devices. Third, there will be more ad placements on YouTube’s home screen, increasing the opportunity for hospitality marketers to reach users.

YouTube Creates Its Own ‘Stories’

Last year, Facebook and Instagram attempted to grab onto the popularity of apps like Snapchat that allow their users to post ‘stories,’ or pictures or short videos meant to quickly show events in real-time that disappear after a set time. This year, YouTube is joining the Stories revolution by adding its own YouTube Stories, which will allow users to publicly respond to comments with photos and videos to keep the conversation between marketers and customers going.

These are a few small tweaks that could make a huge difference in your marketing strategy by the time you graduate from Pickens’ Hospitality and Tourism program and start working on drawing in customers. The social media marketing sphere is hugely profitable to all social media companies, so adapting to their users’ needs is key. It’s up to you to take advantage of these new features to drive your marketing efforts forward.