Direct Digital Media, Pros and Cons for Hotel Industry

Table of contents

1. Introduction 2

2. Facts and definition 2

3. Analysis: Pros and Cons of direct digital marketing for both- service providers and consumers 3

4. Analysis: How service companies are making use of direct digital marketing in order to create a customer relationship 5

5. Conclusion 8

6. List of references 8

1. Introduction

As the world around is more connected than ever before, direct digital marketing presents a new marketing tool to communicate all around the world in a more effective way. The following essay illustrates the facts and definitions of direct digital marketing. Furthermore it analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of it for service providers and also customers and in the end it demonstrates how the hotel industry is using the different tools of direct digital marketing.

2. Facts and definition

When business industries hear the term “direct digital marketing” they often just think of their own website or their “Facebook”- homepage by which they are represented in the web. But there is even more behind it. It is of course about social networking, but also about mobile payment, mobile videos, mobile search, context- aware service and a lot of more things to think about. Considering the facts, there are nowadays more than two billion of internet users worldwide. 500 million of these are “Facebook” users and in average each of these users is watching one YouTube video per day. Statistics also show, that there are about 470 million smart phone devices worldwide, which enforces the growing mobility and information tools people have nowadays. Based on these facts is absolutely necessary to think local, but to act global. And this is possible by using direct digital marketing (Raulabad, 2012).

Furthermore the social media has been generating 3, 483 million dollars revenue and it is expected to grow by 30% by the end 2015. Besides this around 64% of the people in the USA do online shopping on a continuous basis (Raulabad, 2012). These facts show that the world outside is inevitably living a connected lifestyle. This lifestyle represents a huge digital marketing opportunity, especially for the tourism industry, as it is dependent on a global network more than any other industry.

Direct digital marketing can hereby be defined as “the practice of promoting products and services using digital distribution channels, reaching targeted consumers, building iterative relationships with those consumers and having the ability to produce measurable results. Digital Marketing must be targeted, it must be measurable and it must involve