Running paid ads on search engines or social networks will continue to become increasingly expensive in 2025. Coupled with stricter data protection regulations, it is becoming ever more challenging for hotels to reach new guests through these advertising methods. Yet attracting new guests remains essential to ensuring long-term business success. So, how can hotels best respond to this situation?

Lead Generation as an Effective and Cost-Efficient Strategy for Acquiring New Guests

Already widely used in other industries, lead generation is still often an unfamiliar or unclear concept in the hospitality industry. However, the opportunities lead generation offers to hotels are immense:

Lead generation involves collecting contact information from potential guests, such as their name, email address, or interests, through various channels. These collected details are referred to as “leads.” Leads serve as the starting point for ongoing, personalized communication: Potential guests are gradually converted into loyal customers through regular communication with targeted messages. Hoteliers can achieve greater long-term independence from expensive advertising by collecting the contact information of their ideal guests just once and then targeting them with more cost-efficient marketing measures.

<div class="article_quote"><div class="article_quote_contain"><div class="article_quote_quote">"Lead generation is practically tailor-made for the hospitality industry, yet its potential remains largely untapped."</div><div class="article_quote_name u-text-style-main">Christian Schauberger, Hotel Director at Ortner’s Resort, Bad Füssing, Germany</div></div></div>

How Does Lead Generation Work in Practice?

Lead generation across various channels:

• Potential guest contact details can be obtained through lead ads on social media or pop-ups on the hotel’s own website, for example. The selected strategies should seamlessly integrate with existing marketing activities and align with the specific needs of the hotel.

Creating targeted incentives:

• To encourage prospects to share their contact information, it is essential to offer them an incentive of genuine value in return. These incentives can include vouchers, which have proven to be particularly effective.

Turning leads into loyal guests:

• The next step involves converting collected leads into actual bookings, with email marketing playing a central role. Through strategic segmentation, recipients can be grouped based on various criteria, allowing for highly targeted messaging. Personalized emails direct recipients to a landing page, where further information is gathered to further personalize communication. The result? Higher booking rates over the long term and greater recipient satisfaction.

Manually implementing all these steps, however, is a time-intensive and laborious process. This is where specialized marketing automation software comes into play: It enables hotels to automate the lead generation process – from data collection to targeted communication.

ADDITIVE+ Marketing Automation: Achieve Greater Success in Online Marketing Through Targeted Automation

ADDITIVE+ MARKETING AUTOMATION enables data-driven and automated online marketing designed specifically for the hospitality industry. The software solution collects data from multiple channels and enables automated and personalized communication with both potential new guests and existing ones. This approach helps hotels save time and reduce costs while achieving revenue growth through optimized communication and transparent performance analytics for continuous campaign improvement. The lead generation process can also be efficiently automated, giving hotels a long-term competitive advantage with more ideal guests and higher occupancy rates.

If you want to take your online marketing to the next level with lead generation and marketing automation, schedule a free, no-obligation consultation with one of our experts today!