For hospitality businesses like hotels, resorts and venues, building strong community connections has become critical to success. With increasing competition, dependence on seasonal visitor spikes and the constant need to drive repeat business, community management strategies that foster local engagement can provide a key lifeline.
From supporting staff loyalty and retention to using social media community management to better connect with customers, the voices of the community can be make-or-break for hospitality brands fighting to stand out. At Creatives On Call, our over 1,300 hospitality marketing experts understand the importance of community management in this industry. When you work with us, you’ll get on-demand access to community management experts and strategists who can help you increase local engagement through customized approaches.
The Challenges Driving Community’s Emerging Importance
Hospitality has never been an easy business. The sector faces inherent volatility from changes in travel trends, seasonality and external events beyond its control. Specific challenges have pushed brands to value community connections even more, including:
- Booms & busts: Travel hot spots go through major highs and lows in visitation week-to-week and month-to-month based on seasonal shifts, holidays and events. Smooth year-long revenue is nearly impossible without community support filling the gaps.
- An experiential arms race: As competition increases, brands pour more into amenities and on-site activities to capture interest. This drives massive overhead. Community partners can provide this kind of value through public events, partnered giveaways and more without the same costs. For example, a spa may partner with a local ice cream shop to provide free ice cream for visitors on a hot summer day as part of a seasonal promotion.
- Difficulty building loyalty: With so many hospitality options at their fingertips, visitors jump freely between brands. Community partners and local residents become powerful loyalists, which directs referrals and repeat visits.
Tightening bonds with community members has emerged as an accessible, scalable solution for hospitality businesses looking to make a name in the industry. With the help of Creatives On Call, you can create and implement a tailored community-oriented strategy that drives business and establishes you as a trusted local name in hospitality and leisure.
Defining Hospitality’s Community Management Opportunity
At its core, hospitality community management refers to the ongoing nurturing of relationships between hotels/venues and key community groups like residents, event partners, vendors, municipalities and media.
This provides brands with grassroots support filling rooms during slow periods, amplifying awareness, contributing unique local offerings and serving as vocal brand champions online and off. Meanwhile, thoughtful community participation allows hospitality businesses to give back and aid the long-term economic health of their home cities.
Here are some concrete examples of community management in action:
- Partnering with the local museum on a quarterly basis to host public events offering exclusive hotel packages and museum access. This raises brand exposure while supporting the arts.
- Implementing a community support program for hotel employees facing hardship, including financial grants, transportation aid and internal donation drives. This increases staff retention and goodwill.
- Making contractual commitments to source set percentages of food and beverage inventory each month from local minority-owned farms and breweries. This supports regional businesses.
- Providing free monthly meeting space for community groups like youth orchestras, small business associations and veterans groups. This gives back to neighborhood partners.
- Working closely with convention and visitors bureaus on cross-promotions of the destination and showcasing unique location attractions that integrate hotel amenities. This benefits tourism marketing efforts.
The most effective community initiatives provide value to the hospitality brand through increased affinity and support, as well as local partners via economic assistance, resources and voice. There are many creative ways to make community central to ongoing strategy across focus areas. Partnering with our team ensures your community initiatives remain the key focus in your efforts, whether you want to create a display for a local convention or draft a contract to partner with a local restaurant. We’ll keep you organized and focused on your goal: to form deeper bonds with the local community.
Connecting the Marketing Impact of Community Management
While community-geared initiatives have their own upside, they also fuel wider hospitality marketing and growth efforts enormously. The connections are impossible to ignore for marketing leaders in the sector looking to cast a wider, more cost-efficient net.
Consider these areas where strategic community participation directly enables marketing success:
- More cost-effective reach: Local partnerships, event co-hosting, municipality collaborations and more efficiently increase brand touchpoints and exposure at marginal extra spend versus paying only for owned advertising channels.
- Customer insight mining: Getting to know residents, fans and community personalities through direct engagement provides hospitality brands with incredible first-party data and behavioral understanding.
- Growth of brand identity: Supporting local partners like artists, suppliers, nonprofits and more cements an authentic, differentiated identity and set of values visitors emotionally connect with.
- Content generation engine: From visuals to stories and local color, community activity supplies a steady stream of compelling owned media content that saves creative costs. Community-centric stories are great for social media platforms and provide a relatable way to interact with visitors.
- Booking accelerator & safety net: Finally, the referrals, loyalty and word-of-mouth that community members drive often result in direct bookings and sustained base revenue during slow periods.
Crafting a Comprehensive Community Strategy
While single one-off community sponsorships or donations have some effect, the biggest results come through coordinated, strategic programming over months and years. Creatives On Call believes in the power of ongoing marketing and creative work, and our hospitality experts can establish long-term relationships with your team to craft a community strategy that makes an impact for years to come.
Let’s explore these three examples of how hospitality businesses can invest in their communities long-term.
Ongoing Partnerships
These partnerships involve scheduled, repeated collaboration with established local entities in areas like events, attractions, chambers of commerce, tourism boards and more. Benefits include:
- Increased brand exposure/affinity through consistent co-marketing efforts.
- Early insight into upcoming happenings and opportunities.
- Resource pooling for bigger community programming.
Example: Partnering quarterly with the local art museum, comedy club and farmer’s market venue to host rotating community-driven events offering exclusive hotel packages and access
Key performance indicator (KPI): Brand familiarity, message reach
Community Hiring & Staff Outreach
Prioritizing local hiring, fundraisers that support staff causes, and initiatives that collect input from personnel nurture a culture where retention thrives. Happy staff become genuine brand advocates. Results include:
- Lower turnover costs.
- Enhanced talent draw for future openings.
- More authentic brand storytelling.
Example: Creating a community support program for employees facing hardship, including financial grants, transportation assistance and in-hotel donation drives
KPI: Internal utilization, staff retention
Ongoing Community Builders
These are fixed programs for tourism partners, vendors, residents and more that cement a brand’s role as an economic anchor. Outcomes range from supplier diversity to resident loyalty efforts like:
- Sourcing from local minority-owned businesses.
- Providing community public meeting space.
- Launching membership rewards programs for locals.
Example: Making contractual commitments to source set percentages of meat, produce and beverage inventory from regional regenerative farms
KPI: Local spend percentage, loyalty member sign-ups
While these examples provide templates, hospitality brands seeking maximum community results must tailor programming to match their region’s cultures and needs.
Now let’s discuss specific activation tactics to build community connections across these three areas.
Top Hospitality Community Management Tactics To Adopt
Co-Create Destination Events
Identify calendars of existing events drawing visitors or large local crowds. Reach out to organize and offer the hospitality brand as an event co-host, sponsor or affiliated location. This rapidly raises brand exposure and affinity.
Formalize Local Partnerships
Pursue ongoing partnerships with chambers, convention and visitors bureaus (CVBs), key venues, tourism agencies and influencers. Shape collaborations around co-promotions and packaged offerings for high-potential stay segments.
Support Community Causes
Research causes and nonprofits valued by locals and visitors alike. Get staff involved in serving as leaders or volunteers for lead organizations. Drive donations, fundraising assistance, grants and in-kind support.
Challenge Staff To Give Back
Rally staff to source grassroots community initiatives in need of assistance. Empower them to take charge of volunteering, advise organizations or innovate event promotions on the brand’s behalf. This builds serious culture and retention.
Localize Amenities & Offerings
Work with neighborhood artists, designers, farmers and creatives to infuse community-centric touches throughout the hospitality experience — from decor to menus. These authentic flourishes delight guests and cement bonds.
Create Community Loyalty Rewards
Design special tiers of loyalty programs, packages and perks tailored specifically to win over and reward locals. Feature partners they know and love while making membership prestigious.
Give Community Causes the Spotlight
Don’t just provide financial support to community groups. Co-market their events through owned channels. Give them the mic to speak at brand happenings. Shine a spotlight on their work at every chance.
Publicize Community Metrics
Collect data on the economic value the brand drives for local vendors, partners and municipal taxes. Feature these numbers in owned media and collateral. Quantify the brand’s regional impact and cement community investment credibility.
Keep Community Efforts Consistent
Avoid “random acts of community support.” Maintain steady programming month-to-month. Consistency and commitment build trust and maximize local affinity over time.
Wherever you see your brand having the most impact, Creatives On Call can help you get your initiatives off the ground. Our hospitality data experts can work with you to publicize community metrics, or our seasoned strategists can develop a local rewards program for your visitors. Let us put our decades of experience to work for you.
Combining Creative Solutions for Added Community Impact
For many hospitality leaders, designing and activating a comprehensive community strategy represents uncharted territory. More used to working with traditional marketing agencies, they now face integrating community consulting, digital engagement tools, data analytics and employee management systems.
Thankfully, marketing and creative consultancies like Creatives On Call make launching a winning community approach more seamless through personalized, scalable solutions that hospitality brands can tap into on demand.
Wherever resource or capability gaps emerge in the community-building process, a team of marketing and creative experts at Creatives On Call stand ready to fill them. Our teams feature talent like:
- Copywriters: Developing partnership frameworks and collateral for local events/sentiment tracking surveys and tools like hospitality email marketing campaigns.
- Community managers: Planning grassroots partner/staff outreach initiatives.
- Social media managers: Creating and posting social media content designed to reach your community with messages that leave an impression.
- User interface (UI)/user experience (UX) designers: Crafting localization into brand apps/member portals.
- Data analysts: Quantifying hospitality’s economic impact on vendors and municipalities.
On top of talent, our proprietary engagement technology allows for gathering key community insights, mobilizing advocacy initiatives and reporting on impacts across channels in real-time. Whether you’re launching a single seasonal community campaign or requiring an embedded team for ongoing community build, Creatives On Call can build a solution tailored to your needs.
Launch a Community Management Strategy With Creatives On Call
Connect With Creatives On Call
Community engagement is a space that hospitality brands must master by converting locals into fans, partners into allies, and staff into loyalists. But for many marketing leaders, making this shift will demand outside help and expertise.
As an industry-leading marketing and creative consultancy, Creatives On Call specializes in helping businesses solve marketing and communications challenges. From copywriting for hospitality to marketing campaigns centered around solidifying your brand, our services span far and wide to deliver the tools you need to excel in your industry.
While we believe marketing should be an ongoing, coordinated effort, we can also connect you with hospitality experts for single projects. Or, using our team of creative consultants, we can build your dream team for hospitality marketing. Let us put our creative skills to work for your brand.
Contact us today to get started.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the most important community groups for hotels to partner with?
Some valuable community partners for hospitality are CVBs, chambers of commerce, key cultural institutions like museums, influential nonprofits, and organizers of large regional events or festivals. These entities have big microphones for increasing brand visibility and affinity.
What is an example of a creative way for resorts to give back to their community?
One creative way resorts can give back is through public fundraising drives. For example, resort guests could be encouraged to donate to specific community causes with every booking, enabling the resort to amass meaningful donations. Groupings of on-site cottages or rooms could even “adopt” a specific cause to rally behind. This engages visitors in supporting the location they travel to.
