“Hospitality needs a new kind of marketer.”

As marketers, we live inside digital platforms. Our technical acumen must be on-point.

Hospitality marketing is a real, technical skill. I would say we’re more like marketing technicians than traditional marketers these days.

The number of tools and platforms and technologies that hospitality marketers have to learn (i.e. become experts in) has become challenging to say the least.

It’s a challenge in hiring and training creatives who want to be marketers.

It’s a challenge for traditional marketers who are looking to transition to a career in hospitality.

Often expectations or past experiences simply don’t align with what we actually do each single day.

When I’m hiring, I tell candidates “This job is not just about posting pretty pictures, doing photoshoots or coming up with cute content. You need to also understand the technical side of every platform to create engaging content. And you've got to understand the analytics of every platform to gauge effectiveness."

I want the people I hire to be clear-eyed about that.

One day, you’re logging in and out of ten different extranets to update restaurant hours.

The next day, you’re reverse engineering the customer journey, looking at the platforms, apps and web technologies that travelers are using, trying to understand how we as marketers can leverage these same tools to influence consumer behavior.

If you're not deeply in tune with digital trends and the technology, you can't build a meaningful marketing strategy. It's as simple as that.

The hospitality industry (myself included) needs to do a better job of hiring and developing this kind of digital hospitality marketer. We need to require digital acumen, build in continuing education courses for the technical skills and reward creativity. It’s a package.