E MARKETING IN THE HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY PROSPECT AND CHALLENGES

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
According to the definition provided by the American Marketing Association (2008), marketing refers to “an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders. In essence, marketing is a consumer-oriented philosophy or way of doing business; companies that are consumer oriented will put consumers’ needs and wants on their top priority. From this perspective, the ultimate goal of marketing is therefore to create and retain profitable customers by satisfying their demands. It is worth noting that the goal of retaining profitable customers is particularly challenging in Asia including Hong Kong. This is because people in this region tend to be more group oriented and the word-of-mouth effects are especially strong. E-Marketing

Hospitality marketing is unique because it deals with the tangible product, like a bed in the hotel or food in the restaurant, but it also deals with the intangible aspects of the hospitality and tourism industry. It is about the experience in a trip and social status it brings eating in a fine-dining restaurant. Hospitality marketing is very critical in the success of any hospitality and tourism product, organization and tourist destination. Proper marketing effort promotes a product or service that fills the needs and wants of the consumers and at the same time, bring profits to the organization or country that features it. E-Marketing

E-marketing is any marketing done online via websites or other online tools and resources. E-Marketing can include paid services while other methods are virtually free. A wide variety of e-Marketing methods are at your disposal, including: direct email, SMS/text messaging, blogs, webpages, banners, videos, images, ads, social media, search engines, and much, much more.
The increasing presence of the Internet in daily lives has resulted in the Internet an essential media in marketing communication. To gain competitive advantage in the demanding tourist market, it is important nowadays for a hotel company to have its own website, promote its products through social networks and mobile applications, use e-mail as a channel of communication with its business partners and customers, and apply all available information-communication technology (ICT). It needs to provide all information for potential clients in one place at any time of day, from anywhere in the world. That can be possible by using innovative ways of communication and by adapting business operations to demanding requirements of the modern tourist market. This imposes the innovation of practices and the implementation of new technologies in business processes. Therefore, there is a need for awareness about the necessity of applying ICT in the hotel business.

Previous studies have highlighted the importance of ICT in the tourism and hospitality industry (Sigala, 2003; Pitoska, 2013). They were mainly focused on the role and importance of websites in the marketing of a tourist destination (Govers, Go, 2004; Wang, 2008; Woodside et al. 2011), the importance of social media for destination marketing organisations (Ružić, Biloš, 2010), and destination choice (Tham et al. 2013) etc. In addition, previous studies cover topics related to the application of e-marketing in hospitality such as the effect of e-marketing on consumer behaviour (Andrlić, Ružić, 2010), the application of e-mail marketing (Dobrača, 2011) and web promotion in the hospitality industry (Ružić et al. 2011). A set of papers are related to website quality in the hotel industry (Law, Cheung, 2006; Panagopoulos et al. 2011; Schmidt et al. 2008). However, “as the theory in the field of e-marketing is still in its infancy and not yet well established, there is a need for having more well-established studies that could be considered as a step towards theory building in the field of e-marketing” (El-Gohary, 2012: 1257). Since there is a lack of publications which deal with a general level of implementation of e-marketing in the hotel industry, it seemed justified to conduct research on the application of e-marketing in the hotel industry and thereby contribute to the study of this issue.

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
Marketing is all about identifying, anticipating and satisfying customers need profitably. Tackling the challenges of e-marketing in Nigeria and being effective with digital marketing has posed a serious challenges for the hospitality industries in Nigeria. The challenges of e-marketing in Nigeria include:
• Understanding the rural customer
• Making the right technology and marketing choices
• Having a compelling proposition for rural customers
• Adequately modeling return on investment from e-marketing.
1.3 OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY
Thus, the objective of this study are stated as follows:
i. To determine the level of e-marketing implementation in the hostility industry.
ii. To examine the benefit of e-marketing in the hospitality industry.
iii. To know the challenges of e-marketing.
1.4 RESEARCH QUESTION
i. What are the benefit of e-marketing in your hotel?
ii. How correct is the internet assertion that e-marketing has helped in widening the knowledge and scope of the staffs?
iii. How relevant is e-marketing to the hotel?

1.5 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
In today’s internet age, building an online presence is imperative for all businesses to be competitive. E-marketing provides businesses with access to mass markets at an affordable price and allows them to undertake a personalized marketing approach. The flexible and cost-effective nature of e-marketing makes it particularly suitable for small businesses.

1.6 SCOPE OF THE STUDY
This research work examine ‘E-marketing in the hospitality industry: prospects and challenges. This study reveals the importance, prospects and challenges of the E-marketing in the hospitality industry. It also highlights that E-marketing is an important tool to improve the hospitality sales and revenue.

1.7 LIMITATION OF THE STUDY
In carrying out this study, a number of constraints were encountered.
Firstly, sufficient data posed hindrance due to shortage of textbooks and journals as the few textbooks available in the library were borrowed and not returned immediately.
Secondly, some copies of the questionnaires were not returned by the respondents. This limited the number of responses which the researcher had hoped to work within the project.