Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 7016: The Effectiveness of Marketing Communication and Importance of Its Evaluation in an Online Environment (Sustainability)

Online marketing communication covers a wide area and thus promotes an extensive reach of advertising to a broad audience. Hotels can achieve certain goals through online communication, mainly an increase of hotel awareness; an improvement of their image; and an increase in the level of customer satisfaction and trust, or brand loyalty. Measurement of the effectiveness of communication tools in the online environment is still a challenge, whether in the academic world or in the business world, mainly due to the complexity of this process. The main objective of this paper is to propose a methodology for implementing an indicator suitable for the evaluation of the effectiveness of online communication activities in the Slovak hotel industry. It uses analysis of the current usage of online marketing communication activities from the perspective of hotel service providers. The methodology should be applicable to support decision-making and actively support the sustainable development of hotels. In order to achieve the objective of the paper, the authors conducted a marketing survey focused on online marketing communication by Slovakian hotels to determine their use and to map the current state or methods of evaluating their effectiveness. Results of the research suggest that hotels in Slovakia perceive evaluating marketing communications online as being important, regardless of the size, length of operation, budget, and class of the hotel. They prefer financial metrics because they are a de facto manifestation of the traditional approach towards investment evaluation. The results also showed that return on investment is the most common metric for evaluating the investments of online communication activities, and that respondents expressed the highest level of confidence in this metric as well. In line with the results, we have proposed return on investment (ROI) as the most appropriate metric applicable in evaluation of the effectiveness of online communication tools.