What Worked in 2015 Marketing Doesn't Work Today

Digital marketing is undergoing a revolution in hospitality.

What worked in 2015 doesn’t work today.

But most hotels are still operating like it does…

The way it used to work

A few years ago, you could win purely with the technical side of digital marketing – things like audience building and targeting.

Back in 2015, we were all posting still photos on Instagram. You could get away with a couple pieces of mediocre creative and good targeting because not as many people were running ads on social media.

The leverage was in the tactics. Who you targeted, how you set up your campaigns, and the rest of the button-clicking on the Meta dashboard determined whether your digital marketing budget was well used.

Today? None of that is the real needle-mover.

What changed

The content world is so much more competitive today.

And the result of this is creative is everything.

A few years ago, audience building and selecting was a lot more important than it is today relative to the creative.

But today, the highest leverage thing you can do is to invest in good content. And a lot of it.

Good content allows you to test a ton of different ads. It allows you to have better returns on your ad spend – stuff that does well organically usually can convert well into paid content.

The reality is that none of this stuff is new. DTC has been following this playbook for years.

But it certainly is new to most hotels.

The budget allocation problem

Let’s break this down:

Your digital ads agency – managing campaigns. Technician.

Your PR firm – $5K/month for a couple placements. Manager.

Your director of marketing – coordinating all these vendors. Manager.

Your social media manager – managing the account but not creating viral content. Manager.

These are not content creators.

What you’re not spending on: the creative. The content creation. The content creators.

Literally, the videography. The script. The pre-production. The post-production. Everything that goes into the creative asset.

That’s where you should be investing.

Because you can leverage that content across all these other areas. Your ads perform better. Your organic social drives awareness. Your PR gets amplified.

But it all starts with the content.

The disconnect is that without the content piece, none of those technicians and managers can do their job optimally.

If you don’t have good content, good storytelling, and good creative, you’ll simply be drowning in a sea of better content that’s competing for attention.

The technicians and managers are important and necessary.

But today, good content is the differentiator.

What we learned building Onera

When we started Onera, we tried to hire a traditional hotel marketing agency to run our social media.

And what did they do?

Sent a junior employee once a quarter with an iPhone to capture content.

That was it.

So in 2023, we stopped outsourcing and built the team ourselves. Full-time videographers. Editors. Copywriters. Creative associates.

We treated content like the business development tool it actually is.

The result was 80-85% direct bookings. Almost exclusively through organic social media marketing.

Why this matters

When you drive bookings through your own content, three things happen:

You own the customer relationship from beginning to end. Not the OTA.

You save 15%+ on OTA commission fees.

You reach less price-sensitive guests. Someone who discovers you on Instagram isn’t price shopping. They’re not anchored to a specific price point like they would be on an OTA where they’re seeing you stacked against 10 other options.

If they can afford it and they want to stay there, they book.

The simple 3-step strategy

1. Create organic content for awareness. Post consistently. High-quality short-form video.

2. Test hundreds of different pieces of content every month in Trials. Move over the winners to main grid.

3. Then take the pieces of content with the most organic engagement, re-purpose them into ads and spend money on conversions.

That’s it.

Simple. But very few hotels are doing this.

The bottom line

Hotels often see social media and content as a checkbox. Something you do because you’re supposed to.

Not as a fundamental driver of revenue and awareness.

Digital marketing has changed.

We’re not posting still photos anymore. We’re not winning with targeting tricks.

The leverage is in creative now. And that requires content budgets, creative specialists, and time to optimize.

Hotels that figure this out will crush the competition through demand generation on social media.

Hotels that don’t will keep spending money on the same vendors doing the same tactics that worked in 2015.

It’s time to wake up to what works in 2026.