Marketing Your Hotel Online – A Checklist

The internet has opened up a whole new world of marketing opportunities for hotels and businesses in the travel and tourism industry. Traditional ways of marketing hotels are no more effective when your aim is to attract visitors from across the world.

Smart hotel marketers have already chosen internet as their preferred marketing medium. The scalability, cost-effectiveness and faster execution of ideas make the internet just perfect for marketing hotels.

If your hotel business hasn’t taken the online leap yet, this is the time to do so. Let us explain how you can leverage the internet medium in the best possible manner:

Improved website design:

Your hotel’s website often creates the first impression of your property to a potential visitor. So it is important that you pull out all stops to ensure that the visitor develops a favorable attitude towards your hotel. This means that your website must have meaningful content, should load fast, have excellent navigation, updated video and photo galleries and even interactive features like virtual tour and location map. Make sure your website layout is uncluttered, elegant and content rich.

Go mobile:

Mobile device adoption is clearly on the rise and it is vital that your website is also responsive to mobile and tablet devices. Your mobile website needs to be straightforward, so that the most important information is displayed right at the top and unnecessary clutter is avoided. Responsive Web Design technology may be used to ensure that an optimal viewing experience across a wide range of devices like desktops, smartphones and tablets. What’s more, even Google recommends responsive websites.

Ride the social media wave:

The social media movement is here to stay and your hotel can reap all its benefit by establishing a powerful presence on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google + and YouTube. For example, you can share pictures of your hotel on your hotel’s Pinterest channel which will get repinned by your followers and thus introduce your hotel to more potential visitors. Reputation management is an important factor to be kept in mind while engaging via social media channels.  By creating an active social media campaign on Facebook and Twitter, you can keep people aware of happenings in your hotel and in your region.

Adopt paid advertising:

If you have the marketing budget or need quick results, don’t forget to include well conceived and positioned paid ads in your online media campaign. Digital advertising services like Google Ads and Facebook Ads offer a variety of advantages like precise targeting and estimation capabilities that traditional ads do not offer. For example, with Google Ads, you can ensure that your ads are displayed at those places where they are likely to be seen by the very people they are targeted at. For example, if your hotel has a golf course, Google can display your ads in websites, blogs and forums that discuss golf, thereby bringing your hotel in front of a targeted crowd.

Digital advertising also offers the facility of re-targeting, i.e., advertising to a consumer who has shown some sort of engagement with the brand, especially when the previous case did not result in a conversion. This way, it becomes possible to leverage on the earlier marketing that took the consumer to the previous brand’s site in the first place and thus, increase chances of a future conversion taking place.

Present yourself on popular travel portals:

Make sure that your hotel is listed on popular travel portals like TripAdvisor, Expedia, Booking.com, etc. Not only does this help improve your visibility to visitors from across the world, it also helps you tap into the traffic generated by these portals, especially if your hotel is one of the major accommodation facilities in your area.

Make sure your hotel is also listed in Google Hotels, which is currently being majorly promoted by Google.

If your hotel is known for its restaurants, make sure they are listed on leading restaurant review sites like Yelp.

Reviews:

For every hotel, getting positive reviews on travel portals and social channels is extremely important. Make sure you take every effort in getting positive, descriptive feedback from your customers. You can vastly improve your review count with simple steps like sending a thank you note to the customer with direct links to the review pages and specifically requesting them to post their experience.

Make sure to check back regularly on your review pages and respond to any negative comments quickly and compassionately.

Local optimization:

When Google detects that your search query carries local intent, it provides a list of business listings relating to your query that are located near you. For example, if you search for “hotels in New York”, Google will give you business listings of popular hotels in New York along with their NPA (name, phone number and address).  It is important that you optimize local search to the fullest extent as it gives you a significant advantage over other bigger hotels. Let’s put it like this- the bigger hotels may have a bigger website and the best SEO tactics in place, but your location will give you the edge that you need to make sure that the user zeroes in on your hotel.

Video optimization:

In order to improve your site’s visibility online, you can upload videos of your hotel and its offerings to your site which not only give your potential visitors a better idea of the overall décor of your hotel and the services offered, but also help bring more visitors to your site by the use of appropriate SEO tactics. For example, you can upload a few videos to YouTube and attach a few links to your hotel’s website. This way, if the user likes what he sees in the video, he can conveniently click on the link and be taken to your website.

In addition, if your hotel is based in a city that is a popular tourist spot, you can take videos of the tourist attractions in your city and upload them to your hotel website, thus promoting your hotel indirectly.

If your website includes streaming videos, don’t forget to employ effective video optimization tactics, including having a video sitemap.

E-commerce integration:

Make sure to make the online booking facility in your hotel website simple, seamless and secure. Online booking is a very convenient way for visitors to book their stay with minimum effort on their part. A large chunk of hotel bookings nowadays is made online and you need to ensure that you don’t lose out on this promising opportunity to increase hotel occupancy.

Marketing through external blogs:

External blog marketing can be of many types: either you place ads on blogs relevant to your subject, or you could write guest posts on other influential travel blogs. From a hotel’s point of view, it makes sense to place ads for your hotel on popular hotel blogs. As a respected hotelier, you can even offer to write a guest post on a popular hotel blog in which you may give your views about the hospitality industry. While writing your guest post, don’t forget to include a link to your hotel website! You can also reach out to popular bloggers to mention or review your hotel on their blogs. An approval by a respected and popular blogger can translate into a significantly higher number of visitors.

Email marketing:

Creating a robust email database of your customers is an excellent way to stay in touch with them and let them know about new offers at your hotel. Another excellent tactic would be to send them creatively designed e-cards on special occasions like birthday, anniversary or during religious festivals.

Conclusion:

The above are some of the tactics that will go a great way in enhancing your hotel’s online presence. What is important is to use the internet medium effectively by keeping your audience consistently engaged in a creative, honest way. This will not just improve your hotel’s reputation online, but encourage visitors to recommend your hotel to their peers.

If you have any questions or comments, please do share it with us. We also encourage you to check our website design services for hotels.