The importance of having the right hotel marketing strategies is difficult to overstate, as it is a key part of launching a hotel, optimizing the number of bookings you generate, building brand awareness, and managing your reputation. In this article, you will learn more about some of the essential strategies to adopt at all times.
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15 The Most Important Distribution Channel: Your hotel Website 🙂
Adopting the right hotel marketing strategy in the right situation is crucial, but some strategies are applicable at all times, too. Below, you will see a breakdown of some “all-time” hotel marketing strategies and strategies that respond to the coronavirus pandemic and associated changes to consumer behavior.
1. Bring Your Hotel Website Into 2024
In addition to having an appealing and functional website, one of the most critical hotel marketing strategies is ensuring your website is in keeping with modern user expectations. In particular, you must ensure your website loads quickly and is responsive across all devices, including computers, smartphones, and tablets. Prioritize accessibility, too, which could include using a colorblind-friendly palette and ensuring text can all be read aloud using a screen reader.
Your website should be user-friendly, easy to understand and navigate, and should use up-to-date security features. Support multiple payment options and try to make the entire user experience as friction-free as possible. The article “Tips To Gain More Bookings With Your Hotel Website“ describes more tips about creating a perfect hotel website.
Video: Hotel Website Design
2. Add a Direct Booking Channel to Your Website
Many of the best hotel marketing strategies are designed to generate direct bookings because these are much more profitable than bookings made through third parties, including OTAs. For this reason, it is essential to add a direct booking channel to your website and design the booking system to be easy to use.
Avoiding commission fees associated with OTAs is one of the reasons direct bookings are more profitable, but adding a direct booking channel to your website also gives you access to more customer data. This can then be used for upselling and cross-selling between the booking and the guest’s arrival. That said, you should also add upselling components to the booking process itself, so you can maximize revenue per customer.
3. Follow The SEO Staples
There’s no point in having a website if it’s difficult for potential customers to find via their preferred search engine. Ensure you follow SEO (Search Engine Optimization) online marketing basics, such as ensuring your content is rich and relevant, with strong keywords and keyword combinations that give your website the best chance of being clicked. Consider likely search terms when planning your hotel marketing SEO campaigns. According to the State of Marketing Report by HubSpot, 88% of marketers already using SEO plan to continue using SEO strategies with similar or increased budgets.
Don’t forget to combine your main keywords with strong secondary ones, like the name of your local neighborhood or district. The article “SEO Tips for Hotels to Improve your Ranking in Google“ describes more tips about how to rank your website higher in Google.
4. Implement a Hotel Chatbot on Your Website
Customer service forms a fundamental part of modern hotel marketing strategies, and customer expectations in this area are through the roof. Customers want rapid answers to questions at all times of the day, which is not always possible using human customer service agents. So why not implement a hotel chatbot on your website?
AI-powered chatbots can provide swift, automated, and natural-sounding answers to questions, can help to guide users through a booking experience, and can assist with price comparisons and other common queries. As a result, you can potentially improve resolution speeds and increase the amount of bookings you generate from your website.
5. Let Potential Guests & B2B Clients Experience Your Hotel From a Distance
Virtual reality tours for hotels provide the ultimate way to experience a hotel or restaurant during the decision-making phase. This allows potential leisure, wedding, or event customers to understand the facilities from afar.
Accessibility to virtual reality tours has greatly improved recently, and most modern VR videos are web-based. They can be viewed on any device with a web browser, including computers, mobiles, and tablets. Of course, the experience and overall immersion can be enhanced further through a VR headset. According to the Virtual Reality Market Research by Fact.MR, the global virtual reality market size is projected to grow at a CAGR of 26% until 2033. Read “Reasons Why Every Hotel Should Have a Virtual Reality Video” for more information.
6. Differentiate Yourself From The Rest
To really contend with the competition, your hotel needs to offer something unique and distinctly different to entice potential guests. Your hotel marketing campaign needs to be equally individual. Quality customer care must be at the core of everything in the hotel and hospitality industry.
Going the extra mile for your guests can yield massive returns. Ensure you’re doing something different, from giving customers a little treat at check-in to nabbing local press and PR connections to highlight hotel marketing events.
Table: Examples of Differentiation in Hotel Marketing Strategies
7. Get Savvy With Social Media
Start now if you’re not utilizing social media in your online hotel marketing campaign. It’s free to create accounts on Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Instagram, and YouTube, and it’s never been easier to create dynamic social media pages in a moment. However, there’s no point in launching a social media presence if you don’t intend to maintain it.
Ensure you have at least one person appointed to keep your hotel marketing social media message live and engaging. Fresh content is pivotal, so ensure you have a content delivery schedule. If you’re strapped for time to create new content, consider launching a hotel blog you can link back to from your social pages regularly. More social media tips about how to promote your hotel can be read in the article “Social Media Marketing Tips to Promote Your Hotel”.
8. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is one of the fastest-growing hotel marketing strategies and involves collaborating with individuals who have a high profile on social media. These individuals are referred to as social media influencers, because they can reach a wide audience and have the potential to influence that audience’s decision-making.
Hotels can work with influencers across platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, in order to gain valuable exposure and attract more business. In particular, influencer marketing can be extremely effective in situations where hotels are targeting a younger demographic or when the hotel wants to project a sense of prestige.
9. Get Recommended by Real Authority
One surefire way of securing new customers is to get your hotel listed with local tourist offices. Whether it’s a printed flyer in a brick-and-mortar office or a prominent link on a local tourism website, you can take a premier listing over many rival competitors.
If you want to appeal to business travelers, nearby convention and exhibition centers are also great places to promote your hotel. It’s also worth talking to the region’s local marketing and event companies. Many of these may only offer part-package deals to their customers, meaning you can cover the accommodation needs and bolster your bookings in quieter seasons.
10. Loyalty Programs
A customer loyalty program is one of the most effective hotel marketing strategies for targeting existing customers, with the aim of generating repeat business. Most schemes work by offering rewards when customers stay with you repeatedly, such as a discount on the next booking, or an automatic room upgrade on their next stay.
This provides a clear incentive for customers to stay with you again, rather than choosing a rival hotel. In addition to maximizing customer lifetime value, customer loyalty programs can help hotels to collect valuable customer data. By analyzing this data, you can understand customer preferences and behaviors and tailor your offering accordingly.
11. Promote Yourself With Online Travel Agencies
In the modern digital age, no hotel can secure regular business without capitalizing on online travel agencies and travel brokers. A simple listing can generate thousands of bookings in the long term, but it’s worth remembering that a commission will be applied each time a booking is generated through such an agency.
Never rely solely on online travel agencies when it comes to your hotel marketing efforts, ensuring such websites are used to generate additional sales, rather replace your direct sales efforts entirely. Find more detailed information about online distribution channels in the articles “The Most Important Online Distribution Channels for Hotels” and “Hotel Distribution Channel Manager: What Are the Advantages?”.
12. Global Distribution Systems
A GDS system (Global Distribution System) is a network that enables automated transactions between travel service providers (airlines, hotels, cruises, and car rental) and travel agencies. When a hotel is connected to a GDS provider, it can be booked through hundreds of travel agencies worldwide.
You can also use such systems to target specific travelers, including those venturing from home turf on business. More detailed information about GDS systems and what the benefits are for hotels, you can be read in the article “Global Distribution System (GDS): What Are the Benefits for Hotels?”.
13. Make Sure to Know Your OTAs Inside-Out
Most modern hotel marketing strategies will try to get the most from online travel agents, with two of the biggest examples being Booking.com and Expedia. However, hotel marketers must take the necessary steps to optimize their online listings regardless of the OTAs being used.
You can learn more about Booking.com, the Booking Extranet, and how to get the most from that particular platform by reading the “Booking Extranet: Strategies to Increase Your Revenue on Booking.com“ article.
Meanwhile, you can learn more about Expedia and its in-built management platform, the Expedia Extranet, by checking out the article “Tips & Strategies to Use the Expedia Extranet to Get More Bookings”.
14. Appoint a Sales Rep and Reap The Rewards
When it comes to hotel marketing strategies, you should always take the best practices in hospitality out into the field when promoting your business. If a local business regularly recommends you to potential customers, ensure you maintain a mutually beneficial relationship with strong incentives.
Appointing a dedicated sales representative is worth considering for hotel businesses looking to expand. Any good rep should be taking stock of potential companies in the area worth connecting with, while ongoing procurement efforts to lock down new partnerships should be at the forefront of any hotel marketing effort.
15. Keep an Eye on Reviews and Recommendations
A great review can earn you a new customer. A poor review can cost you hundreds. Encourage better reviews and recommendations from previous guests by engaging them after checking out. Your hotel could feature dozens, if not hundreds, of times on review websites, so you must ensure that each page has positive reviews and complimentary content.
Monitor reviews on the most popular sites, note any bad reviews, and engage dissatisfied guests with helpful and constructive feedback. Neutralise negative feedback wherever you can. In the article “Tips to Manage Online Hotel Reviews, “ find more detailed information about managing online reviews.”
16. Personalization Marketing
For hotel owners and others in the hospitality industry, it is essential to find ways to stand out from rivals and appeal to potential customers. One of the best ways to do this is to deliver tailored, individual marketing messages.
In the article “Ways Personalization Marketing Can Benefit the Hospitality”, you will learn more about how to achieve this through personalization marketing and learn about how this concept can improve marketing efforts and revenue generation.
17. Invest More During High Season
One of the most important hotel marketing strategies to capitalize on can be summarised by the saying ‘make hay while the sun shines. Through historic and on-the-books data, hotels should be able to determine precisely when their peak season is and when customers are most likely to actually book hotels for that peak season.
For example, the peak season may be at the height of summer, and most bookings may be made in early spring. Regardless, it is important to invest more in ad spending and other marketing strategies according to when bookings are most likely to be made, as this helps you maximize your peak season earnings.
18. Mobile Optimization & Mobile Marketing
Mobile optimization is the process of adapting and orienting content so that it is easy to read, view, engage with, and navigate on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. It is one of the most critical hotel marketing strategies because over half of all internet traffic now originates from mobile devices.
Mobile marketing, meanwhile, is a broad category, encompassing all forms of marketing that are intended to reach mobile users. It includes advertisements in mobile apps, mobile-optimized web content, SMS marketing, social media campaigns, proximity marketing and email marketing. Some mobile marketing content is time and location-sensitive, meaning content can be delivered to users at the time and place it is most relevant.
The Latest Hotel Marketing Trends in The Hotel Industry
For marketers operating in the hotel industry, there is a wide range of hotel marketing strategies to turn to. In the article “Hotel Marketing; The Latest Trends in the Hotel Industry”, you will learn more about the latest hotel marketing trends.
Hotel Marketing Strategies FAQs
Hotel marketing strategies are key ways hotels can reach potential guests and explain why they should visit. Many of these strategies can be used at all times. Still, it is also important to respect the disruption that coronavirus has caused and implement some specific COVID-related strategies.
Want to Learn More About Hotel Marketing Strategies?
Marketing plays a crucial role in helping hotels maximize bookings and revenue. It is the main way in which those in the hotel industry can reach out to potential customers, conveying their unique selling proposition and brand values. In the following articles, you will find more essential hotel marketing strategies to boost your revenue:
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This article is written by:
Hi, I am Martijn Barten, founder of Revfine.com. With 20 years of experience in the hospitality industry, I specialize in optimizing revenue by combining revenue management with marketing strategies. I have successfully developed, implemented, and managed revenue management and marketing strategies for individual properties and multi-property portfolios.
