Digital Marketing To Increase Hotels Bookings

How To Improve Hotel Direct Sales

Posted October 29, 2017

In Data Driven Marketing, Digital Trends, Hospitality, Marketing Strategies

OTAs can replace a sales team with the extra benefit of technology, personnel, and media assistance; thereby eliminating the need to invest in any of these. There’s so much you can do. You can create your advertising campaigns and loyalty programs for guests, give visitors a virtual tour of your hotel, increase your hotel’s visibility on search engines, create a 24/7 response system for your website visitors, etc. Amazing tips follow below:

Your Hotel Website/Booking Engine is Paramount

As you may have already heard, the website of your hotel is your greatest chance to engage your guests and sell to them. Visitors spend an average of 6 minutes on a hotel’s website; 6 minutes which can be used to turn them from website visitors to potential hotel guests. You can achieve this with the use of catchy images, simple and organized room descriptions as well as attractive offers to encourage them to book and simplify the booking procedure. Besides these, you may also want to include an audio-visual of your hotel to give your guests a general feel of your hotel. So include a video that will captivate its viewers and sell your hotel in your website. It is now evident that your website needs to be updated on a regular basis, so make it a part of your plans.

Guard Your Hotel’s Reputation

Managing your online reputation involves conscientiously shaping and controlling the conversations going on about your brand on every online platform. It is very important to monitor the conversations taking place about your business in forms of social media posts, testimonials and reviews if you hope to succeed in the hotel business. This is because the nature of the internet space makes it possible for the opinions of others about your business to influence potential guests.

One of the best steps you can take in reputation management is to register your business with review and listing services. Google and Yelp reviews are important for hoteliers and other hospitality providers. You should also have a representation on online services platforms peculiar to the industry; platforms like TripAdvisor because most of your potential guests can be found there looking for recommendations and making travel arrangements.
Another step to take is to collaborate with a few travel agencies online, e.g. Bookings.com, Trivago, Hotels.com, etc. to incite conversations about your brand. Skift, a travel marketing resource says that unlike hotel business chains, independent hotels have poor representation on these service platforms. In most cases, hotel services platforms will provide marketing management tools to help you make adequate use of their services as well as opportunities to create leads.

Focus on Marketing Campaigns

Digital marketing is not a project you embark on just once and strike off your bucket list. It should be made a business culture, especially for hotel managers. Adopting digital marketing as a regular marketing structure of your hotel does not necessarily entail hiring new staff and acquiring a lot of internet tools. With regular e-commerce and reservations staff and the right digital marketing tools, hotel managers can facilitate building of online campaigns to earn the hotel a good spot on the digital map and consequently increase the number and accuracy of bookings. The tools you should employ for optimal productivity must be cost efficient at the setup stage and flexible enough for creating campaigns.

Finally, using many different tools or an all-in-one hotel marketing platform, you should be able to provide your hotel guests with a consistent multi-channel experience, which is the standard for a successful digital marketing campaign. Whatever your choice of tools may be, a digital marketing structure should be at the centre of your marketing strategy. This would pave the way for subsequent digital marketing demands of your hotel.

Take Advantage of Smartphones

It will be totally unwise to not use the fast growth rate of smartphones for your benefit. According to Nielsen, the percentage of Americans who own a smartphone rose to 80% at the end of 2016. Many travel services and hospitality providers have taken advantage of this boom and the mobile marketing opportunity it presents and if you don’t, you may be left behind. Before now, the mobile services provided by hotels didn’t go beyond check-in, itinerary review and the ability to pick seats at events using apps or email notifications. But now guests want more and smart hospitality providers are offering more.

Delta travellers no longer have to worry about losing their bags as they can be tracked using a RFID chip on the app. And Lucy, the mobile app of Virgin Hotels, enables hotel guests to carry out activities such as ordering room service and controlling room temperature.

Currently, 78% of travellers have a travel app on their smartphones. This points to one fact: the demand for hospitality providers to create mobile experiences that correlate services is growing and must be met. So don’t underestimate your hotel’s app. Since apps and emails often work together, it is wise to use email notifications to inform your guest about new features on the app such as promotions, to encourage the use of your app.

Engaging Social Media Marketing

Just as we stated in our Top Industries on Social Media eBook, the travel industry depends heavily on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. This is because Instagram and Facebook are channels that encourage the use of images in communication. So hospitality providers can use these channels to create the right content that will whet the appetite of social media users to make their hotels the next holiday destination.

An excellent hotel social media marketing campaign will focus on users at every customer life cycle. This means monitoring conversations, encouraging and responding to reviews and comments. This will emphasize your social media presence and foster relationships with your guests, which will in turn enable you to increase awareness and equity of your brand.

Search Engine Accessibility is KEY

Besides having wonderful content on your site, being easily accessible on search engines is very important. Paid search provides great ROI since your focus is on people who are advanced in the booking process (using search engines and in-content ads). Even though this doesn’t replace organic search, the ratio has shifted to 50/50 in favour of paid searches as against the previous ratio of 70/30.

Google shows ads based on the website’s organic ranking. A website with low organic scores would end up paying more when bidding on keywords. Low organic scores can be caused by providing bad answers to your visitors’ questions. This means your CPC would increase and in certain cases your website wouldn’t be displayed by Google at all. The best way to reduce your cost per click and increase your Google ranking is to engage your visitors diplomatically. Accompanying paid searches should be retargeted marketing campaigns. These campaigns have great ROI and conversion rates because focused on people who have already visited your site.

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