When looking to grow your hotel online presence within your target demographic, it’s important to have an effective marketing strategy that will engage users and make you more accessible and desirable over your competitors. It’s especially important in bigger cities, as it’s important to be more visible than other hotels nearby. Because a hotel is a local business, there’s many unique opportunities that can be explored.
The best way to get your hotel’s brand out there is to have a marketing strategy in place that will utilize all digital outlets that can enhance your SEO rankings and help others find you. And, it doesn’t stop there—once you’ve developed a strategy, you’ll want to continually check your stats to track how you’re doing and where there’s need for improvement.
Here are 4 effective hotel marketing strategies that can take your business to the next level and help you be more active and recognized in the digital space, where you can attract more new and returning clientele to your property.
Creating Relative Content
A great way to showcase your hotel’s offerings and be more searchable online is to create relevant content that provides users with the information they are looking for. A content marketing strategy will ensure fresh content is regularly added to your website and social media channels, and it can be used to draw in visitors and keep them coming back.
Additionally, content marketing can be used as part of your SEO strategy, and you can then share this content across a full spectrum of social media platforms to increase engagement on your digital outlets. You’ll want to integrate the right SEO terms within your body of work and create a steady stream of content, where you can appear active at all times and consistently reach more people.
It’s worth starting a blog, and maintaining it, where you’re posting new material at least once each month to stay relevant. Having some routine in place will make it easier to target your audience and remain on the top of their minds, and on the web, with regard to SEO rankings. With a blog, you can share the latest tourists attractions, a guide for best eats and sights in the area, happenings with local partners in your area, and more.
You can also engage in sharing web articles, which can be used as part of a link building strategy, and video content, which can be more overtly promotional.
With any content you produce or find interesting and relatable to your market, you’ll want to share across social media platforms, such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter, and try and engage users as much as possible. Some further ways to engage users outside is by creating a call to action that links back to your website’s booking page or blog.
Working with Local Authorities
To become more visible within your community, you’ll want to form partnerships with local authorities that can vouch for you or connect you with the type of people you’re looking for.
As a hotel is interested in boosting sales and getting more footway in the door, it is worth speaking to your local tourist board or CVB (convention and visitors bureau) to find out the various ways the board can help with promotion of your hotel to visitors in the area.
Similarly, you can communicate with any local business authorities and see if they would be willing to promote your hotel as a venue for conferences, training sessions, and other business functions. So, for instance, if you reach out to a nearby venue that often hosts weddings or conferences, and see if you can cross-link on each other’s websites or offer promotional packages, then their visitors might be inclined to book a space at your hotel for the event.
For this to work, you’ll want to produce and distribute plenty of marketing literature to the various local authorities and make sure that this literature is eye-catching, professional, and persuasive. You should also make sure that you are listed on relevant websites from those you’ve partnered with and that your listings are as complete and up-to-date as possible.
As a way of figuring out which websites to target, as a hotel, you may want to look up competitive hotels in the area, and then use SEO tools to see which websites they have backlinks with. Then, try to get those same backlinks and partnerships, as well.
Having a User-Friendly Website
Number one: you need to have a user-friendly and responsive website. Your website is what users go to first and foremost, and it’s the best way to draw attention to your services and engage your audience. You’ll need a website that is up-to-date with the latest features, has interesting and concise content that explains what your business is and what services you offer, and can be accessible easily over mobile, tablet, and desktop.
Leveraging Off of Metasearch
You’ll want to look into paid search opportunities compared to what OTA’s charge to see how your rates measure up in order to generate more sales, at a lower cost than the OTA’s price.
When a hotel can run its own ads and get a return that’s better than what an OTA can do, and the hotel needs to sell more rooms, it should. Hotels can often run Google ads and pay way less in overall spend in order to get the same hotel room booked than what an OTA would charge. Your best move is to test bidding strategies and create an ad budget that will compete with OTAs, to make sure your hotel is as profitable as possible.
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