Hotel Marketing Ideas: Basics 101

Attract more customers, increase direct bookings

Hotels and accommodation providers definitely need the flare to be creative with their marketing efforts so they can be ahead of their competitors, and stand out in general. Having a website and being on listings is just not going to cut it – it’s the year of reaching out to people over social media, personalisation, and new online trends. You need to make sure people can find our hotel in the first place in order for them to book with you. However, hotel marketing approaches must constantly be refreshed in order for your hotel or accommodation provider to stay relevant in the competition!

Below are 6 key points to start hotels and accommodation providers on their digital marketing strategy mission to be more noticed online:

1. Easily be found – SEO

Rule number one in hotel digital marketing, your hotel needs to be easy to search for, otherwise how would you expect to have an increasing level of bookings? In order for your hotel or accommodation provider to be easily searched, you would need to be everywhere relevant online, in order for people to find you. The use of SEO needs to be top priority here. Use popular hotel keywords relevant to you hotel or accommodation provider to stay on top of your SEO.

2. Increase hotel digital marketing budgets during peak booking seasons

A hotel marketer would most likely be quite aware of when your peak booking seasons are. Because of this, it would only make sense to increase your marketing budgets during the busiest seasons. The idea here is to research, understand and plan when things are busy and slow, then you would be able to adjust your marketing budgets according to your evaluation. An easy and most common ad platform is Google, which is very easy to use which means it is easy to adjust budgets continuously. Scheduling your ads is a good way of keeping organised. It would be a good idea to again, research when do people frequently book their trips and around what times, during business or leisure times?

 

3. Ensure your website is both simple and breathtaking

This is not rocket science. Your website is essentially the first point of contact – visually – the guest will have with your hotel, so it only means that your website has to stand out as well as being user-friendly. Your website needs to be straightforward and easy to use on any devise – desktop, mobile and tablet. Remember, the goal here is for your potential guests to make reservations. You need to ensure that your website focuses on clean and simple navigation, as well as making sure your photographs are professional, high resolution and displayed in correct formats that work on all devices. The most important part is making sure the booking process is easy, so keep language simple and easily understandable. Showing off videos is a great way to show your potential guests what to exactly expect, a good way of engagement as well as a well though-through hotel digital marketing strategy. 

A good example is one of our clients, Flying Butler, a corporate Serviced Apartments business based in London, who chose one of our EasyPro templates to display their fantastic apartments and capture enquires and confirmed reservations. 

4. Market the location

It is important to market the location where your hotel is located in or around. People tend to be indecisive before making a booking on whether or not the city and the location within is where they would want to stay. For example, if your hotel is based in Central London, highlight popular places to eat, luxury spots for shopping and visiting, tourist attractions and all the things not to miss within what is around your hotel! The purpose here is to not only focus on marketing your hotel, but to market the location to give people an incentive and ultimately encourage them to book with you!

5. Use of guest experiences reviews

This is quite an obvious on, but hotel marketers tend to sometimes forget to focus on highlighting guest experience reviews. Potential guests always want to see other people’s experiences before making any bookings. According to TripAdvisor, 96% of their users consider reading reviews are important when planning trips and booking hotels, and 85% of their users will usually or always reference reviews before deciding to book a hotel. As important as displaying guest experiences, it is important to respond to reviews whether it is positive or negative – both are relevant for hotel digital marketing. This is because it will show you and your hotel are open to negative feedback and are willing to help with whatever the problem is. 53% of customers expect businesses to respond to their online review within 7 days. Guests want to see that you care about their concerns and intend to have solutions to their problems.  

6. Social media will be your best friend

We need to think, we do people spend most their time of the day? The answer to this is social media. Quite relatively similar to the point before about reviews, people will always tend to use social media to express their experiences about their stay on Facebook and Twitter – whether it is positive or not. Not only just for reviews, but social media has become one of the leading outlets people tend to use when researching about a business. Hotel digital marketing does not just involve having social media account – this is not enough. Best practices of digital marketing is to ensure hotels are participating, interacting and engaging with their audience online. One way to engage in directly messages through social media. Guests or potential guests will most likely try to contact you through social messaging. This is because it is quick and easy to get through directly on platforms.

Perception is everything for a hotel. Making sure you are showcasing your hotel on social media is equally as important as engaging with people. The use of Instagram is the only visual platform you would need. The perfect place to show off all the visuals about your hotel. Instagram has a feature of ‘Live Video which allows you to go live, and this would be visible for 24 hours. This is a great way to engage with viewers to lure them in being interested to make a booking with your hotel. As well as going live, there are other features such as ‘Boomerang’ which is a loop effect video you can add to your story for your account, only visible for 24 hours. This is a fun and creative way to post out content visually, and surely engaging – It sure is worth a go!