Hotel Digital Marketing : How to Increase Hotel Bookings Online
When you’re running a hotel, you want prospective customers to book directly from your hotel website as opposed to an online travel agency site. Although enticing prospective customers to book directly from your site may seem like a daunting task, there is a wide range of digital marketing strategies that you can use to increase the number of direct hotel bookings that your website sees. Each of the following techniques and guidelines is simple and easy to use, which should help you learn how to increase hotel room sales.
Target Customers Using Different Parameters
When you run marketing campaigns for your hotel, it’s likely that you send these marketing materials out to everyone. While this is certainly a great approach towards reaching as wide of an audience as possible, the messaging that comes with these campaigns can sometimes be too broad. You’ll definitely want to continue employing digital marketing campaigns that reach a wide range of customers, but it’s also important to utilize what’s known as macro marketing. When you have the e-mail addresses of customers who have stayed at your hotel before, you should focus on macro marketing by targeting specific subsets of your customer-base with each marketing campaign, which makes the customer feel as though the marketing is more personalized.
When employing this type of marketing, you can use filters to determine who receives your marketing. For instance, families could receive one type of email or newsletter, while couples could receive an advertisement that’s geared specifically towards them. Even a simple filter such as this will allow your prospective and current customers to feel that the marketing is more personalized. It’s also important to understand that mass marketing emails can oftentimes cause customers to unsubscribe to your website or to block your emails from being received in the future. When you want to get customers to book directly at your hotel, you need to go the extra mile and make them believe that you care about their business. One of the best aspects of using targeting in your digital marketing campaigns is that you can be as complex and specific with this marketing as you want.
Focus on Social Media
In today’s world, digital marketing for the hotel industry isn’t complete without a focus on social media, as millions upon millions of prospective and current customers of yours are commonly using sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram when spending time online. If you can reach these people on websites where they spend a huge chunk of their time, this bolsters your chances of attracting more and more people to your website that will book directly. Getting into social media marketing is easy, as there is a myriad of options at your disposal.
The first thing you should do in order to bolster the visibility of your hotel is to make accounts for your hotel on Facebook and Instagram, as these are the two most popular social media platforms for hotels. For the latter platform, many people take pictures of their vacations and place them on Instagram, making your presence on the site essential. Focus on the number of followers you have on each of these platforms. If the number is constantly increasing, this means that your efforts are going well. However, if the numbers are stagnating or even decreasing, it might be wise to retool your current efforts. To get the best out of these platforms, assign someone to this marketing that is smart and knows social media, as the best social media marketing is the kind that uses humor, style, and knows the ins and outs of how social media works.
SEO Services and Why They Are Important
Among the most important facets of hotel digital marketing is SEO. Search engine optimization is used to enhance the visibility of your website on search engines. When you optimize your website and the content within for search engines, you will automatically see a boost in the number of visitors to your site, as this type of marketing inherently causes your ranking to improve on sites such as Google and Bing. When your ranking increases, your website will appear towards the top of searches when a prospective customer types in a keyword or phrase like “best hotel in Sydney”. In essence, this type of optimization means that you’re making your hotel website more friendly for search engines, which can be done by improving load times, incorporating numerous calls to action, and creating new content on a regular basis. Before you begin implementing SEO into your hotel website, make sure to learn more about SEO strategies for the travel industry.
By employing these hotel direct booking strategies, you will be able to increase the number of customers who book directly on your website, which will invariably help bolster your reputation while also providing you with ways to increase hotel revenue.
