Hotel Digital Marketing

  • RevPAR
  • 21 Dec

Why Online Marketing is Vital to the Hotel Business

Marketing your hotel is necessary if you want to book more guests. When it comes to online marketing, the goal for any business is to attract customers and make sure to offer your services and make them accessible to a larger audience. To achieve this, a strong marketing action plan is necessary. You will also need to invest a sufficient amount of time to create an image for your hotel’s brand.

Developing a strategy that will make your business more visible to search engines and your target market is essential. It can affect your revenue, as it is relatively cheaper to run an online campaign than do traditional advertising. Here are some of the reasons why Internet marketing is vital to your hotel business success.


Data-Driven Analysis

The traditional way of marketing your business involves employing research marketers to collect and process important data. Digital marketing gives you the opportunity to understand customer preferences based on their online behavior.


Engagement and Reach

With Internet marketing, it is easier to build brand awareness and interact with your potential customers. One effective way to engage with customers is to use social media to post regular updates on your hotel offerings and events. Your social media posts can reach a wide audience who are all potential customers and clients. Distance is not a concern when you use online marketing. You will be able to target and reach people all over the world.


Cost-Effective

Many business owners who manage chains of hotels and resorts are using online marketing to establish a solid client base. Online marketing is not as demanding as other traditional modes of marketing. They save on the costs associated with traditional marketing methods. You can reduce your marketing expenses and allot more money to other areas crucial for your hotel business. Internet marketing is an important and integral part of any successful business venture in the hospitality industry, so make sure you take the opportunity to use this marketing method and reach a wider audience worldwide.


Guest Booking Experience

The booking experience is the most important aspect of selling a hotel room. Statistic Brain reports that 57% of hotel bookings occur online. That is an overwhelming number. Imagine if you owned a bakery and over half of your revenue came from catering; you would certainly want to make sure your catering processes were on point.

A major piece of the online booking experience is your website's homepage. Surprisingly, so many homepages are confusing and cause the guest to work too hard to book a room. Hotels need to get with the program on web design. An effective hotel homepage will have sections that you can scroll to find the critical information you need to book a room. Visitors want to see the exterior, the rooms, qualifying data like testimonials or ratings, as well as the reservation box. This has not changed in the past decade; it's just now that it should all be on the homepage so it can be better formatted for mobile device traffic.


The Truth About SEO

Hotels were some of the early adopters of SEO practices around 2003. Back then, you could simply place keywords in a non-visible tag on your homepage and Google would index your hotel for those keywords in a couple of months. But everything is different now, and the Google algorithm indexes changes to your site within days. Google uses its artificial intelligence RankBrain to determine search results with unbelievable predictive accuracy. Businesses now have much less control over their search rankings as on-page SEO tactics carry less weight. The good part is that SEO is much less work and hotel executives should be shifting their SEO budget to other digital marketing strategies, like social media.