Online marketing for hotels is becoming more and more complicated, because the players (OTAs, metasearch engines, reviewplatforms…) within this playing field are very diverse and have objectives that often go against the hotels’ online distribution policy. Therefore, with this post we are going to convince you that you should dedicate efforts and investment in this channel by talking to you about 5 ways to improve hotel profitability through online marketing.
1) Highlight your online storefront, the web.
To improve profitability at this point it is vital to focus on the abandonment rate in the booking process or conversion rate(Conversion Rate Optimization – CRO). In order to reduce this rate, hotels will have to improve the user experience in this process and make their potential guests feel attracted to finalize the booking on the website.
In addition, the storefront must also be adapted to mobile devices. Nowadays most of your customers have Internet enabled cell phones and regularly use them to access the web, either through the browser or to access social networks and other services using applications.
2) Make your hotel unique and impressive thanks to the content.
Everyone has a story to tell. Up-to-date and impactful content has never been more important to your website than it is now. Google’s search algorithms reward sites that have high quality and relevant content that people look at, and penalizes sites that have poor, poorly written, duplicate or keyword-laden, uninteresting content.
Texts, Photos, Videos… have to be different to connect with your customers. They must convey astory (storytelling)..
3) Re-engage visitors and customers. Re-engagement and re-targeting.
Once visitors have visited your site you can set a cookie on their computer, so that you can now show ads only to these people who have searched but not booked. This is known as re-targeting.
While re-engagement tries to win back “escaping” customers through optimized messaging with personalized offers, discounts and promo codes to achieve recovery rates of up to 15%.
4) Customers have to find you. Integrates SEO(Search Engine Optimization) and PPC(Pay per Click).
Hotels need to integrate SEO and PPC strategies to optimize online marketing ROI. Google recently announced that paid search results will no longer appear in the right sidebar, giving priority to the top of the page, and placing them above organic (non-paid) results. Likewise, Google announces that it will include a maximum of three of the paid content at the bottom of the page, which means that the contracted results will go from 11 to 7 per search.
These changes will result in a change in traffic, increasing the competition for position on the search engine page. This fact could translate into a decrease in the return on investment of hotels in PPC actions.
So if you want to improve your profitability, we recommend integrating SEO and PPC strategies, working on them together, so that we can increase our position in the ranking, and traffic to our website.
5) Take care of your online reputation.
Manage your reputation properly, the image of your hotel is at stake. Respond quickly to all your customers’ comments on Tripadvisor, Booking or other platforms. And yes, also to the bad guys. Each rating will help you improve your guests’ experience.
According to TripAdvisor’s 2015 survey of 10,000 hotels worldwide, investment in online reputation management ranked highest in priority throughout 2015, surpassing that of renovations, marketing, staff training and technology (TripBarometer, 2015).
Source: TripBarometer, 2015
As we have reviewed, it is essential to work on online marketing, and for this, as you know, there are experts in the field. Don’t let luck decide the future of your hotel business. Luck is at work, and we will be here, if you wish… working to make your online future bright.
