Amongst all sectors of the economy, no sector is influenced more by technology than the hospitality industry. The vast majority of customers in this industry are tourists who spend many hours per week on social media and popular OTAs searching for places to visit, things to do and hotels to book. Therefore, the on-line promotion has become the most popular method in reaching out to potential customers. You can read more about the latest trends here.
Here we will go back to basics, and remind you of the ways you can promote your hotel and your brand on the web:
1. Content marketing
This is the most essential and powerful technique that works especially well for hotels, hostels and BnBs. It involves creating content such as, photos, videos, blog posts that don’t directly promote the business but intrigue the prospective guest. It’s a way for familiarising your guests with the area where your business operates and that they should consider your hotel during their initial investigation early in the marketing funnel.
The key here is to make the content relevant. It shouldn’t be a pure sales pitch. The ideal piece of content would be educational in nature but is also able to talk about your business naturally.
2. Local SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It can be on-site or off-site and it is work that can help you rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs). A successful SEO campaign would mean you ranking highly when potential guests search for something like: “hotels near town i want to visit“.
The skills required for a successful Local SEO campaign are a blend of marketing skills and technical competence. It would involve keyword investigation, writing about interesting topics, building links from other websites back to your hotel’s website, optimizing the content on your own website, listing business details in local directories for NAP signals, and others.
3. Search engine advertising/PPC
Getting ranked highly for free is a difficult task. It requires lots of work, time and patience. For the impatient, there’s SEA (Search engine advertising) also known as PPC (Pay Per Click). If you consent to pay, you can get listed at the top immediately with all search engines. Popular advertising platforms include Google Adwords and Bing Ads.
4. Social media
Social media is a great place to promote your hotel business. You can use your business page to promote yourself and share with your audience places or events to visit near where your hotel operates.
You should aim to reach all users of social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Make sure you include elements in your posts which are known to trigger high engagement levels such as photos, gifs, and videos.
5. Email marketing
Believe it or not, email is still popular and growing. In the hospitality industry, this serves as a good way of attracting repeat visits. You can use email marketing campaigns to regularly update your customers on what’s new in the area, new with your hotel, events taking place near your hotel or inform them of upcoming price promotions.
Nicola Holder 