5 Innovative Ways to Boost Your Hotel Online Marketing Strategy

Are you looking for ways to boost your hotel online marketing strategy?

Your hotel online marketing strategy utilises the platforms you use in order to entice potential guests to complete their booking journey with you.

In this article, we’re looking at how you can boost your hotel online marketing strategy:

Hotel Online Marketing Strategy: Improve Your SEO

To drive potential guests to your site, you need to be visible. It’s essential in your hotel online marketing strategy that you focus on improving your SEO (search engine optimisation).

When your guests use a search engine, such as Google, to search for your business (or for keywords related to your business), ideally, you’d appear on the first page of the search results. To do this, you need to ensure a number of SEO practices are in place throughout your website - such as regularly posted and optimised content, internal and external linking, a strong keyword strategy and suitability for mobile. It’s helpful to use geographical keywords too, to help narrow down the search to your area. 

Your chosen keywords should be used consistently throughout your web content, from your on-page copy to your blog posts. Your content should be fresh, relevant and updated regularly to help keep you visible, accessible and relatable.

Ensure Your Website Will Suit Multiple Platforms

Many people use their smartphones or tablets for browsing; this means your website needs to be suited for different platforms.

Think about image size, as larger images can take longer to download. You also need to consider the flexibility of your website layout, since it’ll need to adapt to the size of different screens as appropriate.

Your website is your hub for online bookings, so it’s important to be user-friendly. As well as being visible for multiple platforms, you need to strengthen your online profile. Your website needs to be simple, eye-catching and informative. 

It’s ideal to ensure that your website offers a clear user journey, where users can easily click through to multiple other pages without confusion. You can achieve this by ensuring that your navigation and menu options are simple and easy to use.

If you have external links on your blog or website, ensure these click through to trusted domains that will serve to boost your rankings.

Optimise Your Online Presence to Suit Your Target Audience

What are your main objectives, and who is your target audience? These are essential questions to consider when building your hotel online marketing strategy. 

Having a clear cut view of who you are reaching out to can help you to focus your marketing strategy in more specific ways, such as optimising particular social media sites for certain demographics, or using LinkedIn to attract business and corporate customers.

Research your demographics; it’s important to assess their terminology, preferences and general behaviours to ensure you’re attractive to them. For example, if you’re looking to build your customer base with engaged couples to maximise your bookings for weddings, they may be put off if your site is promoting business conferences over fairytale weddings.

Hotel Online Marketing Strategy: Build a Relationship With Your Guests

As soon as a potential customer enters your site, you should be looking to engage and interact with them to build a relationship immediately. This will help the visit to your website feel more personal and inviting.

You could promote an offer or discount on the homepage if they sign up - the idea behind this is to try and secure a direct booking straight away. You’ll also then have their email address and can begin sending personalised emails and offers to engage them and hopefully bring them back to your website.

Chatbots on a website are also popular; easy-to-spot pop-up windows encourage users to enquire as soon as they arrive on your website, setting them off on their user journey straight away.

Utilise Social Media

Social media can be a useful tool for launching promotions, offers and competitions, as well as engaging and interacting with your followers. 

You can use polls to do research, or competitions to help your hotel reach a wider audience (it often works well to ask users to share the campaign as a condition of their entry).

Social media is also an excellent way to interact with local businesses and promote each other. This is particularly useful for local attractions and events; if you promote them on your site, the attendees will not only see you supporting them, they may also promote your hotel back as a means of offering their guests somewhere to stay. 

You can link to your website or blog on your social media platform too, to help drive your followers to your direct online bookings platform.

Consider which platforms would work best for different areas of your business. You may find, for example, that Instagram is best for sharing pictures of your hotel and grounds, Twitter may be better for sharing anecdotes, offers and engagement, and Facebook may be best for competitions, engaging with other businesses and polls. Each platform you use must be regularly updated and kept fresh, and it’s vital that you check your messages on each platform too, as you don’t want to miss any enquiries or potential bookings.

If you’ve found our innovative ways to boost your hotel online marketing strategy helpful, why not read our previous blog on the benefits of a channel manager?

Alternatively, please contact a member of our team for more information about our products and services.