Six Powerful Hotel Marketing Techniques to Increase Revenue
In the ever-changing hospitality sector, hotel owners now place a high premium on obtaining direct bookings. As a hotel management company, we are aware of the difficulties they encounter while creating a business plan and marketing strategy that will encourage guests to book rooms through their own portals.
One of the difficulties the hotel sector will confront in 2023 and beyond is striking a balance between direct room sales and those via third-party websites and online travel agencies (OTAs). As much as it would be great to manage everything on your own, sometimes it isn’t possible when it comes to hotel marketing and revenue management. These days, using internet travel firms to make hotel reservations has become incredibly popular. Sadly, over the past few years, guests have adopted a habit where they never even think to book through a hotel’s website. Because they believe the OTA offers better deals than the hotel’s own website, brand.com, many people have grown devoted to it.
How are hoteliers then able to refuse to work with the OTAs?
On the other hand, is that truly what we want in terms of “help”? Do we want to offer substantial wholesaler discounts or pay large OTA commissions, and over time, become unduly dependent on the terms the OTAs prescribe to us—yes, they do try!?
The increased costs hotels must pay to independent websites in order to offer their own rooms result in significantly lower profit margins for them.
But there is still hope!
The tide has been turning lately, and in an attempt to attract direct customers, the “trend” is returning to moving business away from online travel agencies and onto the hotel’s website.
Thanks in part to the “buzz” generated by the big hotel chains’ marketing campaigns, more and more travelers are realizing the benefits of making direct reservations. Vacationers start looking for deals and lower lodging costs that OTAs don’t typically offer. The race to increase website conversion rates in order to divert bookings from OTAs has begun.
An application named “Stop Clicking Around” was introduced by Hilton. Calling it “Your Rate by IHG Rewards,” IHG says it has resulted in a 7% rise in digital revenues and a 32% increase in mobile revenues. With their best rate, or better yet, better rate, assurance programs for their devoted customers, Marriott, Starwood, Choice, and Best Western have also joined the fight against OTAs.
They are battling for what is rightfully theirs. Are you keeping an eye on this at your hotel?
It’s time to become aware of the situation and act quickly to seize the initiative!
You can think about this topic and get some ideas for your sales and marketing tactics from the insights provided in this post.
Article Synopsis:
The Top 6 Hotel Marketing Techniques to Increase Sales
1. The First Step to Success is a Great Hotel Website Design
2. Hotel SEO Marketing: The Foundation for Online Visibility
Content reigns supreme.
Utilize links to establish trust.
SEO Components
3. Hotel Brand Defense
4. SEM protects brands to drive high ROI.
5. Hotel Re-Marketing to Increase Sales
6. Get Direct Consumer Visibility with Meta-Search Marketing
Rebates and Reward Programs
Experiences Make a Package Sell
Encourage direct bookings by being altruistic.
The Top 6 Hotel Marketing Techniques to Increase Sales
To stay ahead of hotel marketing trends and optimize revenue production, hotels must apply effective hotel marketing strategies as they endeavor to navigate the dynamic marketplace. Here at Golden Valley we’ll reveal the top six tactics that can really affect the success of your hotel:
1. The First Step to Success is a Great Hotel Website Design
To get direct bookings, a hotel website needs to be visually appealing and optimized. The finest hotel websites have a clear booking engine, are easy to use, and are aesthetically pleasing while also reflecting the personality of the hotel. Bookings and website visibility can suffer if SEO and keyword research are neglected. Thus, the first step is to make sure that your website is fantastic, and the second is to make it simple for visitors to find.
Focus on developing a distinctive user experience, offering thorough details about your hotel and its services, and including a ton of excellent photos and videos if you want to raise your website’s search engine rankings. To target customer queries, conduct keyword research and create landing pages with particular offers that are themed. Use a booking system that streamlines the process and incorporates guest evaluations to highlight favorable experiences. Additionally, because more people are making reservations on their phones, make sure your website is mobile-friendly. To prevent losing out on direct sales and having to pay OTAs hefty commissions, hotel websites must be properly designed and promoted.
Select a web development business with experience in the travel e-commerce sector and a track record of successfully generating direct sales from hotel websites when working with them. To give them complete control over your website, make sure they utilize an open-source content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal. Steer clear of Flash since it makes it difficult for search engines to rank websites that have it.
Successful Hotel Promotional Techniques
2. Hotel SEO Marketing: The Foundation for Online Visibility
By implementing some fundamental SEO features and tactics, even the smallest independent hotels may guarantee a regular, professional presence in the search engine result pages, or SERPs.
The most crucial thing to remember when considering SEO for the hospitality sector is that things change all the time!
Big search engines, such as Google, update their algorithms about 500 times a year in addition to adding new features and functionalities. Every modification affects the way search results show up on SERPs. You, hoteliers, need to take the initiative when it comes to SEO and content production. 8
Here are a few essential hotel SEO marketing tactics:
The King is Content
Successful hotel websites inspire their visitors in order to obtain top rankings and increase conversions. It’s critical to provide captivating content that draws visitors to your website and retains them. It signals to search engines that your website is useful and worthy of higher ranks by encouraging visitors to stay on it longer, exploring several pages, and lowering bounce rates.
Given the continued dominance of mobile search traffic, mobile optimization is critical. Google is aware of this and penalizes websites with inadequate mobile functionality. Make sure your material works well on mobile devices and offers a consistent booking experience. To improve engagement and increase conversions, keep an eye on how mobile users behave and make the necessary adjustments.
Monitoring the traffic to your website is crucial. With tools like Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and Bing Search Console, you can track organic traffic, evaluate user interaction data, and regularly verify your ranking visibility. React quickly to shifts in user needs, search engine algorithms, and the competitive environment.
Use technology and expert advice to maximize your search engine presence. Real-time modifications to on-page content, metadata, photos, and other elements are possible with a strong content management system (CMS), ideally one that is open-source. Teach your employees how to use the CMS and take advantage of its features to find high-performing pages, possibilities for search exposure, and performance comparisons with rivals.
It’s imperative to keep your hotel’s local SEO consistent and optimized. Search engines trust consistent listings on reputable portals, which results in prominent placement on search engine result pages (SERPs). Minimize redundant listings and make sure local profiles are up-to-date on sites like Yelp, Bing, Google My Business, and others.
Establish credibility with links!
The way links interact with your website is one of the most significant aspects affecting its placement in the search engine results pages!
In essence, search engines gather information about webpages and/or individual pages by examining links pointing to them (that domain) on other websites. Links originating from reliable and valuable sources (such as edu and gov) inform search engines that the page or site they point to is likewise reliable and deserving of prominent display in search results. To build trust through links and stay out of trouble for poor (spammy) links, you should keep an eye on and routinely analyze all inbound link actions and opportunities. Here, link management strategy is crucial!
Be more than “just a hotel website”—there we have it once ore—”content,”,” our friend! Give the vacation planner interesting and educational content! Steer clear of dull and general descriptions. Draw in the guest. Provide advice on the neighborhood, point out points of interest, announce events, include event calendars and interactive maps, and impart other fascinating local information. Prove that you are the top visitor to the location!
Make your hotel website a significant source of income by taking advantage of additional digital marketing opportunities like sponsored search, banner advertising, email marketing, reservation retargeting, etc.
SEO Components for Hotel Promotion
Use these essential tactics to make your hotel website search engine optimized.
Headline Tags
Title tags are a crucial component. If you include your desired key in the title, it not only shows up in the clickable section of your listing in the organic search engine results, but it also helps you rank higher. Clear titles that accurately reflect the content of the page are essential. For your pages to be accurately represented and to aid in rankings, your title tags should have all three of these components:
The page title
The right auxiliary keywords
Name of your brand or hotel
To guarantee the best results, you can only target two or three keywords on each page. More will reduce your ranking potential. As a result, you will want many landing pages to target various keyword combinations.
To find the right keywords for your hotel and target markets, use Google Keyword Planner.
Metadata summaries
They invite people to click on your link by giving a brief synopsis of the page. In addition to being direct ranking criteria, they have the ability to affect additional variables such as the average time a person spends on your website and the click-through rate, which measures how many people view your page.
In the SERPs, meta tag descriptions might sway users who aren’t sure what to do by providing useful information. An effective meta tag will increase website traffic and direct booking revenue. The terms you include in your meta description will always be bolded in the test results that a visitor sees when he reaches for them.
In addition to mentioning your hotel’s unique selling proposition (USP), which sets it apart from the competition, you should include a call to action encouraging guests to make an immediate reservation. Make sure the message you convey is appropriate for the audience you want to reach.
Keep in mind that the keywords and those in the title tag must match.
Headings
Make headers and subheaders and tag them within the page’s text. This is a crucial on-page component for keyword targeting! Many leisure travelers use their cellphones to browse for inspiration when they have some free time. By separating your text into headers (caption titles), you draw readers’ attention and make the content easier to navigate.
When you use this type of caption title, it’s easy to see what your page is about. Understanding the subject will raise your usability metrics, which will raise your landing pages’ SEO rating. Make use of a clean structure with subsections for each paragraph. It will improve the usability of your website.
Material
Because Google’s search algorithms are so complex, your content must be outstanding! Pay attention to detail because the following are the most important factors for your content: Freshness (updated information, correct pricing), Quality (engaging stories), Readability (free of spelling and grammar errors, easy to navigate and scannable, i.e., short paragraphs and bullet points), and Usability (functional links, easy to navigate with a quick possibility to find what the user is looking for, easy to book directly). Make sure your headers are properly categorized, that your website is simple to navigate, and that you regularly provide high-quality, new content to draw in visitors. Remember that content is king when it comes to getting high ranks!
Enriched Bits
Through reviews and ratings, they offer fast information about your hotel (a star rating beneath your title tag, a customer review that takes the place of the meta description, and specific business details like address or opening hours). The click ratings can be quickly increased with rich snippets. Rich Snippets are an extremely helpful SEO strategy to have in your toolbox. They don’t directly impact your search rankings, but they do have an impact on the frequency with which users click on your listings in the search results, as well as the average session time and bounce rate. In addition to bringing visitors’ attention to your listings, these snippets provide them with fast information and another incentive to browse your website. As I previously stated, linking is a highly common and successful SEO strategy! Links come in two varieties: internal and external.
Links within your website point to other pages. They facilitate the discovery of all the pages on your website by search engine crawlers, which is necessary for your website to rank highly on SERPs. They also make it simpler for prospective guests to get the information they require (e.g., a link to the reservation menu for a direct booking).
External links can be outbound, directing visitors from your page to another page, or inbound, directing people from other pages to your page. Additionally, Google checks for links from websites to other relevant websites, as this indicates a website’s community involvement and avoids being perceived as spammy. Making contact with other websites to request links from them to yours is a crucial and easy traffic-generating strategy. Consider travel blogs and websites that list hotels.
Three. Hotel Brand Defense
It’s critical to assert and defend your trademark in order to preserve your hotel’s reputation and drive revenue. Unknowingly giving online travel agencies (OTAs) the opportunity to bid on their brand name, many hotels lose out on potential clients and lose out on direct bookings. Keep this from happening to you.
Incorporate brand protection into your internet marketing plan. Register your hotel’s trademark with search engines such as Google to prevent competing websites from running advertisements using your name. By doing this, you stop OTAs from putting in bids for your hotel name and sending guests to their websites.
OTAs utilize Google Adwords to bid on your brand name so that it appears at the top of search results when customers search for your hotel on search engines. Customers who are unaware of this and click on this advertising end up on the OTA’s page rather than yours.
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By safeguarding your brand, you can prevent OTAs from taking advantage of your direct bookings and sending guests to other lodgings. OTAs advertise under your brand name with the intention of converting visitors to their own consumers; they don’t care about bringing in more business for your hotel.
In order to stop brand piracy:
To increase efficacy, formally register your brand, ideally at the European level.
Use the Trademark Complaint Form to report your trademark to Google.
To make sure that their regulations are being followed, get in touch with Google. Ads that contain your brand name in the text can be removed, but not all advertising based on your brand name (URLs excluded).
Search Maastricht Townhouse Hotel on Google
Having your own website show up at the top of search results is the aim. Establishing a mutually beneficial partnership with OTAs is crucial; this involves acknowledging their influence while simultaneously claiming control over the rooms and negotiating leverage.
4. SEM protects brands to drive high
Online marketers frequently engage in competitive keyword bidding on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Search engine result pages (SERPs) display advertisements above and below the organic search results. These advertisements can be bid on using a pay-per-click (PPC) model.
But with search engine marketing (SEM), bidding on your own brand name is where the real action is. This approach provides the best return on investment (ROI) and is also an efficient way to safeguard your brand.
Trade protection regulations in the US, UK, and other countries lack much to be desired, allowing OTAs to freely bid on your trademarks. In the EU, however, brand protection through trademark enforcement works well. Consequently, it’s critical to include clauses restricting OTAs’ use of your trademarks in your agreements with them.
When compared to OTA commissions, the ROI from bidding on your brand name is typically larger because it is less expensive than bidding on short-tail destination keywords.
Our clients have realized returns on investment (ROIs) of fifteen to thirty-five times, corresponding to cost percentages of two to six percent. Compared to the 15% to 25% commission that OTAs charge, this is significantly more appealing.
To get you started, consider these helpful pointers for search engine marketing strategies:
Instead of focusing on territory, aim for languages and produce unique advertisements for each one. In the event that your website is not translated, direct visitors to the English version. Click-through rates are increased by using ads in targeted languages (CTRs).
Modifiers for keywords might help you focus your targeting. If you choose a broad match, you can end up with low-converting generic terms. Ads can show up on searches that contain the changed phrase or similar variations, but not synonyms, thanks to the broad match modifier.
Keep an eye on the keywords that are being picked up, and add negative keywords to block certain words from bringing up your advertisement.
If other hotels use your brand name, you might want to think about cutting out sites that aren’t relevant to your target audiences in order to keep expenses down. Put your precise location in the advertisement so that it stands out as your hotel.
Put a call to action in each of your advertisements, like “book now.”
To make the most of the area your advertising takes up on the page, use phone, location, and site link extensions.
5. Hotel Re-Marketing to Increase Sales
Hotel retargeting is a marketing tactic in which lodging establishments seek out and connect with prospective clients who have already visited their website but did not complete a reservation. It entails showing these previous website visitors customized advertisements when they peruse the internet, reminding them of the hotel, and enticing them to come back and make a reservation.
Remarketing operates by monitoring website visitors’ interactions with a hotel’s content through the use of tracking cookies or pixel tags. This enables the hotel to establish distinct audience segments predicated on the actions of its visitors, including individuals who arrived at the booking page but did not proceed with the reservation. The hotel can then use a variety of online channels, including social media, news websites, and other websites in the Google Display Network, to target these categories with ads.
The following are some simple measures to take:
Make segments in Google Analytics based on users who visited your booking engine’s first page but did not complete the conversion. Segments may be based on specific promotional or package pages that website users have read, or they may be language-oriented.
Navigate to Admin -> Audience Definition -> Audiences -> New Audience -> Import segments in Google Analytics, then choose the newly generated segment. A remarketing audience that you create in Analytics can then be accessed through the Google Adwords account of your choice.
Go to Google Adwords and start a new display network-only campaign. Select an audience and choose how to target your advertisements using interests and remarketing lists. Choose a category by choosing remarketing lists. Note that your Google Adwords and Google Analytics accounts need to be correctly linked. Find out more about the opportunities this presents for hotels and how Google Hotel Ads is permeating the hotel distribution vertical.
Below is a screenshot from Google Adwords from one of our hotel clients from the previous semester to give you an idea:
6. Get Direct Consumer Visibility with Meta-Search Marketing
Listing hotel availability and rates from many online travel agencies (OTAs) and direct hotel websites on one platform is known as hotel meta search marketing. This enables customers to utilize the meta-search engine to directly make reservations and compare costs.
By utilizing well-known sites like Google Hotel Ads, TripAdvisor, Kayak, and Trivago to reach a larger audience and enhance booking prospects, meta-search for hotels increases visibility. It uses a cost-per-click (CPC) methodology that enables hotels to efficiently target particular user categories or markets while controlling advertising expenses. Metasearch helps hotels increase their profit margins by enabling them to boost direct bookings, thus decreasing their dependency on OTA listings and increasing their own booking options. An effective meta search marketing campaign must maintain rate parity, optimize bidding tactics, manage online reputation through user reviews, ensure mobile optimization, and make use of tracking and analytics tools.
Having Fun with the Cost and Packaging
There are a few simpler ways to encourage guests to make direct reservations on your brand.com hotel website when it comes to pricing.
Extra savings encourage people who are unsure.
For example, you may provide membership discounts. As OTA is actively doing this, you ought to as well. Here are a few concepts that are really effective for our hotels:
a voucher good for a 5% discount for anyone who signs up to receive your newsletter.
10% off coupon for returning visitors
A 5% discount code is included on an optimized landing page for those who are actively searching Google for a hotel deal.
The OTA cannot object as long as it is offered at a membership rate. They are acting in the same manner. You provide customers with a discount code in exchange for their registration and membership.
In addition to offering a membership discount, you could use remarketing to offer a discount to website visitors who haven’t made a reservation. You can thus offer them a retargeting advertising banner with a 10% discount a few days later if they visited the booking engine after viewing the page with the 5% discount and chose not to make a straight reservation.
It assists in guiding people who are still undecided across the finish line.
Experiences Make a Package Sell
You should develop specialized products as a hotelier to appeal to various target markets or clientele. Packages are the term used to describe certain items in the hospitality sector. You must be acquainted with this, I’m sure.
Let me use the website for a hotel in Hycinth Hotel Trivandrum that we are now developing as an example to help you better understand what I mean when I talk about addressing diverse target markets. At this hotel, we cater to a wide range of travelers and have designed packages to suit each one’s specific needs:
Weekend Apart
Summertime Off
Spa Deal
Romantic Getaway
Pre-Ship Provisions
Offer for Cruises and Parking
Barcelona with your kids or family.
As you can see, we are obviously targeting these customized hotel packages and offers at distinct consumer niches.
Approach direct bookings with a charitable mindset. Rather than giving away discounts (for instance, if your USP is “luxury” and you don’t want to “cheapen” your hotel), ask the buyer to make a donation. You have the option to donate to a worthy charity with each stay that is directly booked on your hotel website. You may improve your reputation by “feeding the hungry” and free your hotel from OTA dependency by “saving the world”!
Remember that occasionally a little “push” is needed to get guests to book. Sending them subtle cues to get their attention and remind them of your great property is perfectly acceptable! Various tools are available to you, such as basket recovery and message pop-ups. Increasing the urgency of losing a special promotion and reminding users with an exit capture message when they try to leave your website are two more strategies to persuade people to make direct hotel reservations on your website.
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