Hotels are a competitive industry and with many hotels decreasing their room rates to get more customers, the competition is taking a low-margin turn for many hotel owners. To succeed in getting more room bookings consistently, the most fundamental thing you need to take charge of is your marketing strategy. With a well-laid-out promotional strategy for your hotel, your hotel business will give you profits consistently. So let’s look at the below hotel marketing ideas to start your journey towards a bigger and more profitable business venture from your hotel:
1) Get More Bookings from Your Website
Most hotel owners become satisfied by just getting a website designed for them. Many of them don’t know that just a few things if added to their website can heavily change the results that they are getting presently from their hotel website. The success of your website lies in the number of customers it can send to your business from the total number of visitors it gets. So here are the things you must watch out for and implement, if not already, on your website
a) Let people see, select and book rooms directly through the interface of your website. A quick booking plugin will let you take advantage of the impulse decisions of customers.
b) Give a video tour of your hotel along with the main features of your hotel. This will have a more profound effect in influencing visitors as compared to content written on your website.
c) Increase trust in your hotel by including elements like the mention of your hotel in press/media, affiliation/certification with reputed institutions, safety, and privacy factors, testimonials, etc.
d) Many visitors will arrive on your hotel website while browsing from their mobile devices. This makes it important that your website should have a mobile-responsive feature so that its resolution auto-adjusts depending upon the device.
e) Slow loading site is one of the main reasons why visitors press the back button on their browser and move to another site. So test the loading time of your site and make it fast to load.
2) Show the Brand Image of Your Hotel
Making your hotel business stand out from the rest is an advantage that can easily be attained by issuing press releases (using a well-networked press release service provider). Getting mentions of your business from world-known media sites creates a very positive impression about your business. On writing and issuing a press release, the content provided in the form of press releases makes it to hundreds of sites and this big network of distribution also helps in acquiring new backlinks and traffic to your website. This is why many brand-sensitive businesses regularly send out press releases.
3) Prepare Your Site for Organic Traffic
All those websites that do not find a place in the top 10 results of Google miss out a great traffic potential because many people first move to Google search for finding products and services. There is fierce competition to get listed on Google’s first page and only those sites win this race who adopt a good SEO (search engine optimization). So go through internet marketing websites and forums to learn the latest SEO techniques and use them for ranking your hotel website in Google. If handling the SEO of your hotel website all by yourself seems inconvenient for some reason, let it get managed professionally by any SEO agency.
4) Get More Bookings Through Google Business Profile
On the first page of Google, the 3 distinct local listings shown for local search queries are taken from GBPs (Google Business Profile) of businesses. So make a GBP for your hotel and get as many details filled out like address, number, photos, etc. After this, proceed with GBP optimization steps like building reviews, citations, etc as this will increase the chances of your GBP being shown much more frequently as compared to GBPs owned by other businesses. As seen in the case of SEO, you can either decide to work on GBP optimization by yourself or by getting it outsourced to any SEO business.
5) Get Quick Advantage with Ads
While ranking your hotel website is a good long-term marketing strategy for your hotel business, it does take time to achieve a good rank in Google. To roll things faster in your favor, using paid advertising to drive traffic and leads to your hotel business is a good option. In order to have good results with paid advertising, selecting and using only reputed networks like Google Ads and Facebook Ads is recommended because low-quality advertising networks will quickly drain your budget without giving you any good returns. Learn the basics of the ad platform where you intend to run the ads else you will end up getting lower returns or even negative returns.
6) Use Content Smartly to Get More Rooms Booked
Everyone interested in coming to your city/town will not be just interested in booking a hotel. Many of them will have plans to travel to famous spots in your city/town too and they will search for the same on Google. So, on your website, start posting articles relevant to popular spots in your city/town and you will soon find much more traffic and consequently customers booking rooms after going through these posts. You can start writing content on topics like “good places to visit in [city/town]”, “best thing to do in [city/town]”, etc.
7) Good Directory Listings Still Work
On Google. search for hotels in different towns and cities and you will easily find many directories existing in the top 10 results. If you go ahead and post your hotel details in these directories (that are ranking high), you will get two benefits. First is that your hotel site will receive more traffic (and customers) due to additional channels of online visibility attained from these directories. Second, the backlinks resulting from these directories will have ranking benefits for your site on search engines and this will lead to more visitors to your hotel website.
8) Don’t Miss Collecting Emails
Not all people make decisions instantly, some people go through many options and considerations before making a decision. So all visitors that come to your hotel website will not book rooms for various unknown reasons. You can, therefore, start collecting the emails of your site visitors so that many additional chances to convince potential customers will open up. To give a good reason for your site visitors to leave their email addresses on the opt-in form of your website, you can provide some discounts, free guides on local tourism, etc. Remaining connected with people through emails will also help you in generating many repeat bookings of your hotel rooms.
9) Use LinkedIn for Opening a New Channel for Customers
Though you will find mainly professional profiles on LinkedIn, you can use this platform to search for good partners for sending more customers to your hotel time and again. Since you will need to connect with travel guides, event managers, tour operators, etc to get leads referred to your business, you can easily find many such profiles listed on LinkedIn. So make good use of LinkedIn to get your hotel business introduced to those businesses and services that can send you new customers regularly.
10) Target Extra Rankings with Videos
Videos made around low-competition topics relevant to your city/town and posted on Youtube will start ranking in Google search results too and this will be your new traffic funnel. So start making and posting videos on Youtube selectively and you will see these additional assets bringing in more income for your business after some time.
11) Start Building Your Social Worth
Building profiles for your hotel business on social media has its own set of advantages. It gives links to your hotel website. It lifts trust in your hotel when people find an active and throbbing profile of your hotel online. It helps your hotel to get new referrals from other businesses from events, travel, and related sectors. So maintain an active social media profile of your hotel for getting these benefits.
12) Grow Your Hotel Business by Providing Add On Services
While it may not be possible for your hotel to accommodate a gym, spa, or other similar facilities, you can definitely tie up with the respective service providers and can offer these services as an add-on to your hotel visitors. This way you can collect more income per customer. You can also add such features in your marketing materials along with making the disclosure that these services will be provided by trusted third-party businesses.
13) Get More Travelers with Hotel Booking Sites
List your hotel on all the prominent hotel booking sites like TripAdvisor, Expedia, etc. Since these sites consistently spend a huge amount of money in promoting themselves, your hotel can also get benefit from the visitors of these online platforms. Some of such hotel listing sites also have premium plans using which you can get more exposure and in turn more customers for your hotel business.
14) Come Up with More Reasons/Features
For any person searching for hotels online, there are plenty of options for him. In order to make your hotel stand out, you must come up with some creative and unique features that are not present in other hotels. You can provide luxury tours (in partnership), pickup and drop facilities, seasonal menus, exotic drinks, etc. To prepare a good list of unique features, you can monitor the listings of all the top hotels in your area and can adopt the best features.
15) Introduce a Loyalty Program
In order to ensure that people who regularly visit your city or town choose your hotel to stay, you can provide some incentives like discounts or a loyalty program. On applying a loyalty program, you will find that the bookings to your hotel and the revenues will increase.
16) Use Augmented Reality for More Sales
You can give a better picture of your hotel details like various types of rooms, reception areas, and other facilities using “Augmented Reality”. By giving a more clear feel of your hotel, more people will get tempted to book a room in your hotel. It will also display your hotel as one step ahead of many other hotels that do not have this technology implemented for their business. You can very easily find the details of getting Augmented Reality technology implemented for your hotel online.
17) Start Promoting the Destination
A significant chunk of the population coming to hotels are those people who are travelers. By writing content on your city along with the top places to visit in and nearby your city, you can get the attention of many people who are likely to come to your city. Using such blog posts, you can very easily promote your hotel side by side. If you do not have the time to write such destination guides, you can contact any freelance writer and can get such articles written.
18) Get More Customers by Fine Tuning Your Pricing
You can adopt different pricing during lean and strong seasons in order to maintain a consistent flow of travelers to your hotel. You can also compare the pricing mechanism of competing hotels from your location and can revise your prices so as to stand more chances of getting selected by people.
19) Incentivise Taxi and Cab Drivers
Some people who arrive in a city or town without pre-booking a hotel for them can be brought to your hotel if you incentivize cab and taxi drivers with good commissions per customer. You can also put up advertisements on the vehicles of these taxi and cab drivers so that more passengers will become aware of your hotel.
20) Maintain a Highly Skilled Staff
Most of the time you will see that many tourists complain about the bad attitude of hotel staff and this, in turn, causes a dent in the revenue of the hotel. To make sure that your hotel doesn’t fall victim to the negative behavior of your staff, train your staff and maintain a direct review system using which you can warn your staff and can provide good services to your customers.
21) Team up With Event Organizers and Planners
Event organizers usually book hotels to conduct various seminars and events and this is why if your hotel business promotes good offers to various event organizers, you can get regular business from them. You can also ask wedding organizers and event planners to recommend your hotel for various events and functions.
22) Reach Out to Local Travel Bloggers
You can easily find owners of good travel blogs from your city/town online. Create a list of such blogs and reach out to their owners and ask them to promote your hotel in their travel guide. You can also give them some free coupons which they can publicly put up on their website for their readers. This process will also help in creating new backlinks to your hotel website which will assist your hotel website to gain a higher ranking in Google.
23) Get More References from Tourism Board
Every region has a tourism board and you can reach out to the officials of the local tourism board in order to get your hotel promoted and referred by them on their marketing materials. In exchange for this favor, you can give them either commissions or fixed monetary returns.
24) Tie Up with Travel Agencies from Other Regions
Reach out to travel agencies of different cities and regions from where you get most travelers. Send your business proposal to them so that they can refer your hotel to their clients and can get a certain amount of commission for every confirmed client that they send to your hotel.
25) Start Hotel Affiliate Program
Start an affiliate program for your hotel business so that the affiliates of your business would do all the promotion work in order to send you more customers. In order to access a readymade pool of affiliates, you can sign up on any big affiliate network site like Commission Junction.
26) Use Common Promotional Methods Too
Not everything and everyone is online, offline promotion methods for your hotel can also help you get more hotel occupancy. Advertising through banners and billboards near railway stations, paying commissions to taxi drivers, ads in newspapers, etc are some offline promotion methods for your hotel where you can invest to get good returns.
27) Check and Maintain Your Hotel Image Online
Reviews are, nowadays, an important part of shaping the decisions of people. On typing the name of your hotel in any search engine, people must not find bad reviews of your hotel. With more people saying good things about your hotel online, more people searching for reviews of your hotel will feel encouraged to select your hotel. So humbly ask your customers to leave their reviews about your hotel online.
Do implement these hotel marketing ideas to see astonishing results. If in doubt related to any topic covered in this article, let us know.
