A Comprehensive Guide to Hotel Marketing

According to data, the global retail value of the hotel business has surpassed $500 billion, with the US market accounting for $200 billion of that total. But how can you get the word out about your hotel in an industry that is becoming increasingly difficult daily?

With online travel agencies (OTAs), SEO, CRM, and other factors to consider, hotel marketers might become overwhelmed. However, you understand that without a strong hotel marketing strategy, your hotel would struggle to meet its revenue and occupancy targets. Not sure where to start?

Fortunately for marketers and hoteliers, this article contains useful information on how to market a new hotel and recommendations on how to promote a hotel online and attract hotel visitors. Check it out!

What is Hotel Marketing?

A strong hotel marketing strategy is the foundation of your hotel’s success and is essential for recruiting and engaging guests in an increasingly competitive industry. With a detailed plan, your hotel can effectively convey why guests should – and must – book your hotel rather than your competition.

The right hotel marketing strategy allows you to appeal to the right audience at the right time and in the right way, ensuring that you not only get the guests your business requires and deserves but also stay top of mind through personalized and targeted remarketing campaigns that foster guest loyalty and a strong reputation through reviews and word of mouth.

The Role of Marketing in the Hotel Industry

With the rise of digital media consumption, most hotel marketing is online. Any issues discovering your hotel online will harm the number of reservations. You should develop your hotel’s presence on the most relevant web platforms so guests can locate you and book in seconds from the comfort of their sofa.

Over 75% of travelers use search engines to find accommodations, so you must be on top of your SEO game. Use trendy hotel keywords in your website content and budget for paid ads, as hotel-related adverts dominate the search engine results page.

Dive into website statistics to see where customers are booking, and then target those platforms by participating and developing a competitive presence. Investing in certain platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and travel websites is a tried-and-true technique for increasing website traffic and conversion. You may not flourish on every site, but your presence will allow individuals who use various digital media to find you.

Building a Strong Brand Presence

The ultimate goal of establishing and developing your brand is for your hotel(s) to gain more recognition and increase customer awareness of what your brand represents. This should reduce your acquisition cost over time, allowing you to steadily improve revenue and profits.

Here are a few important tips to help you get that recognition:

1. Create a Marketing Strategy

   This involves selecting how you will design your website, what third-party channels you will use to sell, what types of emails you will send, which other businesses you will collaborate with, how you will affect your reputation, how you will develop loyalty and much more.

2. Prioritize a Mobile-Friendly Booking Experience

   With fresh research indicating that mobile booking is becoming increasingly popular, your brand experience on mobile must be the same as that on desktop or any other platform. The moment a web page fails to load or a booking experience becomes clumsy, the brand image you’ve built begins to erode.

3. Embrace the Power of Social Media

   Social media might be where your brand comes to life. If you upload something that goes viral for the right reasons, allows followers to engage, or fosters a feeling of community, your audience will do the rest for you. It’s critical to develop your social media strategy and consider how you’ll convey your brand’s narrative in a way that gets people talking.

Digital Presence and Online Visibility

A strong digital presence and online visibility are crucial for hotels to reach and engage with potential guests in today’s internet-driven travel planning landscape. Optimizing your website for keywords and enabling direct booking should be top priorities. For example, highlighting your hotel’s family-friendly amenities while using schema markup helps surface your pages when parents search for “best hotels for kids near Disneyland.” Clear booking widgets help convert that interest into direct reservations.

Beyond your site, managing and responding to reviews on public listing sites like TripAdvisor and Google helps improve impressions and rankings in search results. Platforms like these essentially aggregate opinions to determine reputation.

Finally, leveraging paid tools like Google Ads, social media promotions, and programmatic display ads can enhance visibility by putting your property in front of those likely to travel to your area based on their browsing history. Combining owned, earned, and paid avenues creates an effective online presence.

Effective Content Marketing Strategies

Creating content is one thing, but you must also ensure that it reaches and resonates with a broad audience. Here are some of the top suggestions to consider when implementing your strategy:

1. Optimize SEO

   To improve your results in Google’s algorithm, focus on high-volume keywords. However, remember that some of your customers are searching can be long-tail keywords with low volume. You should continue to generate information around these topics since travelers will find it beneficial. It’s also critical to have a mechanism to monitor the effectiveness of SEO strategies, such as Google Analytics.

2. Excite your target audience

   Today, 84% of people expect companies to offer an experience, solve their problems, and provide experiences. Interactive material has also been shown to enhance conversions, so consider providing prospective guests something enjoyable to consume, like a quiz, that also allows you to acquire their information.

3. Encourage reviews

   Reviews are nearly always something travelers look at before booking a stay at your hotel, so you must work hard to satisfy your visitors and persuade them to submit a review on your social media or sites such as TripAdvisor.

Leveraging Online Travel Agencies (OTAs)

OTAs have transformed how customers book hotels, flights, and other travel accommodations. These platforms act as go-betweens for tourists and hotels, offering a simple and effective way to discover, compare, and book rooms online. Also, below are a few strategies to help you improve hotel bookings:

1. Use a Distribution Channel Manager

   A hotel distribution channel manager is an application that allows you to manage many distribution channels from a single location. Using one can assist you avoid having to access each OTA separately to alter things like room rates or availability. This can help you implement a considerably more dynamic pricing strategy, allowing you to simultaneously alter prices on a single OTA or all OTAs.

2. Take Advantage of OTA Promotion Opportunities

   Hoteliers may make the most of what Internet travel agencies offer by taking advantage of special offers. This is especially critical during times of low demand when keeping rooms occupied becomes the priority. Some promotional alternatives include paying for higher visibility on OTA search engines or conducting ad campaigns targeting targeted populations at specified times. You may also be able to pay larger commissions in exchange for increased visibility or participate in special deal promotions provided by some OTAs.

3. Know Your Competitors

   The hotel industry is highly competitive, and your hotel and its primary competitors will most likely compete for the same clients on the same OTAs. As a result, it is critical to learn about your competitors and understand what they offer their clients. This can include conducting independent research, reviewing online criticism, and monitoring prices.

Email Marketing for Hotels

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective and practical strategies to reach guests and increase direct reservations. First and foremost, you must optimize our mailing list, which contains many prospects. They should be high-quality leads that can be identified by analyzing previous findings. This approach can be simplified by providing easy-to-fill forms on your website and asking your consumers in person during their stay.

After establishing a sizable target audience, you can use holiday-themed mailings to attract possible guests. Offer discounts and personalized incentives for sending targeted emails during busy periods. Send theme-based emails to your prior clients, particularly those who purchased upgrades and upsells.

Innovative Strategies for Customer Engagement

A hotel’s top priorities are connecting with guests, providing excellent service, and gaining loyalty. So, here are some hotel guest engagement techniques that will allow you to improve visitor engagement and experience:

1. Interact Through Social Media Channels

   By being present and responsive on social media, you provide guests the opportunity to get their queries answered while also promoting your current special promotions. Being available on any platform to meet your guests’ needs allows them to engage on their terms and in the environment that suits them best.

2. Send a Welcoming Message

   Automating a welcome message is a simple operation that can be extremely successful. It’s an opportunity to jumpstart hotel engagement with a simple introduction and make your new guests feel appreciated. It’s an opportunity to share information that will help your guests arrive more smoothly, such as facts about online check-in processes or directions to your location.

3. Provide Personalized Alternatives

   Gathering data before the guests come allows you to create upgrade offerings that appeal to their demands. If you know they prefer a high floor, consider upgrading to the penthouse suite. If they specifically requested a view, you could upgrade them to a room with a better view.

Utilizing Influencer Marketing

Giving up a free night to potentially earn hundreds more in the future is certainly worth it, as this may happen if you successfully attract an influencer to your hotel. Offer them a complimentary stay with all amenities included, and simply ask them to promote your brand to their enormous and loyal following. You can even provide them with a promotional coupon to encourage their audience to book.

Leveraging Visual Marketing

Marketers who incorporate video content into their efforts, whether via social media or organic search, see 34% greater conversion rates. As a result, hotels that do not invest in this smart technique will miss out on a chance.

Here are some significant data to help you build your case for video marketing:

• 84% of video marketers use Facebook as one of their primary video marketing channels.
• People are watching more videos online than ever, and the number has doubled since 2018.
• 70% of YouTube visitors have purchased from a brand after viewing it on YouTube.

These are just a few reasons why all hotels should include a strong video marketing strategy in their digital marketing plan.

Strategies for Local Marketing

Local web marketing is the process of promoting a business or service within a specified geographical area. It entails leveraging digital technologies like websites, social media, SEO, and other online channels to reach local customers.

For example, your strategy can include developing a hotel website, running social media advertising targeting individuals in the hotel’s vicinity, and optimizing content for SEO so that it ranks higher in local search results. Word of mouth is also an important component of local online marketing since it fosters confidence with potential consumers and encourages them to reserve rooms at the hotel.

Further Read: Social Media Meets Google Business Profile: Here’s Why You Should Care

Data Analytics and Performance Measurement

Data analytics is transforming how hotels approach marketing. Hotels can develop individualized and targeted marketing campaigns for specific consumer groups using a data-driven marketing approach. This increases revenue and provides a more tailored user experience for guests.

Furthermore, hotel business data analytics can be applied beyond typical marketing channels. As you know, most firms are currently focusing their marketing efforts on social media and influencer marketing.

Hotels can analyze data to identify social media influencers representing their target demographic. Furthermore, by collaborating with these influencers, hotels may broaden their reach and interact with potential visitors more deeply.

Challenges and Solutions in Hotel Marketing

One major challenge hotels face is driving direct bookings rather than having guests book through third-party sites like Expedia. This cuts into profit margins due to commission fees. Creating loyalty programs and offering discounts or perks for direct bookings helps combat this challenge. Email marketing focused on limited-time deals for subscribers helps hotels establish more direct relationships.

Another big challenge is managing distribution across the major OTAs. Listing on too many OTAs can undercut attempts to emphasize direct channels, but avoiding them altogether reduces reach. Strategically limiting availability on certain OTAs during high-demand periods can help maintain rates and establish market precedence.

Future Trends in Hotel Marketing

Keeping up with the current trends in hospitality marketing is essential, but it is also critical to grasp the context of these developments. With this in mind, the following is a breakdown of trends pertinent to the whole hospitality industry:

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

   AI streamlines procedures and provides useful insights. Most online hotel room seekers utilize aggregator websites to book their stay, while others may visit a hotel’s homepage but depart without booking. Most consumers prefer interacting with hotel staff rather than submitting preferred dates and check-in details, which can be time-consuming.

   Using AI chatbots on your website allows you to give personalized service while developing a robust infrastructure. Your visitors may now place room service requests through your AI-enabled website, saving time for your hotel personnel.

2. Capitalize on Experiential Tourism

   Traveler preferences are shifting from destination-focused to experience-focused tourism, creating a tremendous marketing opportunity for hotel providers. Travelers are increasingly lured to distinctive experiences, such as concerts by Taylor Swift and Beyonce or athletic events. For example, when Beyonce visited Cardiff in May 2023, hotel occupancy was 95.7%, and the average day cost was GBP 200.15, both of which were record highs. Travelers are willing to pay to stay in hotels, offering easy access to activities.

3. Multichannel Marketing

   As the term implies, multichannel marketing involves promoting your property on multiple media. This encompasses social networking networks, OTAs, and meta-search engines. These platforms have acquired significant traction over the previous decade and remain the most popular marketing trend in the hospitality industry. The reason for this is the convenience with which hotels can be booked and the availability of multiple options on one platform.

Conclusion

Regarding increasing efficiency, hoteliers must take advantage of all available online and offline possibilities. Offering more streamlined direct booking alternatives on your website and mobile booking apps and attractive pricing and incentives can position your hotel to take a piece of the independent hotel market.

Furthermore, with so many digital channels available today, hotels must fulfill the demand for personalized and enticing content that competes with OTAs and meta-search engines. Creating relevant, useful, and interactive content for your potential visitors will help you increase brand awareness, trust, and a more positive impression of your resort.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I optimize my hotel’s online visibility?

Optimize your hotel’s website for search engines and local listings to boost your online visibility while claiming and updating key travel site profiles. You should also regularly solicit and highlight guest reviews and run paid search and remarketing campaigns to drive direct site bookings.

How can hotels effectively use social media for marketing?

To use social media for marketing, start by identifying the top 2-3 platforms your target guests are on and creating lifestyle content and hashtag campaigns optimized for engagement on those sites. Then, strategically use promotional offers, contests, and geotargeting for location-specific social ads that build awareness and website conversions.

How can hotels balance direct bookings and OTA partnerships?

To balance direct bookings and OTA partnerships, offer incentives like discounted rates, upgrades, and loyalty points for direct bookings while highlighting these benefits prominently on your site, and simultaneously negotiate competitive OTA commission rates and availability to encourage direct channels.

What are the benefits of a loyalty program in hotel marketing?

Hotel loyalty programs increase repeat visits and guest spending by delivering personalized rewards and recognition that evolve based on member status tiers and purchase history.

What are the emerging trends in hotel marketing?

Leading trends in hotel marketing are AI-powered customization capabilities, expanded mobile features like digital keys and messaging app customer service, self-service kiosks, and forming strategic partnerships with brands that resonate with your guests’ interests.