You’ve created a wonderful story. Now it’s time to sell it – advertise on digital channels, get found through a search or build advocates. Hotels and accommodation providers can no longer ignore this area. Its time to adopt these online marketing tips to promote their hotel and get found online.
The world is your oyster when it comes to promoting your business. In the digital world, almost anything goes and everything is measurable. Typically digital promotion works within these parameters. There are 6,586,013,574 searches a day worldwide. To put it into perspective, there are on average around 500 million tweets per day, so 13 times more.
Things you should get familiar with
Search engines are a powerful channel to connect with audiences. They should be at the centre of everything you do in the digital world.
SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING
A marketing strategy that is aimed at growing your ‘organic’ (unpaid) visibility on search engines like Google, Bing and Baidoo. The aim is to do everything you can – technically and via content – to ‘rank’ high on the first page of the search engine, increasing your visibility and hence the likelihood of a click through to your website. Find out the basic SEO terms, you should be familiar with & tips to master this essential digital marketing segment.
PAY PER CLICK MARKETING
A model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically. This includes ads on Google AdWords, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Within this, you can have a display (banner-style) advertising or search advertising.
ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT
Knowing what is being said about you and managing it well. Its techniques and strategies ensure that people find the right materials when they look for you on the Internet. We look in depth about the role of PR in this later in the guide. “92% of consumers regularly read online reviews to learn about a business.”
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
After search, social platforms are the most powerful platform to engage customers and drive web traffic with the aim of conversions – for most properties, this means a booking.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
One of the oldest forms of marketing on a digital platform. Affiliate marketing is a revenue share model where you incentivize others to sell on your behalf.
CONTENT MARKETING
Use smart storytelling to do the selling as explained above. Find out more on how you can do content marketing here.
EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. Marketing automation tools are available such as Mailchimp,etc to do direct efficient email marketing.
MOBILE MARKETING
Reaching out via mobile devices, be it text, apps and more. Booking via mobile device is rapidly increasing especially after the pandemic hit, Focus on your mobile marketing to attract potential stay-cationers.
BOOKING ENGINE
The most crucial aspect of digital marketing for a hotelier is to have a smooth booking engine. A good booking engine can get you far and earn you lucrative direct business and also provide a seamless user experience for a potential booker.
ANALYTICS
The best part of digital marketing is DATA. It is about making informed choices and using customer information and behaviour to make your marketing machinery personalised and more efficient. This article has been taken from STAAH’s Free eBook on Digital Marketing Toolkit for Independent Hoteliers.
Source : www.blog.staah.com