As an independent hotelier, you have to constantly market your hotel to attract steady business. Unfortunately, if you’re not a part of a large chain and you don’t run a huge property, the time and attention a solid marketing strategy takes can be a drain on your resources. When you’re trying to drive direct bookings, the challenge can be especially intimidating.
Thanks to the rapid evolution of technology, the internet, and marketing, you now have plenty of strategies and tactics to build a Book Direct strategy at your disposal – but how can you carry them out and still have the time and money for the rest of your hotel’s operations?
Today’s post will feature a list of tools that will simplify your hotel marketing. Specifically, we’re focusing on tools for 5 areas:
- Creating the perfect guest persona
- Researching and generating content ideas for a hotel blog
- Organizing content ideas
- Better visual content
- Data analysis
These tools will help you get key hotel marketing tasks done faster, easier, or better – maybe all three!
Let’s get started.
Tools for Creating the Perfect Guest Persona
A guest persona – or 3 – is a powerful tool in your hotel’s marketing arsenal. When you have a profile of your ideal guest, complete with name, goals, and other details, it’s much easier to create a focused marketing campaign. You can use your guest personas for marketing campaigns, for staff training – even to help you design your website.
Here are 4 tools to help you get there:
1 GoSquared
A real-time analytics tool for monitoring, reporting and understanding web traffic. GoSquared helps you crunch turn the data behind your website into something you can really use to understand your guests.
2. Woopra
Woopra builds a comprehensive profile for users by syncing customer data and tracking their activity. It’s a solid tool for understanding how specific groups of people interact with -and behave on – your site.
3. Typeform
Typeform is a great surveying tool – it has simple, clean design, an incredibly easy to use system, and a multitude of options. The free version has many features, so there’s no need to go pro if you don’t want to. You can created forms, surveys, and quizzes for your guests and even to gather feedback from staff members.
Tools for Researching and Generating Content Ideas
Content on your hotel website is important for a number of reasons. Your basic website content is your chance to write about your hotel in compelling language to draw in visitors. If your hotel has a blog or a news section, your content can be linked to from any number of sites – this is great exposure, and both kinds of content are great for SEO.
However, it can be difficult to come up with ideas or to guess what your guests want to read – so don’t guess! Here are 5 tools to give you excellent topics and the right keywords.
1. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a simple and easy to use tool for generating content ideas. Once you’ve entered a keyword related to the type of content you want to create, it lists the most popular posts by social share from sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc.
Buzzsumo even lets you filter content by date and type of content. Types of content include:
- Infographics
- Guest Posts
- Articles
- Interviews
- Giveaways
2. Keywordtool.io
Keyword tool.io is a popular alternative to the Google Keyword Planner. It generates over 750 long-tail keyword suggestions from Google, Bing and Youtube with a single search. You can get the top 20 or so of these for free, which is usually enough! You can find the best keywords for your hotel – which keywords are popular, but not too competitive.
You even get a handy copy button, which lets you copy and paste your entire list into a spreadsheet or word document.
3. Soolve
Soolve is useful alternative to Google’s autocomplete for keyword research.
