Hoteliers have long known that locals both frequent their property’s restaurant, spa, or cafe – and stay overnight at their hotels. Because of this, a budget for local search marketing campaigns is often included in annual plans.
NB: This is an article from ScreenPilot
The concern is that some local search campaigns don’t perform as well as their national campaign counterparts and therefore, may fall off the scale of importance and priority. However, here at Screen Pilot, our Search Marketing teams have seen local campaigns compliment our clients’ nationwide efforts effectively. By combining research with offering strategy and timing, we’ve seen local search campaigns decrease average CPC and increase click-through rates.
Here are a few tips you can use to improve your local search campaigns.
Customized Offerings
In order to customize your offerings, you must know who is staying at your hotel or resort. What are the guest personas of your property? What do those personas perceive as value and need? Guests living in the same city as your property are different than those traveling the entire state or visiting for a one-night stopover.
Because of this, it’s ideal to create different packages that cater to these different guests. Those staying for one night are most often business travelers looking for special rates on short stays. Other local travelers may be looking for a weekend getaway so packages discounting weekend nights or even credit to your restaurant or spa may be appealing.
Seasonality Matters
In most areas, there is a high and low tourist season. The locals in your area may want to visit the property during high season or they may want to drop in once the tourists have left. By knowing this, you can build on top of your customized offerings and promote them during the times when locals are coming to your hotel most often.
Determining when the locals visit your hotel most often will create a trend which will help you know when you should have your local campaigns running for the best return.
Promoting Local Events
The best way to drive more local bookings is by promoting local events. More than likely, people are coming from all around the state for a music festival or large sporting event.
By creating a package dedicated to this event, you show that your property is knowledgeable about the area and it is a great opportunity to include special rates not only on tickets to the event but on their stay at your property.
Our Findings
In Screen Pilot’s local search marketing efforts, we’ve seen an uptick in metrics. By customizing our ad copy with packages created for locals, our average on-site conversions nearly doubled for our clients who practiced this strategy, and click-through rates increase as much as 10% when we work to promote local events.
Our local event campaigns also procure the lowest CPC out of all unbranded efforts. On average, our seasonality efforts also paid off with CPCs dropping $1 and cost per conversion increasing upwards of 59%.
Overall, we’ve found local campaigns to be a great compliment to our branded efforts. By customizing copy, and promoting local events in the right seasons, we’re creating hyper-targeted local efforts searching for a hotel.
Take these tips and create more focused local efforts for your property.
