Hotel digital marketing is a term used to cover a number of different methods to promote your hotel online and build your online presence.
NB: This is an article from Arise
There are over 5 billion internet users worldwide and it’s most people’s first stop in their buying journey. So what can you do to make the most of it for your hotel? And why is it so important?
Digital marketing for hotels (also known as hotel online marketing or hospitality marketing) is vital to drive direct bookings, reduce commissions being paid to OTAs, boost visibility, fend off competition and grow your brand online.
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A complete digital marketing strategy for your hotel will help with all of the above and ensure that your hotel is in front of more potential guests, whilst nurturing existing customers and building brand loyalty.
How To Manage Hotel Digital Marketing
As previously mentioned, digital marketing is a term used to describe a number of different online methods to showcase your hotel. Some of the main ones include…
PPC (Pay Per Click – AKA. Google Ads & Bing Ads)
The primary aim of hotel PPC is to ensure your hotel is getting more bookings, but not relying on OTAs for this.
The likelihood is that if you sell your rooms through OTAs (online travel agents) like Booking.com, they could be running PPC ads for people searching your brand name and stealing potential traffic from coming direct.
Whether it’s through an OTA or your own website, a booking is still a good thing. However, wouldn’t you rather reduce the commission being paid to these OTA’s and encourage people to come direct?
That’s where PPC comes in! PPC for hotels gets your website visibility on search engines for lucrative keywords relevant to your hotel.
We’d always recommend two types of campaigns here; a brand campaign protecting your brand name, encouraging people to come direct, and a competitive campaign targeting more generic, yet related keywords such as “hotel in your location“.
An effective hotel PPC marketing strategy can quickly get your hotel excellent visibility on search engines to encourage more direct bookings, usually for less than you’d pay in commission to the OTAs. And what’s more, you’ll be visible for more widespread searches you weren’t visible for before. Win-win!
Not only can you advertise on search engines, but you can also run metasearch ads to gain visibility on other sites such as TripAdvisor and Google Hotels.
Rather than bidding on keywords, metasearch is much more brand-led and is a great way to showcase your business on hyper-relevant websites, for people already searching for your brand or related searches.
