During peak travel seasons, such as the summer or the holidays, hoteliers experience strong booking numbers from travelers.
NB: This is an article from Travel Media Group
But what about the times of the year that see a sudden decrease in demand and room occupancy slowdown? Well, to prepare for those moments and prevent as much slowdown as possible, it is imperative to build a strong digital marketing strategy for your hotels that addresses three key areas.
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Those areas include the following:
- Social Media
- Online Guest Review Response
- Hotel Reputation
By solidifying these critical aspects of your digital marketing strategy through actively managing them, you will be able to cultivate repeat business at your hotels.
Reach Travelers with Social Media:
The first key piece of the puzzle to gain more repeat business is enhancing and optimizing your hotel’s social media presence. Most hoteliers already understand the importance and impact of social media but lack the knowledge of how to reach travelers via social platforms. First, you need to get organized with a social media calendar or content schedule. This will ensure that you have a consistent posting cadence of social media content for your audience. The significance of regularly posting at the same time from week to week is that guests will begin to anticipate your social posts and be more likely to engage with them.
Second, when it comes to social media, the content needs to be exciting and eye-catching. Writing enticing captions and uploading high-quality images are vital to the overall success of social media. Lastly, respond to your guests when they leave comments on your posts or share a post. Doing so will encourage your followers to engage even more and boost the performance of your hotel’s social posts on various sites.
Stay Connected with Guest Feedback:
Next, online guest review response is a topic that many individual hotels and hotel management groups know is fundamental to their businesses but may need help finding dedicated time for. Again, this practice is another piece of the puzzle to cultivate release business and is arguably the most essential component. Carving out time to read online guest feedback on review websites like TripAdvisor, Booking.com, and Google Reviews and responding to each review on these sites ultimately improves guest loyalty and allows a clear understanding of what travelers say about your properties.
This immediate and real-time feedback from travelers gives insight into the guest experience at the hotel being discussed in the review, which is information potential travelers actively research. Remember that writing uniquely crafted responses explicitly tailored to the guest who wrote the review is strongly recommended. Genuine responses are best practices regarding review responses and generate more guest engagement.
Capture Bookings with Online Reputation:
Last but certainly not least is the hotel’s reputation. Your reputation will play a pivotal role when looking to capture bookings and welcome back previous guests. A strong online reputation consists of a robust social media presence, highly rated hotel scores on review sites, and the overall ranking of your hotels in their respective market compared to the competition. A well-built reputation takes considerable time and effort to achieve and must be continually upheld. Successfully delivering on the digital front and at the property level is required to cultivate repeat business and increase hotel revenue.
Implementing the most time-efficient and cost-effective digital marketing strategy is challenging. It is even more complicated depending on the availability of associates at the hotel, being that the industry is going through a staffing shortage.
