Are you using retargeting as part of your hotel’s market strategy? If not, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.
NB: This is an article from Staah
Here are some reasons as to why and how to make your direct bookings soar through retargeting.
What is retargeting exactly?
Retargeting targets potential hotel guests who have already visited your hotel’s website including your booking engine by displaying advertisements for your hotel to them on other digital platforms. It’s easy to do – just install a code or pixel on your hotel website, either on the entire site or just one specific page, and you’re ready to get started.
When a person visits your hotel’s website, this code places a cookie in their browser. This cookie allows you to retarget the visitor using ads on various channels, like search engines, social media, and countless third-party websites
Why is it important to your business?
Imagine the revenue benefits you could achieve if only 3% or 4% more of your traffic turned from lookers to bookers.
Retargeting can help you with this. By using retargeting and experimenting with different marketing strategies, you’ll be able to ensure that more of your traffic converts.
To put it simply, hotel remarketing is a strategy that helps you engage with your website visitors who might have abandoned your hotel’s website page at any given point. This is a way to remind the online user to visit your site again and complete the booking.
Why is it helpful? Well, let’s try to understand the users’ mind for a moment. The prospect is searching for hotels on Google or on an OTA site. The online user browses your page and abandons it without making a reservation. In this case, your site held the attention of the user but did not help him/her make a final booking. Retargeting to those who did not convert is your Ultimate mission.
Where should you begin?
Using remarketing ads for hotels, you can use various methods to remind the online user at different points about your hotel brand, offer a discount, engage and drive a booking in no time. This is a valuable tool that targets those users who visited your site and were not converted into customers.
There are different ways you can retarget your prospects online. Three that come to mind are site, email and search.
1) Site retargeting
Site retargeting is a great way to target prospective guests who have visited your hotel’s website in the past. You can tailor display ads based on the content they viewed on your site to show more relevant ads. In most cases, these ads are only shown to people who didn’t make a booking. This way, you can either leave those customers out of display campaigns (so as not to overwhelm them with ads after they’ve already booked) or give them the extra nudge they need to make the reservation.
2) Email retargeting
Email retargeting supplements email marketing campaigns by targeting consumers who have opened your email. Using a simple code in the email, guests who open your email will then see ads for your hotel on sites throughout the web like Facebook and YouTube. It’s a subtle yet powerful way to target your email subscribers without bombarding them with more emails.
3) Search retargeting
Search retargeting uses the keywords that prospective guests search for on Google or other search engines to target them with display ads. You can tailor display ads to people searching for keywords specific to your geographical region, like “Sydney bed and breakfast” or “Northland weekend trip.”
4) On-Site Targeting
You can retarget your visitors on your website too! Why let them go without making a booking and then chase them on other platforms? Instead, you can retarget the visitors who are leaving your website without making a booking on your website itself.
Tools like Hellobar and Optimonk give you a facility to display a popup to your visitors when they are leaving the website without making a booking. Here, you can display a popup with some offers or promo codes to make them complete the booking on your website.
This is a great way of converting the website visitors into the bookers.
Quick remarketing tips for hoteliers
- Use a strong campaign idea that offers great deals to your previous visitors. This should entice them to visit your site again and make the booking.
- Use the most appropriate keywords and opt for those that will reach a higher volume of users.
- Your objective is to gently remind your prospective customers about your hotel brand without annoying them constantly with remarketing messages. Be subtle.
- Use these remarketing strategies to increase hotel bookings and keep the flow of visitors coming in regularly to your property.
- on-site retargeting, if a person is about to leave the website before making a booking, you can retarget them with some offer, etc. You can use tools like Optimonk and Hellobar for on-site targeting.
