man looking in despair reflecting on possible broken elements within their hotel marketing

Hotel marketing is an incredibly complex web of tools, programs, sites, and third-party systems.

NB: This is an article from Travelboom

In order for your marketing to work at its potential all systems must be functioning, and when you built them… they were.  Unfortunately, over time things break, stop working, change or are simply just forgotten.  One of the oft-forgotten aspects of a great hotel marketing effort is going back and checking what you “think” is working great.

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When you do this, you’ll more than likely find that what you thought was a fine-tuned marketing machine is in dire need of some maintenance.

In our history we have built and optimized hundreds of sites, booking systems, and marketing programs.  We have also found (sometimes the hard way) several things that seem to just break on their own.  These 10 things are what we have found need to be checked, and checked often, to ensure your marketing efforts are as effective as possible.  We recommend you test all your systems at least quarterly and this checklist of hotel marketing fails will give you a great start of where to look.

Hotel Marketing Miss #1: Email Collection Systems

The prospect funnel at any hotel is based on a well fed email database.  Unfortunately many times your funnel is broken and you don’t even know it.  One of the most common issues we find when evaluating new client sites is one or more of their email collection tools simply do not work.  This may be caused by a field that no longer exists, a database location that has changed, or the system that sends emails from your website to your email distribution system has old credentials.

Solution: Test Your Forms

You don’t know which form is broken if you don’t test.  This means going through every form on your site at a minimum of every quarter and filling it out.  Then making sure that the submission you just created appears where it should, be it your CRM system, email system, site database, or an email recipient.

Hotel Marketing Miss #2: Your Mobile Site Is No Longer Mobile Friendly

Any good hotel marketer is constantly adding new content to a site; new articles, photo galleries, planning tools, and more.  However, sometimes these great new hotel marketing tricks end up tricking us by not working so great on the myriad of phones, tablets, and screens we would expect.  We have found this is a very common issue with the most common issues being:

  • Fixed width content not scaling down to the proper phone width
  • Pop ups appearing on mobile devices
  • Buttons and text overlapping
  • Video systems not working

The Solution: Pick Up Your Phone And Test

This comes at no surprise, but you should be browsing your hotel’s website at least once a month (honestly daily is not too much) and making sure that everything is working and rendering as you would expect.

Read rest of the article at Travelboom