Hoteliers are Going Gaga Over These 11 Hotel Digital Marketing Strategies

We all have learned that food, water and shelter are the three basic needs of human beings. The Internet is the newest addition to this list.

Nowadays, people rely on the internet for everything. From a nearby tea stall to a hotel miles away from your current location, the internet has answers to your every question. To put it in one line ‘Internet is an Epitome of Information’. 

To find a hotel at any location, the very first thing you do is search ‘Hotels In XYZ’. And you’d be looking for 3 factors before making a reservation –

• Price Range
• Guest Reviews
• Hotel’s Website

Your hotel’s search ranking depends purely on visibility; which is a result of algorithms, quality content, and how visitors engage with your website. Your ranking on Google depends on visibility. This online visibility depends on your hotel’s digital marketing strategies.

You might have a lot of questions now. What is digital marketing? How to do it? How will it benefit me more? 

The answers to all your questions are here. So grab a hot cup of tea and let’s get started.

What Exactly is Hotel Digital Marketing?

Hotel digital marketing (also known as hotel online marketing or hospitality marketing) means building and maintaining your hotel’s presence online. This includes social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in addition to Google and other search engines.

Consequently, you should accept the fact that hotel digital marketing gets you more bookings, better visibility and of course a stable brand name in the market.

Why is it Important to Have Digital Marketing Strategies for Your Hotel?

In today’s era, most of the visitors search for hotels and other services that they provide. With a good hotel online marketing strategy, you’ll be able to approach all these potential guests and build a loyal customer base for your business.   

Guest’s journey begins by discovering your hotel on metasearch engines, social channels, or organic search like on Google, Yahoo, and more. Being visible on these channels is more important than ever. 

Digital marketing strategies for the hotel business should encompass search engine optimization and numerous paid and organic channels to give your hotel visibility throughout the research, consideration and final booking phase.

We are listing out some of the best strategies which you should implement for best results. 

11 Best Hotel Online Marketing Strategies

1. List your hotel on Google

Before the internet era,  people used “Yellow Pages” for searching business information. ‘Yellow Pages’ was a directory which had a registration of all kinds of business. From a plumber to a government official, everyone was on it. 

Well, this concept became a thing of the past as the internet and ultimately search engines dawned upon us. Now everybody wants to get their business registered on Google. From a barber shop to the world’s tallest hotel, Burj Al Arab, it lists every business.

As a hotelier you might have two questions –

• How do I list my hotel on Google? 
• Is it free of cost? 

The answer to your second question is – ‘Yes, Registering your Hotel on Google is free!’

For the first question, let me take you through the step-by-step process, also discussing various features to enhance it. 

Google My Business, also known as GMB is like creating an E-Card for your business. It helps to bridge the gap between business owners and end users. 

Basically, before making a booking, guests search for any property they’d be staying at. From facilities to star categories, ratings, and reviews to photos, the price range to FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), a potential guest searches all. 

Now to start with the listing part, install “Google My Business” on your smartphones for easy updates anytime. You can also opt for a website version.

Once installed, all you need to do is fill up the registration form with the required information such as the hotel’s name, star category, location, facilities, and so on. 

It is important to check the contact details of your hotel. An inaccurate location and contact no. impacts search results and booking flow.

When searching for a business online, 80% of consumers lose trust in business with incorrect/inconsistent contact details.

Moz’s Local Search Ranking Factors Survey

Once you’ve filled out and submitted the form, you’ll receive a code for business verification. Post verification of your hotel, you need to enhance your listing. 

‘Google My Business’ provides you with salient features such as:

• Rating and review.
• Collection on your hotel’s business page.
• Auto-update user-generated content geotagged with your brand.
• Adding site manager.
• Integrated meta-search for hassle-free bookings.
• Hotel attributes

With your business now finally listed and updated with content, you need to focus on maximising your reach amongst the audience. Because, if you’re not even visible online; then regardless of how much you slog, it’s not going to work.

Now, how to be reachable online, you may ask? Comes in the oomph factor – 

‘Simple. Get your hotel website designed.’

#ProTip: While you have invested your time and efforts in GMB, do not forget to enrol for Google’s Free Hotel Bookings Link. This new program by Google allows hotels to display booking rates and acquire direct bookings for free (also, no third-party commissions involved). Click here to learn more about Google FBL.

2. Have your website

Now, having a website is the next step in hotel’s digital marketing strategy. And when I say a hotel website, I don’t just mean put up some poor pictures, add 2 lines of content about your hotel, and be done with it.

Basically NO. I mean a hotel website that showcases your amenities, your hotel location, your rooms, and everything else that your hotel is.

Just like how we designed the hotel website for one of our users:

Mobile Website Optimisation

People prefer finding anything on a smartphone rather than on a desktop. Mobile-friendly websites are most recommended by smartphone users.

Here are some analytical aspects of mobile optimization from Think Google – 

• Mobile searches for “hotels with XYZ facility” grew over 60% in the past 2 years (AC Hotels with pools, Albany airport hotels with shuttle service, anchorage hotels with a hot tub in the room, Arizona hotels with lazy river, Atlanta hotels with smoking rooms).

• Mobile searches for “place to travel” with different combinations have more than doubled over the past two years.

• Across nine markets, researching hotels and airfares on a mobile device is as common as shopping for clothing.

• Friction on a mobile site when completing a booking can lead to travellers trying another site.

Nowadays guests want to make a hassle-free booking. As per the above facts, having mobile optimised increases booking inflow and maximises revenue generation. 

With the website now being made you need to optimise it in the best way. Remember, your end goal is to be among the top search results. For this, you need to perform good SEO. 

3. SEO: The backbone of websites

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. Performing a good SEO will rank your hotel higher on the search engines, thus giving you the visibility your hotel needs.

Above all, it is very important for you to strengthen your online presence.

But how’d you do that? Here’s a solution for that

Download our FREE handbook to measure your hotel’s online presence

It’s a downloadable guide that explains to you how to improve on OTA rankings, booking engine’s performance, review management and 40 other important aspects of your online presence.

Hotels appearing in top search results invest more in their SEO part.

Although some go for paid or as we call them organic listings. But do you know, there is a secret trick which usually none of the hoteliers follows? That covert technique emphasises local SEO.

Emphasis on local SEO

So, what is local SEO? 

This part of SEO focuses on the visibility of your business in local search results. For example, let’s say you have a hotel in the Paharganj area of New Delhi. So the local SEO keeps focusing on your hotel to be in ‘hotels near me’ or ‘hotels in Paharganj’ results.

The task is quite simple. Just mention places near your hotel from Google Maps in ‘About Us’ or fact sheets. This could be anything from a famous landmark to any specific road. Post that you can optimise those keywords for better search results.

4. Ads, ads and more ads!

Next, we talk about Metasearch Engines viz. Google Hotel Ads, TripAdvisor and Trivago. Believe it or not, listing on these metasearch engines will not only boost your visibility but also improve your brand value.

However, being available on metasearch would require you to be open to receiving direct bookings. The more direct bookings you get, the more you’ll be pushed up in the industry.

Especially when I talk about Google Hotel Ads. It’s gradually proving to be Google’s saviour in disguise for hotels struggling to reduce dependency on OTAs. To dig deeper into this, you can check our blog post on how Google Hotel Ads help increase hotel revenue.

There has been a 2.4X increase YOY (Year On Year) in Google Hotel Ads referrals from smartphones.

Google Analytics

Instant exposure always has its benefits. However, it has its fair share of drawbacks if your ads aren’t managed and optimizing your ads.

You should run dedicated ad campaigns on Google (Here are some FREE Google Ad templates which you can use to create your ads) and Facebook (Instagram comes with it). There are many benefits to engaging in such campaigns. Moreover, they make sure that your hotel is visible and the information about your commendable services reaches the right people.

Other Ads

However, Facebook Ads are the cheapest way to attract more guests. So, you can easily get more bookings through the platform by staying within your budget.

Similarly, even Remarketing Ads give you amazing opportunities to bring your hotel business the light by targeting those people who’ve already visited your website. Hence, there are higher chance that they’ll visit your website to book with you.

So, if you’re not yet listed on any metasearch engines, now’s the right time to do that.

5. Go social the social media way

Presence on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube is not a new thing these days. But, making the most of that and utilizing it to its best potential is what you need in your digital marketing strategies for hotels. 

Secondly, going live on these platforms is one effective approach to increase the engagement of your followers.

Social Listening

Social listening is monitoring your social media accounts for mentions, promotions, user content generation, lead generation and more. This is an opportunity where you could promote yourself by engaging in posts across all your social media highlighting your brand. 

Let me put it this way, what would you do if someone mentions you in their Instagram post? Simple, you’ll promote that post on your Instagram page.

So basically, every time someone geotags your hotel or mentions it in their post across social media platforms, acknowledge it. This improves your engagement level and creates a good impression on your potential guests. 

6. Tell your story through video

While checking any hotel’s gallery you might have seen video-based content on their websites. These videos show a 360-degree view of the hotels. They include a wide-angle capture of all the aspects of a hotel such as the lobby, room interiors, restaurant, swimming pool and so on. 

This helps in gaining the trust of the guests. Let’s look at the video of one of our customers for a better understanding.

Hotels are creating videos highlighting the precautions they’ve taken for hygiene post-COVID-19. The video gives insight into preventive measures such as hotel sanitization every day, staff being checked for COVID-19 for temperature before entering the hotel, use of masks, gloves, and sanitisers by staff, and so on. 

Here’s a short clip of GoStop Hotels. They’ve created this unique video post-COVID-19 on reopening.

Videos like these help guests in choosing the perfect hotel to stay in. It also gives them an inside peek into the hotel’s facilities, making it a solid source of information. The best option to maximize the views is uploading the same via YouTube. Once the video is on the platform, you can opt for YouTube SEO.

What is YouTube SEO?

YouTube SEO is the process of optimizing your videos, channel, or playlist to rank higher amongst the relevant search results. This includes the textual context of your videos such as meta description, keywords in titles, hashtags, and so on. 

The focus part here is keywords since the system cannot read images or videos. However, people don’t realize that just the title and description are not the only sources of text. 

Transcripts, Closed Captions (CC), and subtitles are also used for it. You can take the help of any marketing person to implement this in your YouTube videos. Using this in your videos enhances viewership, user engagement, and SEO.

Technically, subtitles, CC, and transcripts are a part of your keywords. Including this in your video helps in improving your ranking amongst search results. 

7. Don’t forget email marketing

Today, people generally underestimate email marketing. But, hotels can use it efficiently and effectively if they want.

Factually speaking, emails are the best way to communicate in both our business and personal lives. 

With the help of email marketing, you’ll be able to connect with guests by sending them pre-arrival emails and providing them guidance about selecting the best amenities as per their budget.

And it helps you stay in touch after they leave your hotel via post emails.

In the same vein, you can utilize the booking confirmation emails to engage your guests who’ve booked your hotel room.  

This way, it attracts new guests and retains existing guests which is important to earn great ROI for your business. 

8. Take advantage of influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is one of the effective online marketing strategies for hotels. It is a tool that a hotel can use when they want to attract a huge audience. Hotels contact an influencer who has the power to affect the purchase decisions of others. 

However, it’s an easy option for hotels as an influencer has a good reputation for their knowledge and expertise on a particular topic. 

Influencers can help you by posting about your hotel on their preferred social media channels and can engage their followers on your blog.

9. Blog it right

Hotel blogging is an excellent way for hotels to take advantage of a medium called blogs. It offers the ability to expand deeply on topics and attract like-minded readers i.e. guests. 

The reason blogging is a great tool is – that it not only provides deep knowledge about a particular topic to the visitors but also convinces them to dig deeper for your services which is surely a win-win situation for you.

Travel Blogs are trending among travellers. Let it be a backpacker or a group of wanderlust friends, everyone researches before travelling to any destination. The best source of information for them is blogs highlighting information on local sightseeing. Most of the hotels create a pamphlet or a fact sheet to help guests with such information.

As I have mentioned earlier, Google is the most stable source of information, these factsheets are things of the past. The best way is to digitise all this information in the form of an engaging blog. 

These blogs will guide travellers with relevant information on local attractions. Also, they would help your website gain more views with local SEO.

10. Practice the trend: Chatbots

Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in the hospitality industry lately. Not only can they help with conversions, but they can also improve your brand’s reputation. As a result, this increases trust and engagement with your would-be guests.

Implement chatbots to answer your guests’ inquiries

Subsequently, chatbots improve communication, direct people down the path to booking, ensure your 24×7 availability and reconnect with visitors who have abandoned their bookings.

Try implementing chatbots on your website and see how your bookings increase with a considerable hike in guest satisfaction.

11. Maintain your online reputation

Overriding any belief you might have in your mind for your hotel’s online reputation; you need to accept the fact that the hotel industry was, is and will be revolving around guest satisfaction.

Negative feedback is just as valuable as positive feedback.

Jack Canfield

And why not? You NEED to know what your guests are saying about you. How else will you improve your services?

Besides, these online reviews are the key elements these days. All your guests – current and future ones are going to check those reviews and ratings to decide on their stay with you.

That’s why maintaining your online reputation is an important aspect of your hotel’s digital marketing. Additionally, keep a close track of your ratings and key review sites and determine your goal firmly where you want to be!

Set an objective of what you want your guests to say about your hotel once they leave. Hence, a well-maintained online hotel reputation will help you get more bookings.