We know third-party channels play an important role in the hotel marketing space, they are necessary and drive revenue. However, it is still important we do not forget about brand.com, the hotels own website and driving direct booking through this channel.
Your hotel’s own website, social media and email communication channels are the best way to gain loyalty, grown brand awareness and drive RevPAR by increasing direct bookings.
- Messaging: Why should someone book with you? Think like a customer, booking.com or trivago are fast, simple and easy to use. You can price check, search multiple properties, earn genius points and simply click to book with all your details saved. So why would someone book directly on your website? Communicate clear and concisely why they should book with you – Best Rates? Better rooms? Loyalty points?
- SEO: Most guests will find your hotel’s website through a search engine like Google or Bing. Take time and work on your website’s SEO. Focus on local search, on page optimisation and a strong content plan. If you publish high-quality articles on your blog and add relevant pages it can really help drive organic traffic to your website. Ensure your do your keyword research and focus on adding content to these pages which adds values and improves overall customer experience.
- Power of people: Now more than every ‘customer feedback’ is crucial in influencing booking decisions. How we collect this feedback and respond plays a vital role in the booking journey and winning new customers from competitors. Ask for feedback, collect it, monitor it and reply. Try to anticipate and action and negative reviews on site before guest leave. You can enhance review generation by email marketing campaigns and surveys post stay or mid stay. Customer feedback on your website has been shown to increase direct bookings.
- Niche-based holidays: Be different, OTA’s tend to run standard b&b or Room only packages. To drive booking focus on added value and be creative with niche holidays and experiential traveling. Focus on unique offers and tailor your packages to suit the need of your target customers, long gone are the days of one package suits all. Be creative and explore trends such as sustainability and eco-travel which are here to stay.
- Videos & Virtual Tours: Well-curated video content and virtual tours on your own website are powerful, nothing entices a potential traveller more than a visual display of what they can experience at the property. They inspire wanderlust, bedroom videos, behind-the-scenes tours, drone shooting and bring the property to life with staff and characters all help tell the brand story and encourage bookings and have been proven to be highly effective marketing tactics in 2021, this will not slow down into 2022.
- Be Social – Notice how this one isn’t called social media, it is no longer enough to post on social media, you need to be active, be engaging and be social. Interact and communicate and aim to build a community, with this comes loyal followers. Video again will be key for social media and is one of the best ways to bring your hotel to life online. Social Media is a highly competitive channel now and for a business to be successful they need to have a strong content plan and really get to know who their target market is and the type of content they react and interact best with. Good social content will drive traffic directly to your website and help improve brand awareness.
Like to find out more – get in touch email hannah@getdigtialni.com.
