Hotel Marketing Strategies – Supercharge Your Bookings

Implementing successful marketing strategies is key for the survival of both business and leisure hotels and is the most effective way to attract guests to stay with you. 

What are Hotel Marketing Strategies? 

Hotel marketing strategies cover a broad spectrum of activities that are all designed to drive more traffic to your hotel. This can include maximizing visibility on social media, improving Google rankings, updating your website, and sending targeted emails, among other strategies. The aim is to put your hotel at the forefront of the customer’s consciousness and make it more appealing than your competitors.

If you want to employ some new hotel marketing strategies to attract more clients and secure an increased rate of booking, consider the tried and tested methods below. These strategies are designed to improve brand awareness, drive more visitors to your website, and ultimately result in you making more sales. Sounds good? Of course, it does!

Beautiful and Strategic Website

The days of travel agent brochures are long gone, and instead, your website serves as your digital catalog for prospective customers. For this reason, it is absolutely vital that you have designed a website that accurately represents your hotel and the message you want to convey to visitors. 

A luxury boutique hotel with a boring and basic website is not going to fill people with confidence that they are going to get a luxury experience at your venue. Your website needs to be sleek, visually attractive, and functional. It is absolutely worth every penny to pay a professional web designer to build a website for your hotel because your website is essentially the middleman between you and your customer. 

Even if you have a number of excellent hotel marketing strategies to drive traffic to your website, this will be a wasted effort if people don’t want to stick around on the website and immediately look elsewhere. 

Build for Great SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and this is a vital component of building a successful website. Effective SEO will see your hotel listed among the top results in a Google search. Having a stunning website isn’t much use if you find yourself on page 5 or 6 of search engine results because most people won’t scroll that far through. 

Focus a proportion of your marketing budget on implementing SEO in your website. This is an ongoing strategy that you need to keep on top of if you want to stay high up in Google rankings.

Optimize for Mobile

The vast majority of people book their vacations on smartphones or tablets. They scroll through hotels and booking websites while waiting for a train, eating breakfast, or using the bathroom. This means that having a website that has been optimized for mobile use is essential. 

Mobile optimization involves ensuring a mobile user has an excellent experience on a website, including adjusting content to fit smaller screens and adapting the flow of the content. If a mobile user cannot access parts of your website on their smartphone, they will simply find an alternative hotel website that works well on their device. 

A website that has not been optimized for mobile is one of the key ways businesses lose customers, so this is a hotel marketing strategy that should not be overlooked. 

Speed over Style

We are living in a time of convenience. We know what we want, and we want it now, or ideally yesterday! If your website is slow to load, then don’t expect visitors to sit around and wait. Prioritize a website that runs smoothly and efficiently, even if this comes at the cost of style. 

Reputation Management

Managing the reputation of your hotel both during a client’s stay and afterward is an important part of marketing, which allows you to build relationships and exhibit your hotel’s excellent customer service. A customer who feels valued, appreciated, and listened to, is much more likely to return and recommend your business to friends. 

Prospective visitors who are reading reviews will be able to gauge the level of customer service they can expect to receive if they stay with you, so this is one of the easiest but very effective hotel marketing strategies. In fact, a research study by TripAdvisor found that 79% of travelers found that reviews were more useful when they had received a personal response from the hotel management, indicating that review responses are a key marketing opportunity that can have a big impact.

Send Out Emails or Texts after Each Visit

Following up with a client after they have stayed at your hotel gives you the opportunity to resolve any issues and listen to feedback. This is a key learning opportunity for your business, but it also allows you to display your thorough commitment to customer service and also keep your brand awareness high.

Respond to Reviews You Receive

Any reviews posted online about your hotel, whether positive or negative, should receive a personal response. This is an opportunity to thank visitors for their stay and take on board any constructive criticism. 

You should also remember that any response you make can be witnessed by other viewers, so use it as a chance to display how well your hotel resolves conflict or show the appreciation that clients have taken time out of their day to rate your hotel. This will help to define your hotel brand and show visitors that you value them.

Reward Guest Loyalty

You can help to entice past visitors back to your hotel by offering loyalty schemes. This can be a percentage saving on their next trip or a points system where they can accrue awards based on how many nights they stay. 

This is a great hotel marketing strategy to build a loyal customer base, as they will keep coming back if they feel like they are getting something in return. You should also market any reward programs to lure new customers to your hotel and use this as an opportunity to show customers that you appreciate their business. 

Nice Branding

Branding is all about creating an identity for your hotel. To do this, you need to understand what your customers want and how you’re going to give it to them better than anyone else can. Ensure you develop a cohesive brand that will be easily recognizable and memorable: learn more about hospitality branding!

Promote a Lifestyle, Not a Hotel

While you want to define your hotel brand to appeal to the right audience and create a distinctive identity, remember that people will buy into a lifestyle more so than a building with bedrooms in. This is especially true when marketing your hotel on social media, but it also goes for website content. 

Tap into a desirable lifestyle that will appeal to your target customers. For example, you could focus on images of happy couples enjoying luxury bottles of wine in your restaurant rather than close-up images of the bed linen.

Have a Target Audience

Knowing your target audience is key to successful branding. Most hotels won’t appeal to everyone, and that’s okay. Instead of being semi-relevant to a broad range of people, concentrate on being perfect for a certain type of person. Budget hotels could promote local festivals and proximity to public transport, while more upmarket hotels might want to make a point of nearby golf courses and fine dining restaurants.

Helpful Content Marketing

This is one of the simplest hotel marketing strategies for drawing visitors to your website who weren’t even looking for a hotel. 

By providing helpful information on your hotel website about local attractions and upcoming events, you will become a source for anyone researching the surrounding area. Once you have attracted them to your website with helpful content, you can lure them into looking at your hotel with other marketing strategies, such as having a stunning website. 

Write a Travel Guide with Great SEO

Most people will not visit a hotel purely because they like the look of the hotel. Instead, they will visit because they are interested in local tourist spots or events that are happening nearby. Capitalize on your local area by writing a travel guide blog for your website, with a focus on SEO. 

When someone looks for details about nearby attractions or upcoming events through a search engine, they will be directed to your hotel website, where they can find helpful information as well as a convenient place to stay. You should look at regularly updating the travel guide with new events to keep it relevant.

Promote Your Town’s Attractions on Social Media

Wherever your hotel is situated, you can guarantee that there is something nearby that will appeal to visitors, whether that be a theme park with wild roller coasters, a historic church, or a beautiful beach. Promoting local attractions on social media can make your hotel appeal to more people, and it will also make your content more searchable.

Email Marketing

Nobody wants to be bombarded with promotional emails; however, you are doing your customers a disservice if you don’t let them know about any offers you are running. Remember that keeping your clients up to date with potential savings is one way of ensuring good customer service.

Update Your Customers with Deals and Offers

Try to keep your email marketing to a minimum. Otherwise, you risk being resigned to the junk mailbox or receiving the dreaded ‘unsubscribe.’ Keeping your email marketing short and to the point will help to ensure your communication gets read and digested. Lead with promotional offers you are running, and tempt bookings with discounts and deals. 

Entertaining Monthly Newsletter

Keep in touch with customers with a monthly newsletter that has an entertainment focus as opposed to a clickbait vibe. Readers can quickly see through marketing emails that are targeted at securing bookings, so be a breath of fresh air in their inbox and aim to brighten their mood with an amusing anecdote or exciting upcoming local event.

Local Business Relationships

Co-Promote Each Other

Local businesses are an invaluable untapped source of new customers for many hotels. Work to build relationships with other businesses in your town and promote each other on social media, by word of mouth, or by having each other’s business cards on display. This is an easy hotel marketing strategy that won’t cost you anything and can only have a positive impact on all involved.

Contests

Running contests on social media is a quick and effective way to reach more people. Plenty of social media users will gladly share your post online if they stand a chance to win a free stay at your hotel because it costs them nothing and takes a mere second. This will help you to increase brand awareness and become visible to more potential customers. 

Promote Your Town

Every town has something to offer visitors. Even if your town has no attractions, then it can be a ‘rural and peaceful getaway.’ Enhancing the reputation of your town and bringing it to the attention of a broader audience will help you attract more hotel visitors.

Fully Utilize Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile is a tool that is free to everyone, and it allows you to customize the way your business appears in search results and maps on Google. Every hotel should be using this service to maximize its online presence. 

Conclusion

Implementing these hotel marketing strategies will go a long way to creating a more lucrative business and ensuring repeat bookings and long-term success. 

While there is no overnight fix to turn a hotel business around, utilizing social media and the internet effectively can allow you to witness results very quickly. You can become a pro at using social media for your hotel by reading our article and contacting Mediaboom to get help.