Digital Marketing is one of the key driving forces of the contemporary global economy. Almost every level of industrial hierarchy is directly or indirectly influenced by effective digital marketing techniques. Similarly, Digital Marketing in the Hospitality industry has an irreplaceable role to play. It's near to impossible to generate greater revenues for a hotel without having a full fledged online presence. Behind every well-established hotel brand stands a highly professional team with shrewd digital marketing acumen.
As simplified as it might sound, digital marketing imbibes a 360-degree approach inculcated by hospitality industrialists to yield results.
Hotel Digital Marketing is multifaceted to its core operational performa. The above stated digital marketing services are curated to the needs of the hotel brand in order to generate greater revenues and increase economic feasibility. Creating a proficient digital marketing blueprint is what leads a hotel to the horizons of excellence. A hotel that fails to empower its brand recognition through social media platforms is nearly invisible to potential customers which can further prove to be detrimental for the hotel brand and its reputation. For a better understanding, let’s comprehend the concept of hotel digital marketing with a detail centric approach.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing, in generic terms, refers to building a virtual presence of a brand encompassing online marketing strategies. Businesses utilize digital channels like search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers. Through digital marketing, you can outreach a larger audience inclusive of potential customers that will likely buy your product/services. Not only confining to its mainstream advantages, digital marketing is cost effective to a great extent keeping the conventional dynamics of marketing at bay and helps you to track the progress of your venture simultaneously at your convenience.
Hotel Digital Marketing
The operational performa of the hotel industry has dramatically transitioned over the past two decades. Hospitality industry is a major contributor to the world economy if we go around statistics. People being more travel enthusiastic and luxury savvy is what boosts the revenues for hotels at this date. This is exactly where digital marketing steps in. Hotel Digital Marketing or Hospitality Marketing or Hotel Online Marketing is creating, establishing and then time and again building your hotel’s presence online.
Physical booking of hotels and resorts or last minute table booking for weekend dinners was already becoming less often and now is almost a thing in past post COVID-19. Customers of all age groups prefer comparing and opting services online as of today. Even the current work lifestyle makes it hectic and an extra task for a person to personally visit the properties and thus is avoided 9 out of 10 times. Now, what does a customer or a potential prospect look for while surfing online?
The answer to this interrogative narrative can be easily drawn upon a few factors namely:
Ever-changing contemporary Industry trends
High-end services and unique operations
Online Reputation and Recognition
Customer Engagement
Hotel Digital Marketing envelopes the entire prerequisites of a hotel brand to run a smooth digital presence. The online hospitality marketing is customer fashioned including highly converting marketing messages. It does not only build your website strong but also works in favor for onboarding clientele.
Digital Marketing and Communication
Hotel Digital Marketing does wonders to your hotel venture. From keeping existing clients in the loop to attracting potential customers and investors through effective hotel digital marketing strategies, the hospitality industry maintains proficient supervision for accomplishing business objectives.
HOW to showcase the brand value and USPs of the hotel to customers, strengthening the hotel-client relationship and gaining recognition and reputation is very important for any hotel brand. Digital Marketing is effective only when your hotel website and offered services are certified and authentic.
According to the surveys conducted by travel and tourism industrialists, the upcoming years will record an expense of more than 200 billion dollars by the millennials on travelling and leisure. It has led the entire hospitality industry to run on their best possible marketing strategies in order to generate greater revenues.
Hotel Digital Marketing is profoundly beneficial for retention of present clientele. Lucrative and efficient marketing strategies are brought into action by hotels to maintain the prolonged engagement with existing clients. Fluctuation rates of annual ROIs are highly affected from the pool of clients that continue to show confidence in your hotel’s high end services and top notch hospitality comfort offered and curated for guests to create unique experiences every season. Some of these strategies can be listed as
Maintaining a constant dialogue with regular clients
Considering and curating the guest demands based on past experiences
Marketing refurbished vacation deals and offers suited to guests’ interests
Well-designed and maintained website for customer’s convenience
Assessing past reservations in order to filter priority guests
Majority of the guests look forward to the engagement with the hotel prior to and during their stay. Hotel Digital Marketing has advanced as the travel enthusiasts did over the last few years. Guests are more inclined towards healthy online reviews and hotel brand recognition to make their stay and expenses worthwhile.
Online travelling trends, current hospitality dynamics, market feasibility, fluctuation is cost effectiveness, these concepts are well known to the customers nowadays and thus, hotels have to always be one step ahead to mill profits.
This is exactly where Hotel Digital Marketing comes to use. Marketing the best lucrative deals knitted as per the guest demands and suited to the comfort of travel geeks is what hotels are running after. Luxury that is feasible yet safe, especially during such crucial times of pandemic is highly preferred by travelers. Work from home or ‘Workcation’ is the new normal when we mention corporate industry and tourism in one sentence.
1. ‘On repeat’ effective digital marketing strategies
Successful brand loyalty programs advertised to the right customers at the right time can increase generated revenues for the hotel property.
Incentive strategies that performed well in the past should be repeated emphasizing the motivation behind the guest preference and repeated bookings. Digital marketing provides your hotel a recognition that is beyond loyalty programs and incentives with greater rewards.
2. Customer Relationship Management
Your CRM score is what adds a great value to annual returns of your hotel property. Successful hotel marketing helps hotels to achieve profitable operations through more targeted marketing and deeper relationships with guests, groups, and corporate clients.
3. Destination marketing
Hyping your hotel services and making it entirely profit centric is not considered healthy for a hotel brand reputation. Prioritizing guests and their demands should be the approach of the hospitality industry.
Digital Marketing is being highly put into use for throwing light on travel destinations offered by hotels. Stay is secondary as travelers should be convinced where they are headed to.
How is your hotel's destination better than what all is being offered online? How do you ensure your guest’s safety? Is the destination really worth the visit? Will customers be able to create a unique experience to cherish?
Your hotel’s digital marketing strategy shall answer all of the above. Posting authentic and engaging content on your website can attract hordes of visitors. Strategies focusing on branding, cost effectiveness and incentive marketing can mill profits for your hotel.
4. Measurability of Digital Marketing
Hotel digital marketing holds the ability to provide you with entire statistics and metrics like impressions, views, visits, shares etc, right from the start to finish with a highly comprehensive approach. That is the first and foremost reason why hospitality witnessed a revolution in traditional brand advertising strategies. Broadcasting on television, newspapers and other conventional modes of advertising is almost in the past now.
Offline marketing efforts provide you with less to zero feasibility. Whereas, digital marketing helps you to keep a track of operational performa and accurate results within convenience. What's better than having knowledge about ROIs generated by each and every marketing effort and strategy.
In this era of seamlessly never-ending digital interconnectivity, Hotel Digital marketing invites a whole lot of marketing techniques onboard and how these strategies can be utilized to their ultimate effectiveness for the betterment of your hotel brand. What do you think is the reason behind the immense success of top hotel chains in the world of hospitality? Their capability to interpret customer demands better than anyone and out of box initiatives and marketing strategies marks the silver lining of their top notch hospitality services.
Engaging with customers should involve only authenticity and exchange of resourceful content. Digital marketing is useful only if the content being provided by your company is genuine. Clickbait strategies do not go along well in the long run for hotel brand’s recognition and reputation.
Digital Marketing: An online gusto approach by Hotels
Establishing your website online is just not enough. How you list it is what counts as a long term visionary. Digital Marketing has been proficiently utilized by the hotel industry to outshine the conventional hospitality standards and set new boundaries. Marketing now as a term in itself is diverse more than ever.
Worldwide recognized Marriott International’s Travel Brilliantly magazine serves as a perfect example of a successful hotel digital marketing strategy. Initially launched for millennial travelers is now a go to magazine curated as per the traveler’s desire for new adventures. The magazine excludes outdated travel destinations and trends and explores the new horizons targeting the travel geeks and enthusiasts who are readily looking forward to exploring the untapped destinations within luxury around the globe.
InterContinental Hotels Group has challenged the traditional hospitality methodologies and have unprecedentedly expanded the depth and breadth of hotel innovations. This 3-D virtual reality experience enthralls the visitors of InterContinental Hotels from the comfort of their private rooms or entertainment/gaming zone. The hotel has blended the hotel digital marketing to its best innovative style and have proved that sky's the limit.
Digital Marketing assists hotels to rewrite the rules of advertising and stay one step ahead by tapping into the innovation. In hotel marketing, being proactive and inventive always leads to success. This formula can make a winner out of any marketing professional team regardless of the size or reputation of the hotel that employs them.
Digital Marketing is characterized by the utilization of various digital strategies and channels to interface with clients where they invest a lot of their hours: on the web. From the website to a business' web based branding resources — online publicizing, email marketing, online handouts, and past — there's a range of strategies that fall under the umbrella term of "digital marketing."
Dynamics of Hotel Digital Marketing
Lets run down a few pointers to draw parallels between hospitality and digital marketing. The ABCs of digital marketing and how it has built its own essentiality over the years. These engagement strategies are frequently used by hotel brands to ensure higher ROIs and more economic feasibility.
Advertising destinations prior to services: Guests reach out for desirable destinations primarily. Hotels market their services by convincing guests with the help of content rich websites and listing their unique hospitality standards on online platforms. Due to the large number of users and visitors, virtual platforms also drive tourism of a hotel if digital marketing strategies are put into right use.
Concept of micro moment journey: Customers spend hours on their smartphones while planning for their next journey. Booking and reservations have become easy and fast as never before. Hotels work around these customer patterns and behaviors to boost their revenues. And all these detail centric reformations have resulted in the leading hotel marketers to implement refurbished and innovative strategies to connect at every micro moment. Responsive funnels are being emphasized upon to keep a check on the direct influence of every micro moment of the journey on the booking decision.
Inbound marketing: In the context of creating awareness, attention, interest and desire and
Outbound marketing: Utilizing content in context with creating community, value, quality and experience.
Inbound marketing involves digital marketing and social media marketing as driving forces for awareness, attention, and interest.
Optimizing the experience: In affiliation to micro-moment journey, we very well understand how machine learning has evolved tremendously and been used within the powerful aspects of artificial intelligence. With the increased needs of building quality relationships and personalized experiences with customers, alternatives like responsive funnels, chatbots, email, mobile applications, SMS are being extensively used by hotels to optimize customer experience.
Cognitive website designing: Hotels have merely 8-10 seconds to compel customers online in order to lead to well speculated decision of booking/reservation. Hotels have to establish their essence in the subconscious of the online visitors to influence their decisions. This is a collective effort inclusive of various constituents of hotel digital marketing like social media marketing, social media optimization, search engine optimization, affiliate marketing and much more. However, transparency, authenticity, responsiveness and trustworthiness are key factors that result in direct bookings. A guest will invest where his confidence lies.
Brand reputation and recognition: Your hotel’s content rich website and authenticity do not solely decide the number of bookings. Nowadays, instantaneously available online reviews and customer feedback in context to personalized experiences, hospitality standards & engagement tap into your hotel’s recognition and reputation. With the entire hospitality industry being listed online, one can easily carry his/her own in depth research about the hotel brand and its services. Star ratings, total number of reviews, price and feedback from authorities and guests hold fair share of significance.
Not just SMART, SMARTER: key performance indicators: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound, Exciting and Risky performance indicators measure your digital performance so far. Goal has to be holistic in order to gain recognition and more financial output. Creating a process that relies on listening, caring and connecting with the customers should be prioritized when it comes to digital marketing of your hotel brand.
Studying the components of digital marketing
The evolving hotel digital marketing techniques have replaced conventional modes of advertising in order to create unique opportunities for your hotel brand and ensure, by and large, cost effectiveness and expected net output.
Hotel Website SEO (Search Engine Optimization):
Search Engine Optimization in Hospitality can be defined as the process of optimizing your hotel website to "rank" higher in search engine results pages (SERP), thereby kickstarting and boosting the amount of organic (or free) traffic your website receives.
Hotel SEO enables the brand to strengthen its online presence, drive traffic towards the hotel website and increase the engagement and hotel bookings. To be noted as a key highlight. SEO is the backbone of Hotel Digital Marketing and holds crucial importance when it comes to online branding and recognizance. It also provides you with assured strategies to have an edge over fellow hotel competitors.
When your target audience surfs online for results, they receive a list of websites from the search engine. Post that, majority of the audience go with #1 result which they deem fit to respond to their query in the best and most effective way.
Successful SEO efforts will definitely list your website on the first page of search results itself. It's highly unlikely for the audience to surf through the second, third and so on SERP and with the underlying odds, a hotel website not listed on the first page is likely to go unnoticed losing the potential customers.
Social Media Marketing Strategies:
Providing users with an ample amount of opportunities, social media stands to be an inseparable part of our daily lives. And why wouldn’t such a place, where we spend most of our daily hours, be idyllic for hotel brands to list their brand recognizance and unique hospitality standards.
Social media marketing for hotels and resorts is a unique way to manage your online reputation, conduct customer engagement and track the success of social media campaigns.
With skyrocketing use of social media platforms, Hotels have taken it as an ‘must’ opportunity to build their customer base. Digital marketing involves a major proportion of effective social media advertising strategies. Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Pinterest are highly recommended and reviewed by potential customers in pursuit of having a full fledged idea before planning their next travel destination.
Hotels cater the needs of travel enthusiasts and diligently showcase the content of their brand in the most appealing manner that would not only garner the attention of travel geeks, leisure travelers and professionals looking for work holidays now termed as workcations but also increased the hotel revenues by boosting the number of bookings/reservations.
Showcasing your brand, creating exclusive relationships with customers, reaching out to new potential audiences and maintaining a consistent dialogue with customers over social media platforms are the key factors of social media marketing that inspire successful strategies implemented by hotel brands all over the world.
Creating Hotel Website:
In this 21st era where digital marketing has been empowered to such a great extent, unresponsive click bait strategies and spam content have been prevailing alongside.
You hear a name, you google it, you don't find the website, you ignore it!
A well established framework of responsive and authentic hotel website is so crucial that the audience will probably not even consider your hotel brand if you don't have a proficient and operational website listed online.
A website is the first and foremost place where guests and potential new customers look for information about the hotel. The information is available and accessible at all hours and thus, it is utmost necessary to showcase and present the brand value and high end aspect of your hotel and hospitality standards. A website is the main platform for communication with the guests. It has to offer various modes of communicating channels which users expect. A website should include an intuitive way to contact the hotel along with the navigation of the page being effortless and transparent. The website design should be based on a unique theme which allows the hotel to direct guests through the website in such a fashion that leads to the specific goal, for instance, to optimize the booking process by making it available on every micro level.
Website is not only a communication platform which enables simple communication with the hotel staff. Media is equivalently important because it sells the dreams and assures a guest the comfort as desired at the hotel without a second of hesitation. On top of that, there is a textual description which targets the emotions related to the experience of the stay.
Hotel Website Management:
A hotel website is what catches the eye and what creates the emotional impact that sells. From astounding and exclusive website design to following the latest Hotel Marketing trends, Hotel Website management involved a well operational CMS designed to make more direct bookings.
Hotel website management is basically an advanced, dynamic CMS built particularly for the hospitality industry for the most profitable and communicable channel of a hotel. It assures high functionality and usability with updated and advanced built-in features and the elegant, modern responsive layout.
Website management should ensure an impressive, professional looking, responsive website that is not only easy to navigate, but also add functionality to your web presence featuring great functionality, flexibility, maintainability and multilingual support, offering at the same time speed and simplicity. Hotel Website management provides native SEO support as it has a structure which automates the entire on-site SEO process creating well-structured, standards-compliant and secure websites. As the rate of online bookings increases, the importance of direct bookings is growing. A well operational website designed especially for hotels is the ultimate tool for communicating, understanding and helping your customers, significantly increasing your bookings.
Hotel Consumer Insights:
Hotel Consumer insights can be defined as the rating and reviews offered by the guests based on the hospitality standards of the experience during their visit.
Consumer insights are gathered from hotel guests like clean, freshly laundered sheets, pillows, and blankets that will retain a positive impact on the customers thereby reforming the customer experience. From offering regular housekeeping services to ensure stringent cleanliness levels are met to cutlery and bedding – everything must be in a spic and span condition.
Creatives and Technology for Hotels:
Creativity and Technology that improves the experience! It is another prospect of digital marketing immensely put into use for advertising and innovating hotel marketing strategies. Along with top notch hospitality services, hotels are making sure to provide their guests with high touch experiences.
Connecting the guests with hotel staff through mobiles and other smart devices, in room advanced technology installations like I-Pads and Television entertainment systems and outdoor theatre for unobstructed entertainment within comfort. Installing new systems designed to assist staff members gain instant knowledge into a guest's status while also ensuring guest’s convenience and privacy.
For example, a fusion of motion and contact sensors enables the staff to know whether rooms are empty or occupied — keeping awkward room service run-ins at bay! Guests also can designate their status as “Do Not Disturb" or “Maid Service" from inside their room via LEDs designed into room number signs which signify the status to staff both visually and via a signal sent to a computer/mobile device.
Besides being able to offer high speed Wi-Fi for conferences and business meetings, hotels also need to provide access to audio-visual (AV) and digital facilities for professional gatherings. While the amount of AV and digital equipment that goes into a typical conference room is fairly minimal, staging companies are frequently hired for diverse projects in order to arrange the facility as required. Hotel guests in the 21st century are looking forward to themselves being pampered by a wide range of amenities fueled by new technology.
Maintenance of Hotel/Resort Website:
Converting lookers into bookers is a task. Maintenance is not the most pleasing aspect of hotel management, but it is surely one of the most important. The entire investment to attract guests could be a wasted effort if your hotel property stands to be unkept and not up to the mark upon arrival.
Hotels must ensure that everything listed on the website is experienced by the guests upon arrival.
Using high resolution media (image and video content for website)
More relatable mode of communication like narrations or personal experience of hotel guests
Easy to access link for social media platform of the hotel brands
Engage the customers with Google 360 degree tour
Update the website with blogs on hotel and travelling trends
Entertain the visitors with event page of your hotel website
Directing them to subscribe to the newsletter
Furthermore, hotel/resort website is not one time investment and rather requires evergreen efforts and SEO to keep your hotel website listed in one of the top recommendations. Instead of acknowledging anything less than perfection, it is recommended relying on the right hybrid of effective technology and attentive staff to keep your hotel in pristine working order and adhered to authenticity,
When you rely on a content rich website and effective marketing strategies for increased tourism, you only advertise and promise the best experiences of your hotel property and thus it is hotel’s primary duty to ensure the maintenance on ground for zero obstruction in guest experience.
Your hotel website is the flagship of your hotel brand, which is highly judged by online traffic based on the ratings, reviews, the standards of hospitality services provided by your property, customer engagement and there is a list to it. The continuous Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing also drive the crowd towards your website.
Hotel Web Design:
Customer-friendly hotel website designs drive more reservations. The hotel website should be designed in such a way that it retains a fine impression on the visitor and educates a potential customer on the whereabouts of the hotel brand. The Hotel website should be professional, inclusive of photos of and information about your amenities and services, and represent everything you stand for—whether it be unique services, gratifying accommodation , or a desirable location.
Your hotel website should be comprehensible, attractive, easy to navigate and engage with as in otherwise cases, the audiences can be easily distracted by your fellow competitors. Furthermore, a responsive web design with a mobile friendly design can increase the traffic inflow on your hotel’s website.
With responsive design, your hotel’s website will be easy to navigate, view, browse and use for booking purposes on every device. Responsive design alone can dramatically improve your website output, and increase the conversion rate of users looking for their next hotel stay from their smartphone. Hotel reservation software and management applications can be integrated with your website to provide guests the ability to book their own stays.
SEO services and feedback management also serve their purpose in placing your website in higher rankings. On top of that, some of these systems can be positioned to work with Google searches, so that those looking for a hotel in a specific geographical area from Google can see your hotel’s availability right in their search results!
Bang for your buck: ProMiller
Behind the successful digital marketing techniques and strategic implementation stands highly professional and proficient, inculcating years of industrial experience, a marketing team holding rich hospitality acumen. One needs to speculate and be aware of the risks involved while investing in hotel business. Risk involvement cannot be afforded by many startups who are already competing with firmly established and worldwide recognized hotel brands.
Thus, it's a crucial decision to trust your website with a third-party organization. Well, to keep the risks involved at bay, ProMiller is the one stop solution to all your worries. It lets you handle your mainstream venture while taking care of your online brand recognition and establishment.
Our services include:
Social Media Marketing Strategy for Hotels
Create Hotel Website
Hotel Search Engine Optimization
Hotel Website Management
Search Marketing for Hotels
Hotel Consumer Insights
Creatives & Technology for Hotels
Hotel Website SEO
Maintain Hotel or Resort Website
Hotel Web Design
Hotel SEO Services
It is vital to choose a niche Hotel Digital Marketing company after looking through their portfolio and past assignments with Hotels across India and beyond. Most hotels under a management agreement with ProMiller have given the responsibility of digital marketing to us and have been very satisfied with the results. We make sure our client experience unobstructed services catered to customers’ needs by our digital marketing professionals.
Conclusion
Hotel Digital Marketing embarks the successful advertising of your hotel brand on virtual platforms with a large user base. It increases the online visibility of your hotel across various digital channels. The online reviews and ratings shape your brand reputation and lead to customers opting for your hotel services over the fellow competitors. Being consistently engaging and responsive to the customers/guests proves to be of great significance. Along with maintaining a constant dialogue with clients, the brand has to equivalently put efforts to reach out to the potential customers for business growth which is highly facilitated by digital marketing.
Hotel Digital Marketing showcases your message to the audience that resonates with your brand value and segment of hospitality. With a well established website, the brand will be at a great advantage by implementing marketing strategies that increase reach, rankings, and conversions. The 21st century travel geek prefers to hunt down his next travel destination by surfing online.
From social media platforms to Google search, everything is a prerequisite in shaping this decision. As a hotel owner, you have to be present where your ideal customer is. In our 21st era, it’s the digital world.
Written by Ritik Negi