Reacting to seasonality and optimizing your hotel website are keys to combatting recurring demand declines. By employing appropriate digital marketing strategies, hotels can increase direct bookings while decreasing OTA commission fees.
Offer experience-based packages like beach yoga, wine tastings or excursions with local partners. Establish urgency with expiring discounts, final booking deadlines or countdown clocks that countdown down. Doing this may turn visitors who were just browsing into booking customers.
Align Your Marketing Efforts With the Seasons
An intelligent seasonal approach to marketing your hotel can increase online visibility, drive direct bookings and help recover from slow seasons. By taking advantage of dynamic pricing models, targeted content and seasonal promotions on your website, you can take full advantage of each season’s opportunities.
An effective way to match your marketing efforts to the seasons is by understanding which travelers frequent your hotel in each season. For instance, beach resorts might see their peak season during summer when families seek relief in water activities while ski resorts typically experience their highest traffic volume during winter – using this information, targeted campaigns can be developed that speak directly to each season’s visitor demographics.
Experience-based packages can also be an effective strategy. This may involve hosting cooking classes with your head chef, wine tasting tours in the cellar of your hotel or providing guided walking tours through its grounds. Offering such special experiences helps set your property apart from its competition, and they can be promoted both through automated messages sent to in-house guests via an in-house guest messaging platform as well as your website.
Use personalized advertising techniques to attract guests during the off-season. Use programmatic retargeting to show ads targeted directly at products they have seen or hotels they have visited; users will feel like those ads were tailored just for them and may encourage them to book now!
As part of your holiday-specific campaigns, interactive content on your website can help engage visitors and generate more leads. Engaging experiences may include quizzes, videos, calculators and games which engage people directly with your marketing. Interactive experiences are particularly effective during low season when demand drops significantly and competition for audience is high.
Attracting new audiences during the off-season is key to growing your hotel business. By employing creative ideas, partnerships, and targeted promotions during this low season period, you can increase demand while keeping revenues running at full steam.
Create Content That Resonates With Potential Guests
If you want your hotel to thrive, its digital marketing must attract the interest of its target audience. This involves adapting seasonality, optimizing website navigation and managing online reputation actively. A well-rounded strategy using social media, email marketing and video content will enable an effective presence online that drives bookings.
Blog and article series can showcase your property’s special qualities while showing your knowledge on relevant travel-related issues, like attractions and events in your region. Likewise, these blogs and articles serve as ads for your hotel, reaching new audiences regularly.
As special events and holidays approach, take advantage of them by offering limited-time promotions like free rooms or discounted rates to increase guest attraction and build brand awareness. Promote these offers in email newsletters, social media channels and paid advertisements to maximize impact.
Use your hotel’s unique attractions combined with nearby restaurants, services and events to create compelling packages that attract guests. For example, consider teaming up with an area yoga studio for an exclusive yoga experience for guests or offering wine tasting packages as special treats for special events like graduation.
Utilize social media channels to showcase staff who possess a genuine love of hospitality, helping travelers plan their trip. Share fun and informative videos or posts featuring staff stories or behind-the-scenes glimpses to establish trust with your target audience and build genuine rapport with guests.
Geo-targeting your social media campaigns to target guests from specific regions can increase engagement and reach. Furthermore, behavioral targeting on your hotel website allows for personalized promotions tailored specifically to visitors based on past booking history or preferences – encouraging guests to book directly rather than via online travel agents (OTAs) while potentially offering exclusive loyalty benefits or rewards for booking directly with them.
Offer Incentives to Encourage Direct Bookings
Your website serves as your hotel’s digital storefront, so it is critical that it receives as much consideration as a physical location would. Regular updates with rooms and specials should help draw in customers, while in off-season periods you could consider offering group bookings to corporate entities as a form of advertising your property to new guests.
Incentivize direct bookings by offering incentives. Travellers may opt to book directly if they can receive additional value such as room upgrades, free amenities and loyalty rewards or more flexible cancellation policies. It is vital that all marketing communications clearly articulate your unique value proposition in order to attract guests directly.
Use social media channels to promote direct booking incentives during the off season. With more time on your hands to create content and plan posts calendar, as well as take on larger projects like audit and photo shoot, now is an excellent opportunity to focus on search engine optimization of both hotel website and booking engine to increase conversion rates.
Email marketing can be an extremely effective tool to drive direct bookings. Customized emails featuring your booking engine and special direct booking offers are easy to create; plus it helps maintain relationships with existing guests as well as secure repeat bookings.
Your hotel website can also serve to promote seasonal promotions and persuade guests to book directly rather than through an OTA, using various tactics like benefit nudges and popovers. Furthermore, making sure the booking process is intuitive is key; to do this successfully you should create a user-friendly interface as well as address any usability issues on your site – ultimately turning visitors into paying guests without incurring costly commission fees from online travel agencies (OTAs).
Optimize Your Website for Search Engines
Hoteliers still stand to gain from marketing their websites even though many bookings originate through Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) or metasearch engines; by optimizing design, content, SEO techniques and managing online reputation. Doing this can result in direct bookings being increased.
An intuitive website offers guests an effortless booking experience and makes direct hotel booking easy. A high-quality user-friendly site should feature transparent pricing information, room availability and specials; photos of the property and amenities; as well as an effortless reservation system.
Hotels using data-driven digital marketing techniques, like Google Analytics, can monitor website traffic and conversion rates to identify areas for improvement and thereby enable hotel marketers to optimize ad copy, landing page content and other digital campaigns that attract website visitors.
Utilizing guest testimonials, social proof and customer reviews can be an effective way to build trust with potential guests and improve an establishment’s online reputation. Hotel marketers can encourage such reviews through post-stay follow ups, email communications and social media promotion.
Hotels attract leisure guests during low seasons by offering discounted rooms or packages, promoting seasonal activities nearby, and creating holiday and family packages. Hotel marketers should communicate these offers urgently and exclusively in order to convert browsers into bookers.
Hotels looking to optimize the impact of their marketing campaigns should utilize high-impact ad formats, such as targeted social media posts, email promotions to segmented lists, PPC search ads and onsite signage ads. Such strategies have proven more successful at producing a higher conversion rate and positive return than more traditional forms of advertising.
Acquiring guest information is crucial to building a long-term clientele, yet can often prove challenging for hoteliers. Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) often obscure customers’ real email addresses when booking direct with hotels; as a result, hoteliers must devise innovative methods of gathering this data, such as using Google Business Profile or offering an intuitive reservation interface on their hotel websites.