Hotel Marketing Strategies Blog

Feel free to download this chart to help you with your hotel PPC campaign.

Josiah,

I added your site to http://hotels.alltop.com/

Thanks,
Guy Kawasaki

Alltop is an “online magazine rack” that aggregates the top blogs and news stories. Check out their new hotel section, or any of the other categories they have.

Twitter is one of the fastest-growing social media networks, a microblogging tool that allows its users to make text-based posts in 140 characters or less.  An estimated 5.5 million people now use the service, with website traffic up 573% over the past year according to Compete:

The whole service is based around letting you answer the question, “What are you doing now?”  While this may initially seem like a waste of time with little relevance to a hotel marketer, many organizations have found it useful as a one-to-many broadcasting tool.

Here are some ideas for using Twitter in the hospitality industry:

• First, use Twitter Search to see what people are saying about you, your competitors, your area, and your industry
• Like most of social media, Twitter isn’t just about pushing what you have to sell.  Try to be genuinely hepful to your followers. (JetBlue shares travel tips)
• Share ideas and links to interesting stuff you find.
• Ask your followers for advice on new ideas.  (Get way to get concise, helpful feedback.)
• Break news on Twitter, especially if it affects your web presence
• Use it as a tool to improve your customer service (like Frank at Comcast)
• View Twitter as a way to build customer relationships, and show the human side of your company

So go sign up for an account today, and be sure to follow us on Twitter for all the latest hotel marketing tips.

As we’ve covered in the past few weeks, the vast majority of internet users now expect companies to have a presence in social media.  There are a number of popular social networks in the travel industry, and since most travelers use the internet for trip planning, it’s important that you have a good reputation there.

How can you encourage positive reviews of your hotel in social media websites?

1. At check in, encourage your visitors to register at Yelp.com or TripAdvisor if they haven’t already, so they can discover some of the best local attractions.  Ask them to review your hotel once they’ve signed up.
2. Ask guests to review your hotel online at the end of all guest satisfaction surveys you distribute.
3. When you receive a positive survey response, thank the guest by email, and send a link to tripadvisor.com with a request to rate your hotel there.
4. When guests compliment you on your facility, thank them and say you would really appreciate if they would review you online.
5. Customize a special landing page on your hotel network, so the first web page guests see when they connect to the internet contains links to review sites.  Here’s a very basic sample page:

It all comes down to understanding the importance social media reviews play in a potential guest’s decision making process. So whether you ask a guest to review your hotel, or encourage travel bloggers to write about you, your goal is to take advantage of every opportunity to expand your web presence and improve your online reputation.

Have 15 minutes to spare?  That’s all you need to optimize your hotel website for search engines. Since search engine optimization (SEO) brings you free traffic, giving your site a tuneup could be one of the best uses of your time. (Note: this requires basic knowledge of HTML editing, so if that’s not your thing, send this to your web designer.)

So without further ado, here is my SEO Checklist for hotel websites:

Keywords

• In the site URL?
• Density between 2-5%?
• In H1 and H2 headings?
• At the beginning and end of your page?
• In image ALT tags?
• In Meta tags?
• Avoid: keyword stuffing

Links

• Keywords in anchor text of links to your site?
• Quality sites (high pagerank) linking to you?
• Similar sites linking to you?
• Links from .edu and .gov sites?
• Avoid: too many outgoing links
• Avoid: linking to bad websites (low pagerank or link directories)

Meta tags

• Description tag created?
• Title tag - with a few top keywords?
• Keywords tag?
• Avoid: the Refresh tag

Content

• Is your content frequently updated?
• Is it unique?
• Is the code standards compliant?
• Avoid: old content
• Avoid: invisible text (keyword stuffing)
• Avoid: duplicate content
• Avoid: flash content

Some more resources to help you build a search-friendly website:

• SEO tools by SEO Chat
• SEO tools by SEO Book (great Firefox browser extension)
• Pagerank checking tool
• Web Standards
• Costly SEO mistakes you must avoid
• 21 Essential SEO Tips & Techniques
• 55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love

Brian points out an eye-opening study recently conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation for Cone.  According to the online survey, 93% of social media users thought companies should be using social networks.

What do these people want from a company engaging in social media networks?  The top three responses were Problem Solve (43%), Solicit Feedback (41%) and Provide new ways to interact with brand (37%).

If you’re thinking about getting involved in social media, hopefully this will give you some direction on the path to take.  Clearly, your potential customers want to interact with you - but they’re not looking for another sales pitch.

These days, you hear a lot about the importance of social networking in hospitality marketing.  But what networks should you focus on?  It depends on your goals, but here are some of the most popular:

WikiTravel - similar to Wikipedia, this is a user-written travel guide that was launched in July 2003 by Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins. It was the recipient of a Webby Award for Best Travel Website in 2007, and recently became available in a printed version.  It’s good for providing in-depth information on obscure destinations.

TripAdvisor - the grandaddy of review websites, covering more than 212,000 hotels and 74,000 attractions in over 30,000 destinations worldwide. With more than 20 million reviews and nearly 30 million unique visitors a month, TripAdvisor is the largest travel community on the web.

VirtualTourist - purchased by TripAdvisor in July 2008, this site features user-written destination guides.

Yelp - another big review website that seems more popular with the younger, connected crowd.  (I’ll often type in reviews with my iPhone while at a cafe.)

Boots-n-All - calls itself “the ultimate resource for the independent traveler,” and offers articles and trip planning services

World66 - travel information on over 20,000 destinations, with nearly 80,000 articles written wiki-style

Lonely Planet Thorn Tree - probably the most popular discussion forum, published by the famous travel guide company

TravBuddy - provides more social networking than the others, letting you meet people and share photos, reviews, and blogs

TravelersPoint - lets 100,000+ users write travel blogs and share advice

Image via Wikipedia

In a democracy, elections give citizens the ability to provide feedback to politicians.  In school, students receive grades on their academic performance. And in most companies, employees are given some type of performance review.

Aside from watching key metrics, how do you measure your success as a hotel? As a hotel marketer?

First, let’s remember why feedback is important.  You may be thinking, “I don’t want someone else grading my performance!” But successful hoteliers understand guest feedback tells you…

• What you’re doing right
• What you’re doing wrong
• How you can improve
• Opportunities to attract more business and improve your reputation

…and this input comes from the only group that matters: your guests.

Now, chances are you already have some type of guest satisfaction survey in place at your hotel.  That’s a great start, but here are some ways to use the web to better listen to your guests:

Build a feedback-friendly website. Provide direct contact information for all managers at your hotel. Prominently display a feedback form (or link to it) on every page of your website.  You may even want to use a live chat tool, such as LivePerson, on your website.

Use email to gather feedback. Have management send brief, personal emails to your best guests. Set up a system to collect guests’ email addresses, and send a followup message asking how you could improve their next stay. Email is fast, direct, and effective. Plus a lot of email followup can be automated, making it the ideal relationship building tool for the hotel internet marketer.

Monitor conversations around the web. Set up Google Alerts. Use Twitter search or How Sociable.  Many people won’t say something negative to your face, but they’ll share their feelings freely online.

To manage your brand reputation, you need to know what guests are thinking about you.  Setting up systems that allow you to listen to your guests is essential.

Let me ask you this: How do you use the internet to encourage and gather guest feedback at your hotel?

Image via Wikipedia

50 years ago, it would have been impossible to launch a nation-wide advertising campaign with just $50. Now, you can not only do that, but also rigorously test your message for effectiveness - and only show ads to people actively looking for a hotel like yours.

The technology making this possible is pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.  The concept was pioneered by Jeffrey Brewer and Bill Gross of Goto.com in 1998, but only started gaining popularity in 2002, allowing advertisers to show ads inside search engine results pages.  The premise is powerful: people that view your ad are already searching for what you offer.

Because of this, pay-for-performance advertising brings several very strong advantages to your promotional toolkit:

1) You only pay for results. Your investment is directly tied to the number of visitors to your website. This greatly reduces the risk of running an expensive campaign and getting no results.

2) Your campaign goes live quickly (often with 15 minutes). You can open an AdWords account to quickly test an idea or concept in the market. By bypassing the traditional ad campaign development cycle, you can enjoy first-mover advantage.

3) It’s easy to test for results. Pay-per-click marketing is very analytical.  You can track and test a number of important benchmarks and see which message performs best.

4) You can start on a small scale. With $50 (or less), you can launch a pilot campaign to determine if the format works for you.

5) You can target specific demographics or regions.  AdWords and other PPC platforms make it easy to only show ads to a highly targeted group of people or places. This accuracy helps you deliver your message to the right people.

Pay-per-click marketing should be part of a two-part search marketing strategy that includes organic optimization.  For more information, take a moment to read the differences between the two tactics.

BreadCrumbz, a navigation tool for mobile phones, uses the built-in camera and GPS location tracking to build a picture-based map.  Watch the demo on YouTube:

I believe this is just the beginning of a trend.  Pictures will become the future of directions. Put your website ahead of the competition by offering directions to your hotel in pictures. Small, hard-to-find urban establishments have the most to benefit from this technology.

You could take this a step further and offer custom walking tours of local attractions.  The possibilities are limitless.