The Basics of Digital Hotel Marketing
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Wed, Nov 30, 2011
Forget the statistics, the in depth campaign planning and start with the basics. Marketing your hotel online is an important part of the business, and if you’re just getting started then there are a number of bases to cover first. You’ve been convinced at this point that digital marketing is a necessary sales tool, probably by the fact that you know websites are now driving upwards of 35% of total business for successful hotels. A lot of hotels will even exceed this figure.
Website design is fundamental to hotel marketing
First: have you got the website organized? It is a major assumption in this article that you do in fact have some kind of website set up. Especially for independent hotels, a fully functional hotel website is a must. Even franchised hotels now are breaking out with their own individual websites, because they have benefits that outweigh those of franchised sites. The weakness of a franchised website is that generic search isn’t as effective for them. Only 20% of hotels are found by brand name on search, the rest are found through generic search. Franchised websites tend to be reached by brand name only, as the entire website is SEO friendly to the brand name rather than generic terms.
SEO For Hotels
The term SEO gets thrown around a lot, so it can lose its meaning in the minds of many people. SEO is a fundamental part of web development and the design of the website itself. If a site isn’t designed with SEO in mind, carrying out full SEO can be very difficult afterwards. All search engines impose a “checklist” of sorts onto websites when scanning for SEO. This includes proper and relevant title tags, meta keywords and descriptions, as well as relevant content, inbound links and outbound links. When looking for an SEO expert, remember to find out if they will analyze the design of your web site first. If they’re not going to look at overall website design, run away!
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