Many hoteliers may not know it, but they already are doing a ton of off-line marketing to drive business to their hotel. Off-line marketing such as brochure racks for local businesses deals with nearby restaurants or bars, or alliances with tour operators are all examples of off-line marketing that hotels engage in every day where hotel guests interact with collateral of local businesses within their very own lobby.
The biggest question as a hotelier is whether or not they are capitalizing on this off-line marketing by bartering with local businesses to co-market or drive business to one another. Your hotel may market local businesses such as restaurants and bars and tour operators, but are you getting reciprocity from such businesses? Is the local restaurant recommending your hotel to its patrons? Is your hotel listed on the tour agency’s website as a place to stay providing a link back to your hotel’s website?
The odds are you have all of this one way, outbound marketing you are doing for other businesses but only getting marginal inbound traffic from these businesses. So how do you change this?
Build strong off-line marketing relationships and alliances with local businesses:
Ask to leave a brochure card rack on their counter or posting a rack card on their corkboard in exchange for distributing their menus, business cards, or special offers.
Ask for a banner ad to be placed on their website that links back to your hotel’s website in exchange for a presence on your own website.
i. Here’s a great example of this: http://rivercreekgolfcourse.com/online_specials.html
ii. Tie banner ads to promotion codes to make it easy to track the performance of your marketing.
Now with your Premium Hotel Website Powered by INNsight, you can easily manage online co-marketing and provide both inbound and outbound traffic benefits by posting local businesses that you have relationships on our latest feature: Friends of Your Hotel.
We have built the ability to make your website’s SEO even more favorable by giving you the tools to easily build out an indexing web page per business you have a friendship with. Not only does your website benefit from the organic search engine optimization that occurs when you write content about your friendly local businesses, but your customers can find more relevant deals and offerings, and your friendly businesses will look at you as more of a business partner that helps funnel referrals to them. You can barter links or banner ad space on your friendly local businesses’ websites in exchange for such marketing and thereby generate what is called link backs creating even more SEO favorability to your own website.
The Friends Page offers the main landing page where you can present the ‘billboards/banner ads’ or logos of your friendly local businesses. E.g. https://www.yosemitewestgate.com/friends
Each banner ad then links to an individual web page within your own website that is dedicated to that business creating a powerful marketing vehicle for your friendly local businesses and pages that provide a lot of search engine friendly content and turn-by-turn directions from your hotel to these businesses for your guests to find their way. E.g. https://www.yosemitewestgate.com/friend-details/Pizza-Factory-Groveland
If you are interested in learning more about the Premium Hotel Website Powered by INNsight, visit our about us page at www.innsight.com/aboutus.
INNsight.com powered hotel websites offer the most robust set of tools and features to help you drive more traffic and put more heads in beds than any one-off website designer or hotel internet marketing firm. INNsight.com is a Digital Marketing Platform that easily and economically can manage and drive your social, local, mobile and web marketing channels for your hotel.
