Hotel Internet Marketing Strategies

Increase your hotel’s profit margins by driving direct bookings

What are some hotel internet marketing strategies you need as a hotelier to be successful?

The growth of the Internet, web 2.0 with the social surge and the latest mobile evolution of the internet has created both many challenges and opportunities for hoteliers to market their hotels.  It is imperative that hotel internet marketing strategies are built upon the four pillars of digital marketing: Local, Social, Mobile, and Web.  Hoteliers may find it challenging to ensure that they are positioned on all four legs for effective digital marketing.  A huge opportunity awaits to increase their profit margins by driving more direct bookings if hoteliers can accomplish a solid platform across Local, Social, Mobile, and Web marketing for their hotel.

Many hoteliers neglect the importance of having their own website for their property.  They think they know it all, or feel that their franchise is handling their marketing for them, or simply try and do things themselves and fail to realize that in any case they are harming their hotel business by not having marquee digital marketing for their hotel and maintaining their main channel for guests to research, look, and then book their stays.  Travelers now have more options for researching and booking their travel than ever before.  They are consuming high-quality images, videos, and reviews while doing their hotel shopping on different devices, different platforms and from many locations.  The leading business question on a hotelier’s mind ought to be: Is my hotel’s own digital marketing optimized to provide a platform for lookers to turn into bookers?

The Smart Hotel Shopper nowadays researches hotels in a particular destination using an Online Travel Agent or Google.  They create a shortlist of hotels they would be interested and then quickly jump on TripAdvisor to do more thorough research on pricing and quality of stay and in many cases look to do their purchase right there on TripAdvisor using TripConnect (INNsight.com is a TripConnect Partner).  Once they narrow their list of target hotels that they would like to further research, many smart shoppers look to book direct.  Is your hotel ready to capture that smart traveler?  They say OTAs drive 30-50% of your bookings.  So that leaves a large subset, if not the majority of your potential guests looking to book with you direct.  If you do not have a website for your hotel, you are ignoring anywhere from 15%-55% of your potential guests.