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The relation between hotels and marketing, over the years, has been one of resilience, reliance, and revenue. It has seen changes, some serious changes like the advent of the internet, SEO, digital advertising, and now, AI.
These changes brought a major opportunity for both Hotels and Marketers to adapt and capitalize.
But nonetheless, Marketing for one has adapted, now you know it as Digital Marketing, which means promoting services through digital channels instead of traditional channels like flyers, newspaper ads, cold calls, billboards, etc.
The digital marketing channels include SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay-per-click advertising), social media, e-mails, and websites.
In this blog, I’ll dwell on the core topic “What is Digital Marketing for Hotels,” its nuances, and why it is crucial and beneficial for hotels to do digital marketing now more than ever.
Digital Marketing for Hotels is best defined as a continuous process of attracting, engaging, converting, and retaining guests through direct and indirect digital marketing channels.
Other terms used interchangeably for digital marketing for hotels
All of these mean the same thing: Attracting potential guests to increase bookings.
On the surface, both of them might look similar with a difference in strategies here and there, but beneath the surface, the difference is glaring.
You might say that “typical marketing strategies focus on leads, conversion, etc., but aren't these the same objectives hotel digital marketing strives for? Getting more leads with PPC or SEO, then facilitating conversions with a friction-free website, and retaining them with email marketing. I don't see a stark difference. “
Because the core goal for every marketing effort is Revenue Growth, the difference in marketing lies in conversions.
To convert a potential lead in any other industry, you get to nurture them, sort of nudge them slowly to conversions with constant messaging, but hotels don’t get that luxury. If a guest doesn’t book within minutes, that lead is gone, forever to a prowling competitor or an OTA.
Other than that, there are differences in strategy, targeting, positioning, and retargeting, which we’ll discuss in another blog
Hoteliers have full control over these channels. The budget, frequency, and spend can be adjusted, monitored, and optimized as per the hotel’s unique customer demands. This also means there are no third-party commissions involved
It is the most vital element of all. Imagine a guest just about to make the booking payment, and your website’s page takes minutes to load. Disaster.
It boosts organic traffic and attracts potential guests by ranking your site for keywords like “hotel near me”.
It is the quick method to gain traffic and visibility rapidly and almost instantly. PPC majorly includes Meta ads and Google ads, Bing ads also.
It is the best of both worlds (PPC and SEO). You can advertise by paying on social media platforms like Instagram, or you can bring visitors to your website by posting content on them.
A part of SEO, but for Hotels, it sells the most important thing, the experience. It includes publishing blogs, writing webpage content, social media content, emails, etc.
Hotels are a big fan of email marketing, no doubt because of its power to break the ice with potential guests and retarget them again after bookings. Moreover, a personalized, well-written email can achieve up to 20-26% open rate. So hire a good content writer to avoid the spam box.
The channels below are third-party platforms (intermediaries) that allow you to promote your property for a price, often called commission. Unlike the direct channels, over which you have complete control of price and authority, here you just pay and let these platforms decide the rest.
The largest source, with a 55% market share, OTAs provide hotels of all sizes and types with a booking platform used by a large number of travelers. These third-party agencies can substantially increase the booking rate in exchange for a platform fee, infamously known as commission.
They are price-comparison platforms for travelers and high-intent traffic providers for OTAs. Just like OTAs extract commissions for listings, metasearch platforms like Trivago, TripAdvisor, and Kayak extract commissions from OTAs in return for booking-ready traffic.
The good part about these price-comparing platforms is that even individual hotels, with a website, can list themselves to bring qualified travelers to their site directly.
It's not just AI that has brought a new avenue in digital marketing; the way a traveler now plans their trip has completely transformed. Now, they search, review, and book online rather than calling hotels from phone directories.
The advent of digital marketing took it a few steps further; instead of searching, a traveler just needs to click on an ad on Instagram or Facebook to book a hotel instantly. No need to even search.
Then came Artificial Intelligence into the fray. Redefining the whole traveler-booking journey. It only takes a prompt now, “plan a trip to X place,” the rest, from places to visit to the best hotel in the locality, are brought to the traveler within seconds.
Although these changes have made the life of travelers easier, for some hotels, it has been significantly hard to shift from traditional advertising to digital marketing, and these are the challenges they face:
Heavy reliance on OTAs changes the mutually beneficial relationship into a one-sided one when OTAs start to charge heavy commissions, and the hotels that took digital marketing lightly find themselves trapped in a vicious cycle of commission.
Not only that, OTAs don’t share the guest data with you, so you never get to retarget a guest who was probably impressed and likely to book again.
Considering that every hotel has at least a website, low visibility on search engines becomes a challenge. The obvious solution is SEO, but many hoteliers never fully utilize its potential, for only one reason: SEO is slow. SEO is not slow; it is gradual, it compounds over time, and brings results steadily.
Unlike PPC, optimizing your website doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. SEO typically includes optimizing on-page, off-page, and technical elements of a website to attract organic traffic and increase search rankings.
I’ve mentioned it briefly in the intro that not having control of your own guests’ data makes it incredibly hard to retarget previous guests.
Not only do you miss out on retaining satisfied guests, but without data, you cannot send any promotional messages, discounts, or loyalty programs.
The hotel industry is infamous for its cutthroat competition. A traveler gets offers from hundreds of hotels as soon as they search for “hotels near me.”
In this race, digital marketing has emerged as a reliable process to differentiate and capture potential leads before the competition.
The challenges we just discussed underscore the importance of changing strategies to keep up with the rapid changes in the behavior of travelers. Those who adapt over time always stay ahead of the competition and capitalize on the benefits of being an early adopter.
These are the benefits of doing hotel digital marketing:
Digital marketing elements, especially SEO, PPC, and web development, are the biggest drivers of targeted, or you can say, qualified traffic.
Because you have On-page SEO, where elements of your website and related content are optimized to align with the traveler’s needs, how they search, and change the techniques as their demand changes.
That’s why now websites come with SEO-integrated, or SEO-built in, which means these sites can be optimized and updated as per Google’s ranking factors and target customers’ needs.
First, a dedicated ad manager, or you can do it yourself
Second, Ad spend (money)
Third, creatives (ad copies, images, and videos for Facebook or Instagram)
With that, you can run ads, but keep in mind that it is a costly affair, and every mistake will put a dent in your budget. If you don’t want to risk it, you can hire a Hotel PPC Agency.
Imagine Hotel A, which has been serving guests for over three decades, has luxury suites, exquisite banquets, and impeccable service, but relies on word of mouth for promoting itself.
Then there is Hotel B, established a few years ago, right in front of Hotel A, which doesn’t have a long legacy, but the service is comparable. On top of that, it has an SEO-optimized website, partnered with OTAs, and launches PPC ads when seasonal demand changes.
Who’d you think would outcompete the other? The Latter.
This is how digital marketing levels the playing field for new hotels and even smaller ones that are competing against enormous hotel chain giants.
Compared with traditional hotel advertising methods like billboards, flyers, or television ads, where you can’t even segment the audience, let alone negotiate the cost, digital advertising offers better reach, targeting, and cost-effective platforms for hotel marketing.
PPC is one of them, which offers instant visibility even if you’re new to the industry. Then there’s social media advertising, which doesn’t cost a dime, as you just need to post targeted content with relevant hashtags to reach your target travelers.
Digital marketing helps hotels craft a seamless experience even before a guest decides to stay.
Before the stay: right after the guest books, emails confirming the booking, check-in instructions, and details that clear all the doubts before they even leave their home. If a guest has booked early (10-14 days), you can also upsell experiences such as room upgrades, dining reservations, and local travel tips.
During the stay: The experience gets even better when you have applications or digital portals that guests can access to customize and adjust their room’s amenities like temperature, lighting, and curtains.
Here, the application or the digital portal acts as the element of digital marketing that takes the guest’s experience to a different level. Now, the guest doesn’t have to wait for the staff to come and give a tutorial on every feature.
After the stay: This is where traditional marketing methods fail. With flyers and billboard ads, you can bring a guest to the hotel, make them stay longer with a representative following them around to upsell, but after they check out, you can’t retarget them effectively with traditional methods.
Digital marketing offers retargeting methods like post-stay emails, feedback forms, and request reviews on platforms like Google or OTAs. This saves a lot of budget because you don’t need to spend a fortune on targeting new travelers every time you face a booking famine, because guests who had a satisfactory stay at your hotel are more likely to book again.
Without a doubt, digital marketing is imperative for hotels that want to scale their bookings and operating profits.
A hotel digital marketing strategy includes direct and indirect channels of promotion, such as SEO, PPC, web development, OTAs, etc., supporting the core goal of every marketing effort: Revenue.
Moreover, disruptive technologies like AI have also changed how digital marketing is done. Due to its reliability and capacity to do enormous tasks within minutes, not without mistakes, which has labelled it as a game-changing tool for hoteliers.
