Only last week the proprietor of a small hotel moaned to me that
she had done "everything" to promote her hotel but was still unhappy
with her hotel occupancy and hotel revenue. Everything turned out to be
that she had a website (done by a nephew now at college) and she was on
LateRooms (although never updating her rates).
I am often amazed by how much hotel owners decide to take on as
they contemplate how to market a hotel. There is only just so much that
you can do in a day and with your operational priorities and the
specialist knowledge required something has to give. Undoubtedly hotel
marketing is the key factor to focus on.
So here is my list of some of the Internet marketing hotel activities that you should consider outsourcing to professionals:
1. Hotel Website Design – it requires a great deal of time to
create pages which are informative, visitor friendly, and attractive.
You need to know the industry as well as have technical knowledge. Your
website also needs to be optimized (different to SEO below) so that it
delivers exactly what you want it to, once visitors land on it.
2. Maintenance of Website – your website needs to be constantly
updated and changed so that the search engines find new and relevant
content.
3. Creation of Content – text writing is a very specialized
activity where you have to understand the mind of the website visitor.
4. Advertising – it is possible to put together a pay per click
(PPC) campaign in a few hours, but research, testing and modifying the
campaigns takes a lot of expertise and ongoing time in order to be
effective.
5. Optimization (SEO) – making sure that your website is found by
the search engines is vital. You need effective on-page SEO (meta tags)
and you can participate in all sorts of link building and article
writing activity but it is time consuming and needs to be very focused.
6. Social media – participating in sites like Facebook has been
promoted as some sort of panacea. It can be effective if done well but
it can also eat up much of your time to little effect. It all depends
on how relevant participation is to your target market.
7. Management of Online Reputation – although Google Alerts can
keep you up to date with what people are saying about you online,
monitoring this and taking effective action can be very time consuming.
8. E mail marketing – e-mail is an effective channel to use to keep
in touch with your customers. However crafting good newsletters takes
time and expertise that you might not have in-house. Everyone's inboxes
are much cluttered and it is a challenge to get your message opened let
only acted upon!
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