Marketing for Hotels: 6 Digital Marketing Tips To Get Started

Digital marketing for hotels has continued to grow over the years and many are seeing the benefits of taking a proactive approach to targeting customers online. So, setting up a website and then just running a few adverts just won’t cut it.

It requires a focused strategy with a range of proven marketing channels and tools and focusing on one or two that bring the best returns.

If your hotel is new to digital marketing, you should do some research into your market, and there are some tools that you can use, which I list below.

So, here are six digital marketing tips that are proven for hotels and will also help you promote your hotel effectively.

 

1. Invest in Google Ads for hotels

Google Ads is one of the best marketing platforms for hotels. It has a huge range of tools and features and with these you can target your prospects at different stages. And the campaign types also help you achieve goals like get bookings, raise brand awareness, increase traffic, engage past visitors and more.

The main campaign types include Search, Shopping, Display, Discover and a host of others. But not all of these will be relevant for you.

So, you should think about the goals you have and then pick the right one as you set up your campaigns. Working with a Google Ads specialist will help you with this.

 

2. Review your landing pages

Marketing for hotels is most effective when the website and landing pages are well optimised and very easy to navigate. It’s not enough to run effective ads and drive the right visitors to your website. The website should be tailored to those visitors and offer a great experience.

So, you should check how engaged your visitors are. And some metrics that will help you understand this are bounce rate and average time on page.

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave without viewing other pages. So you want to keep visitors engaged and looking at other pages and booking online and achieve a bounce rate below 50%.

 

3. Conduct market research online

There are affordable tools online that help you to carry out research into your target markets and competitors. Some are free and some are paid but you’ll find them very cost-effective.

One of the first ways to get started is to use a keyword research tool. This will show you how many searches are being conducted for your locations from people looking for a hotel.

And the Keyword Planner tool is where you should start because it is in your Google Ads account and is free. And you can check search volumes and do forecasts to see what you’re likely to spend.

For competitor research, a platform I recommend is SERanking. It has a research tool that you can use to see what keywords other hotels are bidding on and which ones they appear for in the natural search results.

 

4. Target people who are searching for your hotel

In your Google Ads account, you can setup a hotel campaign or use a Search campaign and use locations and keywords to target people who are searching. And you can add your brand keywords to target these people, especially if competitors are also appearing in the paid ads for your name.

This helps you to direct people to your website as they search for your hotel, and not to another hotel.

This is important even if you’re ranking high in the natural search results. If you don’t bid on your brand names and competitors do, you will lose some of this traffic and customers.

 

5. Track your hotel bookings or leads

Tracking marketing campaigns for hotels is essential but can be difficult at times. There are different ways of tracking sales, bookings or leads which include event tracking, goal tracking, conversion tracking and so on.

A good tool to use to track all your traffic sources is Google Analytics. You can track any actions on your website like all hotel bookings, contact form submissions, videos watched and so on.

And you can use the goal templates that are available there to setup conversion tracking.

Tracking in Analytics also helps you to see the paths that people take to conversion. For example if someone comes through a social media link, then an organic link and later through a paid ad, you’ll be able to see all of this and allocate your budgets to these sources accordingly.

 

6. Hire a PPC consultant

If you’re running pay per click (PPC) campaigns for your hotel, it’s a good idea to speak to a PPC consultant to carry out an audit to see how they are performing.

This will help to improve your PPC campaigns much quicker and avoid any budget waste.

However, you should check they have the experience you require. And check that they’re a Google Partner if you’re running Google Ads campaigns. Also, look to see if they have case studies and reviews to confirm their expertise.

 

Get in Touch

As a digital marketing expert for hotels and hospitality businesses, I have a lot of experience setting up and managing campaigns in Google Ads. Use the form below to contact me to discuss your requirements.