How to Promote a Hotel Online - Drive More Bookings

Even if you are operating a hotel with a single room, especially in a rural area, or running a hotel in a metropolitan city, you won't get more bookings. Hence, you need digital marketing strategies to promote your hotel online and grow your business.  

You might have heard this phrase – Food, water, and shelter are everything you need to live life to the fullest. Now, the internet is added to this cluster. People are mindlessly scrolling on the internet to bookmark their favorite hotels. Well, that's only possible if your business has an online presence worldwide.  

Adopting traditional marketing strategies such as advertising on television or displaying your ad in newspapers and magazines won't work anymore. Not only are these mediums expensive, but they also have loopholes, such as a hotelier won't target a specific set of customers. 

Online marketing strategies are cost-effective and would generate more ROI for your hotel business.  

So, grab a cup of coffee, and let's get started.

8 Cost Effective Revenue Generating Ideas

1. Understand your target audience

An important pillar for creating a hotel promotion strategy starts with knowing your audience and getting acquainted with them. Do audience research to determine target clients' demographics, preferences, and behavior. 

If you don't know anything about guests, you probably don't know what type of ads you should create, or which customer segment should be prioritized. Never guess anything; otherwise, you might make bad decisions that could kill your business.  

Once you know a lot about them, you can frame your marketing strategies accordingly. 

The target audience is the set of people your hotel wants to target. Segment your target audience based on age, location, demographics, etc. 

If you don't know about your target audience, talk to your existing hotel guests who have stayed in your hotel within the last 6 months or a year and ask them a series of questions to know their preferences and the challenges they are facing so that later you can retarget them with your ads.  

2. Create a user-friendly website  

A website is the lead generation tool for promoting hotel business. It is the first place when people want to learn more about your business and make up their minds as to whether they should book a stay with you or not.  

The hotel's website should be accessible by everyone; the higher the chances for you to get more bookings. A mobile responsive website is the foundational pillar of a hotel marketing strategy. Make your website SEO optimized so it pops up on the top of the search engine.  

The first impression matters the most! Create a website by adding high-quality images and videos that lure them to click on the book button. Provide a rich experience to them by showcasing hotel rooms and sharing glimpses of your amenities.  

A website is a revenue-generating toolkit wherein the hotelier will present the offer, collect guest information, and generate bookings.  

Here are the 4 hotel promotion ideas you should include on your hotel's website to get more bookings -  

• Hotel's website should be easy to navigate  
• It should include high-quality photos that make the guests book a hotel immediately
• Add relevant information about the hotel along with a clear location on the website 
• Have a USP that makes your hotel stand out from others. Why should guests consider your hotel over others? 

3. Use social media effectively  

Today's customers are spending their day in and day out on social media. Having an online presence on social media is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website and dominate the search results.  

Optimize your profile on social media, and post valuable content that lets your followers connect with you. Social media is all about building long-term relationships with your audience. You must ensure on which social media platform you must invest your time and efforts. 

Moreover, as a hotelier, you need to publish content consistently on those social media platforms where your audience spends an entire day. You can choose to go live on various social media platforms to build long-term relationships with the audience, answer their questions and nurture your audience. 

Fresh content is the heart of social media. If you want to get more traffic to your blogs, consider linking your blogs to your social media or focus on providing value to the audience's feed.  

Another way to get leads through social media is to capture snapshots of your hotel by creating 360-degree informative videos that you can showcase behind the scenes, such as interiors, rooms, swimming pools, restaurants, etc. It will eventually lead them to trust you over others.  

Here are some social media marketing strategies for hotels that can help you achieve more direct bookings.

4. Invest in PPC  

Pay-per-click advertising and growing your social media organically go together to generate leads for your hotel business. Both have the prime motto of expanding your online presence in front of potential customers and making your hotel more profitable.  

Investing in PPC is a great way to get more bookings for your hotel business, as advertisers have to pay only when someone clicks on the ad.

Growing organically is a cost-effective strategy to convert leads into high-paying guests. But it takes time and effort to do so. With PPC, you can run ads for your hotel business by paying bucks to search engines. 

When potential guests click on an ad, they are directed to the website landing page and learn about your hotel business.  

Here are a few hotel promotion strategies a hotelier can implement to increase online bookings - 

• Conducting extensive keyword research helps you figure out the exact words and phrases potential customers seek. Add those keywords in your ad copy that makes your ad more relevant to your target customers.  
• Create ad groups highlighting various hotel services such as room upgrades, restaurants, spas, etc. It will help you target a specific range of audience.  
• Lastly, use retargeting ads to lure those customers who have previously visited your hotel website but have not booked anything.  

5. Leverage the power of email marketing  

Many hoteliers consider email marketing an underrated tool. But email marketing is the best way to generate leads for the hotel business. How do you stay in your audience's mind when they leave your website and social media?  

Using emails is another effective way to connect with the guests by sending warm, personalized emails and sharing your suggestions about selecting basic amenities.  

Sharing quality email content is a great way to build customer loyalty and get more bookings. But don't make your emails spammy by discussing promotional offers only.  

Marketers claimed that running email marketing campaigns for businesses is a great way to get more engagement and increase hotel revenue.  

To leverage email marketing, you have to build an email list. You can capture emails of your target client persona using 2 ways – 

You can either capture emails from guests who book reservations with your hotel or create valuable content for them and ask them to give their email addresses to grab this freebie.  

For example – June hotel sends promotional emails to their guests by creating content that describes the experience for their guests and then luring them to get access to special discounts for their summer offers. 

In this way, they build relationships with their guests, sending them personalized emails and directing them to click on the book now not to miss their summers. It's the power of email marketing.  

Not to worry more, as we are sharing the exclusive list of engaging your hotel guests by sharing these types of emails in their inboxes: 

• First impressions matter the most. So, why not make your guests feel special?  

Send welcome emails to them wherein you (the hotelier) welcome them after they visit your website for booking. After your guests sign up on your website, make sure to send them a welcome email within 18 hours of signing up.

• Send discount emails to customers because people love discounts and getting good deals.  
• Send follow-up emails to your guests asking them to share feedback and their experience at your hotel. Share benefits and rewards points in the email, thank the customer for the stay, etc.  
• Send them segmented emails which are more personalized for the customer. Segmented emails have a 14.31% open rate than non-segmented emails (Source – Mailchimp)

6. Optimize for Local Search  

Optimizing local SEO is another hotel promotion strategy to get more bookings. As a hotelier, your prime objective is to get found when your local customer search for you. For example – The best hotels in Delhi.  

Here are a few ways to optimize a website for local search - 

• Do some keyword research to know what your target audience is searching for that can help you to optimize your website for local search.  
• Create local content to meet the needs of local guests. Use local phrases in your content to get local visitors near the hotel's location.  
• Use internal and external links in your content.  
• Optimize your titles and meta descriptions to get more click-through rates.  
• Optimize your Google My Business Profile to appear when local searchers search for your hotel's business. 

Complete your google my business profile by adding the hotel's name, address, and phone number and sharing images of hotels and rooms along with guest reviews. It will give clarity to your guests about what they can expect when they plan to stay at your hotel.  

7. Partner with Influencers and Bloggers  

Collaborating with travel influencers and bloggers can affect the purchasing decision of guests. Influencers have a massive list of loyal audiences, and a hotel can leverage influencer marketing to increase their bookings.  

As influencers create shareable content for their audience, you can tap that audience by partnering with them. These influencers reach out to customers, nurture them and build trustworthy relationships with them.  

Try reaching out to micro and nano influencers because they will charge less and receive massive engagement on their content. Ask influencers to talk about your hotel in their posts and tag your hotel, and in return, you can offer them a free stay at your hotel.  

8. Monitor and analyze results

Hoteliers can use various marketing tools to check their website performance and formulate their strategies accordingly. It is recommended that hoteliers should visit google analytics.  

• By accessing google analytics, you can track 3 metrics to check your website performance – Acquisition metrics, conversion metrics, and behavior metrics. Google Analytics allows you to access detailed insights about your online audience.  
• Google search console is another tool helping hoteliers see which pages of your website are performing well. It keeps you updated about whether your site is performing well or not.  
• There are various inbuilt social media analytics tools helping hoteliers to track the performance of their ads.  

For example – Facebook business manager allows hoteliers to create, track and manage their online campaigns in one place, and boost their ads to reach a broader audience.  

End notes... 

Now, you get an idea about the top 8 ways to promote your hotel business. As the hotel industry becomes more competitive, it becomes equally important for you to stand out in the market.

So, leverage these strategies to take your hotel's business to the next level.  

If you are still trying to make your hotel stand out and provide a personalized experience to your guests, consider trying out eMark-IT, an email marketing and WhatsApp marketing automation tool, to ease your marketing efforts and send personalized campaigns to the right audience at the right time. eMark-IT helped 50+ hotels by automating their campaigns and saving their costs by 50%. 

Expand your hotel's presence