If you can get guests to book a four-day stay through a “Hotels.com or Expedia” type channel, you’ll take it. After all, it’s revenue earned, and you are increasing your occupancy rate. But why allow a large slice of your bookings to come from these second parties who take a piece of the revenue when you can attract guests with your own efforts and pocket 100 percent of the earnings while providing online visitors with a better user experience?
The best hospitality marketing agencies are able to help hotel and resort properties create scalable, growth-driven solutions to hitting all of their goals, while staying within budget. Additionally, when luxury hotels invest in a custom growth marketing stack, they are able to see exactly where leads come from, where they convert from, and other types of data that helps leadership and internal marketing officers deem whether or not their investment is making a good return, and this data can also be used to enhance audience targeting through a variety of marketing strategies. At the end of the day, hospitality marketing agencies can improve occupancy, ADR and RevPAR through a custom growth marketing stack built on the foundation of understanding your guest’s needs, and how your property offers the best solution.
This article is intended to help hotel managers and executive teams understand how growth-driven hospitality marketing agencies can help them offer a better booking experience that what one encounters with those impersonal and daunting hotel search engines, and how you can simultaneously hit all of your goals to impact your bottom line.
Hotel search engines are for people whose primary focus is on saving lots of money on the booking price, while being content with the bare-bones minimum. But this is not your target audience; people who seek a special experience where their lifestyle is enhanced, and they are surrounded by the best amenities, with incredible views, with the best dining, linens, and a plethora of other things–these are your target buyers.
However, most of your future guests don’t already know you by name, so they do what everyone else does: they go to Google and enter in search terms like “boutique hotels”, or five star resorts”, and because these hotel search engines are so large and have multiple thousands to invest in every month for their digital marketing budget, they rank on page one of Google, have more paid ads on Google and social media platform, so naturally people will click on these. Studies targeting guests seeking unique properties found that more than 92 percent of them were overwhelmed and annoyed with the large hotel search engines because they had too many options to choose from, and very few even came close to what they were looking for. Of these people, 68 percent settled and just booked a room to get the process over and done with.
When luxury hotels invest in growth-driven hospitality marketing agencies, strategies and tools are customized to help lead potential guests to custom content that will educate and nurture them into booking a reservation, and in this process, your content can outrank irrelevant competitors by focusing more on what the guest is searching for in finding the perfect hotel property.
SEO for hotels is the most frequently invested strategy by hospitality brands. As a luxury hotel or resort brand, your website probably does a decent job at giving searchers a glimpse into the lifestyle they will live once booked into one of your rooms. However, if you are like most other boutique hotels, your site is not optimized to capture a large percentage of the traffic, nor is it running with the necessary strategies to attract high quality traffic.
When SEO for hotels is used within a custom growth stack, the ability to capture and convert more leads increases substantially, but only for luxury properties with higher price points, as these guests have more needs and therefore tend to do some research into hotel properties before booking a reservation.
Remember, SEO for hotels simply drives traffic. Additional strategies designed to nurture and educate traffic until they convert into a booking is critical, and when you invest in hospitality marketing agencies that have the tech tools and team members to run a multi-channel approach to booking your rooms, you can help your guests bypass those obnoxious hotel search engines by allowing them to find exactly what they are looking for–a boutique hotel with a first impression that promises to fulfill all of their needs while offering a great user experience.
Download our FREE guide on our custom approach to growth marketing. If you think your hotel property could be a great fit for this strategy, give us a call. We would love to learn about your brand, guests, and the experience you deliver. Together, we can find the right marketing approach to help you achieve all of your growth goals.
