Our agency, Hotel Web Design, specialises in helping tourism businesses create and manage their websites. For the past 10 years we have been helping hotel managers and restaurateurs to raise their profile on the Internet. Our expertise in this sector has enabled us to list the 6 best strategic tools for your hotel marketing.
Building a loyal customer base and attracting new customers in the hotel and restaurant sector can quickly become an obstacle course. Especially if you're not prepared for it and have no marketing strategy in place for hotels or restaurants.
What's more, your customers demand constant and sustained effort. Here you'll find effective techniques to help you stand out from the crowd and attract customers.
Strategy 1 The website
The benefits of having a good website
To attract visitors to your website, you'll need to work on an optimal graphic charter, with a fluid, elegant design, entirely customised to the theme of your hotel. The aim is to give them a foretaste of your services with instant immersion. An ergonomic, well thought-out site will increase your chances of conversion. That's right, 70% of online businesses fail because of poor site usability, according to data from orson.io.
These kinds of details can greatly improve the customer experience. If we analyse the typical customer journey, they are bound to visit your site at some point before, during or after their stay. So it's important that the customer experience is a positive one.
The more pleasant the experience, the more likely the customer will be to remain loyal, return and leave a positive review.
What needs to be checked?
There are a number of crucial points to check if you have a website. Here is a list of the most important.
- The booking engine is an essential gateway to conversion. It must be easy to use and clearly visible from the moment you enter the site. The use of a "BOOK" button is highly recommended. It will turn a simple visitor to your site into a customer who will book with just a few clicks.
- A recent site must be updated regularly. The Internet is evolving every day, and you can't afford to be left behind by technology. In 2022, a 5-year-old site is already obsolete.
- Responsive, between 2021 and 2022 58% of searches for information to book a trip were carried out on a phone or tablet according to the analysis firm Raffour Interactif. So it's essential that your site adapts to all types of device: phones, tablets, computers.
- Secure, To ensure that visitors to your site feel confident, it is important to include the word "https" at the beginning of the URL.
- The legal notices are often forgotten or incomplete. However, it is important that visitors to your site can clearly identify you, especially as this is required by law.
For your information, failure to provide legal information can result in penalties of up to one year's imprisonment and a fine of up to 75,000 euros.
- Cookies RGPD, the consent of the visitor to your site is required for the collection of data. It is therefore imperative to send a notification to the visitor asking them to accept or refuse.
What questions should you ask?
- Am I visible on the internet?
- How are my customers booking today?
- Do I have measurement tools / feedback on my site?
- What are my big seasons, and are my offers consistent with them?
- What improvements could I make in the immediate future (to my site/engine)?
- Do I have control over my site? What do I need to change right now?
Strategy 2 Search engine optimisation
Natural referencing.
Your reputation on the Internet depends on the performance of your website. If you want Google to make you appear on the first page and even better in the first results, you need to :
- Informative textual content and relevant to your establishment. It must be able to capture the attention of Google and your visitors. To create a rich textual alchemy that can be regularly updated to boost your SEO.
- Partnerships with other websites that will display your direct link to the hotel website. This will increase your visibility on the Internet. For example, a recommendation on the website of your town's tourist office, the town hall or websites specialising in hotels, restaurants or travel.
- You need to have optimised codeThis is a clean design that improves the execution of the various actions on a page.
- And finally fast loading. You can modify the code or compress the images to reduce the amount of unnecessary information and speed up loading.
Sponsored referencing.
Does your site not have much content? You just want to get ahead of your direct competitors? You can use sponsored referencing.
- Google adsBy bidding on certain keywords, you can constantly appear in the best position when a user types that word into their search engine.
Strategy 3 Social networks
Digital communication
Communication on social networks is very practical. It's inexpensive or even free. Everyone can do it, and it's a great way to generate content and build a community. Holidaymakers' photos can generate traffic to your site, making it easier for people to find you.
- Can be used as a showcase to present your services, your town and your news in real time.
- For restaurants and bars, it displays the menu.
- You will be able to collect data on the profile of your visitors and adapt your offer.
How do you go about it?
First of all, the most commonly used technique is to plan a publication calendar. These are daily posts scheduled in advance to always offer content to subscribers.
Articles, photos, videos, promotional offers, opening and closing seasons - all this information can be shared directly with your customers.
There's also a free tool that lets you schedule your Instagram and Facebook posts in advance. All you need is a pro account. Facebook Creator studio, it's a comprehensive, easy-to-use tool that will save you time.
Strategy 4 Performance analysis
Your website is a goldmine of information about your customers, and in the hotel business it's essential to retain and develop customer loyalty.
There are already many measurement tools that will enable you to act accordingly. Here are just a few of them.
What is Analytics?
Data analysis can seem long and tedious, but thanks to Google Analytics everything is simpler. In fact, this free service offered by Google will be used by 85.9% of the global market in 2022, according to the statistical analysis firm W3Techs.
You will have access to :
- A dashboard containing all the information your website has collected.
- The number of visits to your site.
There will be two pieces of information on this subject, "Sessions that correspond to all visits in general. But also "the users i.e. the same person who came several times.
- You'll be able to see which pages have been viewed and how many times. This is very useful for identifying which pages are relevant to your audience and which are not.
- Bounce rate is a percentage that you can use to find out who came to your site and then left after viewing a single page. If it's high, it could be because the visitor instantly found the information they were looking for.
You will also have access to the number of all new connections. In other words visitors arriving on your site for the first time.
Strategy 5 Customer care
How can I build customer loyalty?
Customer care involves keeping in touch with customers after their stay in a hotel or after a meal in a restaurant, so that they come back and are satisfied with the service.
The aim is to personalise as much as possible customer experience. There are many customer contact points, each time the customer comes into contact with the hotel on the internet or in real life.
We need to work on each of these contact points to personalise the experience from the moment they arrive on the site, through every stage, right up to the moment they return home after their stay.
- The loyalty programme is suitable for hotels and restaurants, but has unfortunately become much less popular in recent years, as most offers for this type of programme do not live up to customers' expectations.
- E-mailingIn order to personalise the customer experience and build loyalty, it is possible to send pre-arrival and post-departure emails, and this is proving to be particularly effective.
With whom?
There are tools to help you, such as ReallyGoodEmail a free website offering email templates from a wide range of companies, which you can use as inspiration to create your own email campaign.
To automate the sending of your personalised emails, you can use a agency as Hotel Web Design which offers digital solutions for the hotel and restaurant industry. These agencies offer personalised support, from website creation to customer care, search engine optimisation and much more.
Strategy 6 Yield Management
Yield Management or Revenue Management
This pricing strategy consists of charging different prices thanks to a channel manager that synchronises rates. Quick and easy, it can save you a huge amount of time and customers. You'll be able to fill your rooms at the best price.
Our Hotel Web Design agency has its own innovative channel manager, Booky Cloud. It has been specially designed to help you manage your hotel's yield.
I invite you to go directly to our various articles on the subject of Yield management for more information:
- Optimising your hotel's yield management
- How to set your hotel rates
- Comparison of the best Channel Managers
By being present on different communication channels in 2022, your visibility on the Internet will increase and so will your reputation in the hotel and restaurant sector.
With all these hotel marketing tactics under your belt, you're now ready to take the plunge and implement your communication plan to attract new customers!
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