Hoteliers must get smarter and start investigating alternative marketing opportunities!
Helping Central Florida hotels become more competitive and profitable.
I can show you a more effective way to capture the attention of your target market. Using one of the most effective marketing tools available to hoteliers today "The Internet". However increasingly a hotel must be wiser with their marketing approach online. Costs associated with online marketing especially pay per click (PPC) campaigns are reaching (in some cases for the small to midsize hotel) unaffordable Heights.
It's true that a (PPC) campaign is fairly quick and easy to deploy. Requiring a little more than some software to help select the best categories to bid on, and a fat wallet. However it's becoming increasingly obvious that this strategy is probably not sustainable for the average midsize or smaller hotels. The midsize to smaller Hotel must get smarter and start investigating alternative sustainable strategies to capture the attention of guests at a more affordable price.
The more affordable approach.
There's only one major setback with these more affordable marketing channels.
They require significantly more time to develop and deploy than a pay per click campaign.
Click on any the topics below.
Organic marketing channels:
- Organic search
- Linking to other related businesses.
- Linking to Free marketing hubs
- Blogs
- Forums
- press releases
- Email
- Newsletters
- Word-of-mouth
- Sweepstakes
- And much more!
Aligning your strategy
So the question begs, How do you align your marketing strategy with users search behaviors and drive sales? It's absolutely true that study show 80% of a hotel's visitors will find them through a search engine. However that number is based on business travelers not holiday travelers. Don't get me wrong I'm not trying to say that holiday travelers don't use search engines to find hotels.
What I am trying to say is they don't use them quite the same way and not exclusively. They do initially start their search process from a search engine and then expand out through other channels gathering information prior to making a purchasing choice. These other channels include travel information sites, Blogs, Vacation forums, in other words they do their research.
How a family searches for vacation destinies
Today, a family going on vacation does a lot of research and pre-planning. Surprisingly it's not just to save money. Many families plan their vacations together, parents will often encourage children to search out online destinations they might be interested in visiting.
It's an exciting opportunity for the family to have fun and bond. Here's an interesting fact many families spend more time planning there vacation, then they actually spend on vacation. Which brings me to my point, vacationers search out information from many sources and the majority of those sources don't originate from a search engine.
More importantly those decision points can't clearly be defined in most Pay Per Click (PPC) search engine results.
Understanding the role of children.
DO YOU OR YOUR MARKETING FIRM, truly understand the vacation decision-making process for a family? Does your marketing target those decision points?
Did you know, just by mentioning on your website water Parks, Go karts, Paintball, laser tag just to name a few will increase your bookings? Anyone with children, Will definitely tell you children's opinions have a significant influence on there decision making process. Recent studies show as much as a whopping 60%.
Children have a huge influence on the vacation dollar spent. If you doubt it just look at the Disney vacation advertisements. They play up to the children approximately 60% of the time and only 40% to the adults. And you should only hope that your hotel is as successful as the Disney Properties.
"WHAT" you haven't heard of the nag factor?
Do you understand how to use the nag factor? Think, water Parks, Go karts, Paintball, laser tag you don't even have to be close to these amenities just mention them being in your area.
Organic linking
Just think of this if you paid $3.00 per click ( On your PPC campaign) and one of every 10 clicks brought you one sale. That means the cost of acquisition for that customer was $30.00. To fill 100 rooms would cost how much? $3000 and no lasting value! True you filled 100 rooms one time and it fit your marketing matrix. But what if you could take that same $3000 and build out a strategic organic linking strategy. A strategy that would not only deliver 100 customers once but hundreds of customers year after year at no additional cost?
Now what if you built not just one linking channel but dozens over time? What would that mean to your ROI?
If your hotelier your undoubtedly familiar with the four most often used marketing channels and there associated cost:
Let's review shall we
- The hotel's PPC, $3-$5 per transaction.
- GDS, cost (as high as $27 for a typical 2 night stay at $100 per night).
- Third party vendors, Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz ($50+ for a typical 2 night stay at $100 per night).
- Organic search after optimization as low as $1.25 an ago's down overtime.
The financial incentive to reduce the reliance on GDS and third-party vendors is substantial.
So to that end. I hope the following information will aid you in developing your own Internet Marketing strategy and budget.
First step, Assembling your Online Marketing Budget
To get you started on the right path I have assembled a checklist of tasks which must be completed to launch a online marketing campaign.
Second step, Choosing Your Internet Marketing Partner: (Click Here)
Third step, Internet Marketing Budget Considerations:
Click on any the topics below.
