Hotel Marketing: 3 Essential Elements to Market A Hotel In 2022

Marketing strategies, tactics and techniques are a part of the essential toolkit for property managers looking to attract as many guests as possible. It’s vital to ensure that you’re as visible as possible on all the platforms that your potential guests are most active on. Add to this a basic understanding of the stages that a consumer moves through in their buyer journey and you have the basic pillars for how to market your hotel effectively in 2022.

The 4 Stages In The Buyer Journey

When making a purchase decision there are usually 4 stages that a consumer moves through. Commonly referred to as the AIDA model by marketers, the stages are: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Ideally what your marketing strategy should do is attract Attention to your property, generate Interest in what you have to offer, stimulate a Desire to find out more and ultimately prompt the buyer to take Action and make a booking. Applying the principles of this model to your marketing strategy will help you determine both the most effective messaging and the channels to use.

The Best Marketing Channels For Your Hotel

Accommodation and hotel marketing can seem like a minefield but it doesn’t have to be. The tools and channels that we’re going to highlight should be used at all stages of the AIDA hierarchy as they ALL play a vital part in hotel marketing in 2022.

Great Hotel Website Design

It goes without saying that a beautiful website is a prerequisite for all properties nowadays. In fact, we’d go as far as to say it’s the single most influential factor in the booking decision-making process. Of course our guide to how to market your hotel business has to begin with your website.

Hotel website design is so important for making a good first impression. Your website not only needs to showcase your hotel and present it in the best light possible, using great photos and images, but also be easy for visitors to navigate and mobile-responsive, meaning it can be viewed on any type of device from desktop to mobile. You should also look to ensure that your hotel website is easy for you to manage and maintain.

Not all websites are built the same, however, and we’d always recommend using website designers who are specialist in the field of hotel web design as they are most likely to know what drives conversion and ultimately help drive more direct bookings for your hotel. Having your website built by specialists in the field means you can be sure that you are getting best practice and state of the art hotel booking systems design.

Social Media and Reputation Management

Once you have your website designed and optimised, it’s time to increase your visibility to a wider market. When looking at how to market your hotel business, your Google My Business and social media presence are amongst the key factors to help you do this.

A Google My Business listing is important to ensure your property displays correctly and frequently in Google Search results and Google Maps across all devices. And a social media presence on, for example Facebook and Instagram can really help to build your online profile, generate traffic to your website, as well as generating reviews for your hotel.

To begin with it’s best to only focus on a couple of social media channels, particularly if you are going to struggle to post things regularly as there is nothing worse than a stale social media profile. If you are posting to multiple social media channels there are tools available to help you do this, such as Hootsuite or Buffer.

It’s also really important to manage your online reputation so if you do get Google or Facebook reviews for your hotel, whether they be positive or negative, it’s important to respond to them as it demonstrates that you care what your customers think.

Google Hotels

When you are looking at how to market your hotel business, of course, you can’t go past Google’s own products. When it comes to increasing your reach and potential to drive new bookings online, Google Hotels is the perfect solution.

Google Hotels allows you to showcase your hotel in local search results on Google.com and in Google Maps, across all mobile and desktop devices. Travelers’ will see your ads when they are actively looking for accommodation in your area.

In addition, it offers the opportunity for travellers to book directly with you, bypassing the online travel agencies (OTAs), allowing you to capture more bookings on your own website.

Google has partnered with a select network of integration partners only to connect hotels to this service. HiRUM is proud to be one of these and can provide Google Hotel Ads setup for your property.

HiRUM’s marketing services include an integrated Marketing Reach program to manage all these specialist aspects of hotel marketing for you. With our experience and reputation in the hotel industry, HiRUM is the perfect marketing partner to take your hotel business to the next level. Give us a call today or complete the form below to find out how to market your hotel business.

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