Every year hotel business around the globe spend millions of Dollars on marketing and brand building, and consequently they all face a similar dilemma- how best they can spend this money, ensuring the highest possible return on their investment. Given that marketing options have diversified tremendously in the last decade, and now include E-Marketing, Mobile Marketing, E-Mailers, paid SEO and PPC services, apart from marketing in traditional print, radio, and broadcast media, determining your priorities, is never an easy call.
This article sketches out in brief, why E-Marketing, and SEO services in particular must bag a big chunk of your overall budget for marketing?
Why E-Marketing?
Since, different businesses have different target audiences, a single all weather marketing strategy will never do for everyone. Before specifying budget for marketing, one must ask himself the following questions: Who are your target audiences?
How best you can reach your target audiences, via traditional print or broadcast media, or via the digital media?
Once the medium is decided, ask which is the best strategy to convert your audience into your clients?
Studies show that 8 out of 10 people use Google to garner information about their travel destinations. That means for hospitality industry choices are simple. To reach them Hoteliers must spend on E-Marketing, and fare better on Google search results.
Best E-Marketing practices for Hoteliers
While online marketing is generating higher revenues for the hotels, there is also a flip side to it. eMarketer, a US online magazine found in a recent survey that more than half of these online hotel bookings came through third party Online Travel Agencies (OTA) like Living Social, Snap Deals, Make My Trip, Trip Advisor, etc. These third party OTA not only corner a big share of hotel profits as their commission, they also make the home website of hotels obsolete, and harms their brand credibility by offering frequently changing deals (sometimes changing on a day to day basis). Experts feel that while OTA may generate higher traffic and revenues, in the long run there is no alternate, but to devise ways of bringing prospective clients and customers directly to the home website, doing away with OTAs altogether.
The best way to get rid of OTAs without affecting your sales revenue is to improve your page ranking on Google by building a highly effective SEO strategy. This will have multifarious benefits for your hotel business:
It will improve traffic to your hotel website, thus helping in brand building and higher revenues. It will do away with the adverse effects, brought about by continuously changing packages on OTAs and maintain rate parity. Higher profit rates by saving the OTA commission.Because of these above mentioned benefits, more and more hotel businesses are investing profusely in professionalized SEO services. A recent US based survey found that Hotel businesses in US are spending nearly 49% of their advertising money, on digital marketing initiatives, of which nearly 31% is spent on SEO services, second only to amount spent on website designing, and the trend is on the rise. Market analysts are expecting a 7%-9% increase in investment in paid SEO services in the hospitality industry.
Given the benefits of SEO, and taking a cue from recent market surveys in hospitality industry, I believe that SEO should always be high on advertisement budget planning. Also, one must not forget that professional SEO services cost far less than a campaign on traditional media, or even the colossal OTA commissions. Investing in SEO, may well be the safest marketing option for some years.
Website Optimization Is Vitally Important To Get Search Engine Visitors
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