Top 5 marketing tactics to boost bookings at your hotel
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Unfortunately, hotels don’t just sell themselves. While it would be nice to sit back and watch the reservations roll in, the reality is much different.
To consistently win bookings you need to put in consistent effort to make sure your hotel is visible, bookable, and enticing. This is where the marketing side of commercial strategy comes into play.
For hoteliers there are many challenges. Most don’t come from a marketing or digital marketing background, meaning there can be a learning curve when it comes to knowing what opportunities are even available for hoteliers to leverage.
If you’re looking for tried and true methods, you’re in luck; this blog will share 5 surefire tactics: A great website, Strong content scores with OTA partners, Cost per click campaigns, Strong relationships with DMOs, and finally higher review scores (dependent on a great guest experience, of course).
For each tip, we’ll also give you a fresh perspective from an expert on the Lighthouse team who has direct experience with each tactic. If you’re ready to start implementing new marketing tactics that will drive bookings, let’s jump right in and discuss each tactic in detail.
A great website
A great website is one of the most important ways to market your hotel. Even if guests discover your hotel, or check reviews on an OTA, many shoppers still visit your website to look for special deals, get more in-depth information about the property (such as room-types and amenities), and view images.
A great website can also drive direct bookings - a seamless booking experience can incentivize shoppers to book then and there, rather than shop around among various OTA’s, especially when the rate they see on your website matches or beats other options. To add some color, I reached out to Niels from our Bruges office. Niels is a BDM in our Bruges office with extensive experience helping independent hotels with their websites. Here’s what he had to say:
Your share of direct bookings – and therefore how much money you keep in your pocket – hinges on a strong website. It's your online business card, so it has to feel trustworthy and professional. Your booking module should stand out immediately – ideally with a best rate guarantee – and the reservation process has to be frictionless. Without that, users will click away. We see our clients’ direct bookings grow with a website that meets current standards.
So remember: A good website is one that looks professional, is trustworthy, and has frictionless booking experience (especially when paired with rates that a guest can’t get anywhere else).
If you want to learn more about the frictionless booking experience part of things, check out our booking engine. And to learn more about how to identify competitor rates, and members rates, check out rate insight.
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Strong content scores with OTA partners
Not all bookings come directly through your website. While direct bookings are certainly the most desirable, hoteliers must also participate with their OTA partners to maximize occupancy, especially over need periods (also known as the ‘off-season’, which you can learn more about in another of my pieces here).
Much like you want your direct website to look its best, OTA partners also want your property to look its best on their platform so it will sell and they can capture a commission! (learn more about this process here)
To keep hotel partners engaged and content fresh on their websites, most OTA’s have therefore created a “content score” or some other way of grading your hotel's appearance. Things like high resolution, up to date photos and clearly categorized room types can drive the score up, whereas outdated content, rate disparity, and unaddressed reviews may drive the content score down.
Treat your OTA listings with a similar level of care as your website. Make sure that you are responding to reviews, updating the latest photos at the optimized resolution and dimensions, and keeping information about your property (amenities, hours of operation, and descriptions) up to date. This ensures that your score remains high, and your property remains high up in an organic search when shoppers do utilize an OTA channel to search for a hotel.
If you’re worried about converting OTA guests to direct bookers, don’t worry at this point, you can convert them to direct bookers later in the journey, so there is no reason to sabotage your listing on an OTA just because the channel cost is higher.
Here’s what Jared, a member of the Lighthouse Revenue Strategy Services team had to say about maintaining high content scores with OTAs:
Content scores are crucial to strong OTA Production. With just a few minutes spent towards ensuring amenities, descriptions, and photos are all up to date, hotels often see a sizable increase in OTA rooms nights and revenue. Oftentimes, guests are shopping on OTAs for a hotel that they haven't been to before. The deciding factor comes down to your online presence! Accurate and efficient advertisement is crucial to winning valuable business or else you risk losing guests to competitors who took the time to put their best foot forward. At Lighthouse RSS, we offer Spotlights that review content regularly to ensure all is up to date and hotels are presenting themselves on OTAs as an experience that guests are looking for. From the first online click to check out, we strive to provide a guest experience that is transparent, hassle-free and enjoyable.
Cost per click campaigns
In seriously slow periods (low season), all bookings including those from online travel agents can be a welcome sight. But what if you’re in a crowded, competitive market? Or perhaps you are still working on improving your content score with an OTA partner and aren’t consistently ranking high on an organic search yet.
This is where tactics like Cost-per-click campaigns, (known as both CPC and PPC interchangeably) can compliment your existing marketing strategy. By utilizing a CPC/PPC campaign, your hotel will be placed either at the top of an organic search, or in strategic places throughout the search results that are proven to have the highest conversion rate. This boosts your hotel's visibility, and puts more eyeballs on your property.
Here’s how they work: hoteliers typically load a pre-paid balance (perhaps $500, or $1000 dollars), and build their sponsored ad based on a template. From there, a hotelier can specify a daily spend limit, and desired booking windows (for example, you can focus on showing your ad to just last minute bookers if you so choose). Each time the sponsored ad is clicked by a shopper, it may cost .50 cents, or $1.50, or some other small amount, depending on how competitive the market is.
When a CPC campaign has been active for some time, hoteliers can track marketing performance statistics such as impressions, clicks, bookings, and return on ad spend.
Here’s what Rachael, a senior member of the Lighthouse RSS team had to say about CPC campaigns
In the competitive landscape of online travel, cost-per-click campaigns on OTAs are a vital tool for hotels, offering immediate visibility and access to a vast audience actively seeking accommodations. While balancing direct bookings is key, strategic CPC on these platforms ensures your hotel is present and bookable at the crucial decision-making moment, directly impacting occupancy and revenue.
The key takeaway for CPC is that they are a quick and easy lever that you can pull when you need to quickly boost visibility and ranking on certain booking platforms, but at a cost. Consider these strategies in your slowest times of year when there is less risk of displacing lower-cost direct bookings.
Strong Relationships with DMOs
Depending on your market, DMOs (Destination Marketing Organizations) can be a major benefit for your hotel. DMO representatives can help you understand which events are coming to your market, the anticipated volume and demographics of travelers into your market, and other vital information about specific campaigns.
DMO’s can also help boost visibility for your hotel, by providing your hotels as a top choice when working with event organizers. For example, a DMO may be able to list a direct booking link for your website for an upcoming convention with a special offer for conference attendees. By maintaining a strong relationship with your local DMO, you can expect to have more opportunities than other hotel partners that do not participate in any sort of local marketing initiatives.
Joining as a partner member of a DMO offers hotels significant benefits, including increased visibility through presence on the DMO website and associated digital channels. You also gain the opportunity to be part of the DMO’s national and international marketing campaigns, engage in travel trade events and exhibitions, and benefit from being the preferred lodging for media visits and MICE delegates. Furthermore, membership provides access to a year-round program of networking events, tourism research, and market insights, helping to drive visitors from key feeder markets.
Keep in mind that partnerships with DMOs typically require a membership fee and maintaining an ongoing relationship with the DMO partner - don’t expect to simply kick back and see new bookings immediately - a relationship with a DMO is often a longer play that benefits both parties and your local travel market as a whole, and can be rewarding, but slower to pay dividends. We also have an informative blog that explains things from a DMO perspective, demystifying their goals, and what analytics they utilize, that we invite you to read.
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Higher review scores
As all hoteliers know, ultimately what matters is a quality guest experience. All of the quick fixes and tricks in the world won’t fix basic operational problems, or a poor guest experience. Hoteliers should monitor indicators such as review scores, and general guest feedback to ensure that new guests find a reason to book, and previous guests have a reason to return.
Research from Lighthouse indicates that review scores also heavily impact a hotel’s pricing potential. It’s much easier to maintain a strong review score than it is to dig yourself out of a hole once your review score has dropped to an unacceptable level.
We here at Lighthouse did extensive research into the relationship between review scores and a hotel’s ability to drive pricing. What we found is that, while certain markets and market segments have stronger correlations than others, there is an unequivocal link between a hotel’s review score and the property’s ability to command rate. For example, the U.S. average for an additional tenth-of-a-point in review score for a 2-star hotel is roughly $1.50 in pricing power. Imagine you’re a 2-star hotelier and you can suddenly get an additional $1.50 in revenue, on average, for each room you sell. That adds up quicker than you might realize!
Consider doing a deep-dive on your current online reputation and see where your points of strength, and points of weakness are. Try to correct recurring issues that are consistently detracting from the guest experience and focus on small incremental improvements to your review score on all channels. This is obviously a longer-term play, but if executed well can lead to huge, lasting benefits for years to come.
Conclusion
Of course, there are more than just these 5 marketing methods, but if you are able to implement these strategies consistently, it will help you to boost bookings all throughout the year when you need occupancy most. Also, if you haven’t already, consider learning more about Lighthouse tools such as Market Insight and Rate Insight. These market intelligence tools are perfect for better anticipating times of year when you may need to implement the marketing tactics described above.
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