May 18, 2009

Whether you call it the Internet or an electronic channel, it’s still an inexpensive and effective means of promoting your hotel. There are some simple tactics which promote success in web marketing. Don’t be fooled by those huge numbers of “hits” on your site. The true measure of your site’s success is the number of reservations it generates.

The most important first step is to make sure your web site is designed for success. What is success? Success means attracting people to your site, then converting lookers to bookers.

Sometimes, web site owners, themselves, are the biggest obstacle to efficient site design; it’s called human ego. Web sites are public instruments and the design or “look” of a hotel web site is often greatly influenced by everyone involved with the hotel. I call it “design by committee”. Design-by-committee generally results in a confusing, difficult to navigate web site. Everyone has an opinion; often an uninformed one, based upon how good it looks versus how well it works.

The design of an effective hotel site involves much more than how it looks; and herein lays the problem. There are basic “rules-of-the-road” so to speak, which greatly affect how well a site performs. The first is its search ability. Techies love movement and flashy design; unfortunately, search engines do not. Savvy designers know how to fool search engines, but they spend more time trying to get around search engine parameters than they spend on the site’s content; and content is king. Search spiders read copy, yet designers devote less time and effort to the “words” and concentrate on making a site pretty with photography. Here’s a news flash for owners, managers, and other interested parties; the site is not being designed for you. It is hopefully being designed to attract new guests. If you really need to be involved in your site’s design, learn search engine parameters and the way they work, before you impose your will on the designer. The next very important requirement is to create a simple navigation scheme. “Buried links”, links accessible only from other links, are very slick looking, but confuse search spiders and, more importantly, they also confuse the site’s users. Your site is not an online brochure; it’s an online sales instrument. If an online brochure is what you want, be satisfied with mediocre sales results.

It’s still amazing to me how many site designers neglect the hotel’s location information on their site. The assets of your location are the most important considerations for choosing a hotel. Your hotel’s address is only a small part of your location. Distance to/from attractions, activities, and businesses play a major role in hotel sele-ction. Accessibility is the next consideration. Accesses to/from major cities and/or airports are important considerations.

We have all heard the old axiom “a picture says a thousand words”; in life this is very true; except when it comes to web sites. Good photography is important but search engines do not read photography. Carefully written copy on your site can boost your site’s popularity by making it easier to find. For many sites, the copy appears to be written simply to fill empty space instead of actually providing important information.

Reciprocal links are those which, by mutual agreement, reside on your site and, in turn, contain a link to your web site from the linked site. Reciprocal links can boost the overall popularity of your web site by borrowing the popularity of the linked site. Good examples are links to blogs, news articles, and attractions. But, caution, your home page should never contain an external link. Would you really want to entice someone to exit your site from your home page? The popularity of the Internet has also spawned a new breed of site designers eager to cash-in on this new income source. Web site designers are not necessarily good hotel marketers. It seems that everyone involved with the Internet have now become hotel web marketers; without ever spending two days in the hotel business. If necessary, hire a hotel sales person to oversee the building of your site. Make sure good basic principles of hotel sales are being utilized.

When shopping for someone to oversee the design and perform the marketing for your site, ask questions. Hotel sales and marketing experience should be a basic prerequisite. Choose someone who understands the principles and methodology involved with hotel sales and marketing. Choose someone who will utilize those principles to meld your Internet marketing effort into your hotel’s direct sales program. Not doing so is sort of like hiring a plumber to fix your electric wiring. Selling rooms is not like selling widgets or designing technical web tools.

May 12, 2009

For many hotels and other online businesses it is crystal clear that search marketing is every bit as important as online advertising, e-mail marketing, banner ads, link sponsorships, and a hotel’s own web site when it comes to achieving success online. With media allocation priorities coming into focus, it’s time for hotels to think more critically about search in the context of integration within all of their marketing activities.

While the tools and technology available to search marketers have grown in depth and sophistication, too many hotels still seem to believe that an effective campaign can be boiled down to bids and clicks. The reality is that the key principles of advertising –relevance, clarity, and cross-media consistency–apply to search just as much as they do to any other online format. Any hotel can submit its site to search engines and directories. Any business can launch and manage its own basic paid search campaign. And, getting the coveted click is easier than you might think; it’s incorporating search into your overall marketing strategy that takes some far greater doing.

Start with a simple concept such as cross-channel message consistency. In many cases, search campaigns are planned in a vacuum, with little regard for associated messaging in online advertising programs, 3rd party sales channel activities, link sponsorships, or even properly integrated into the Hotel Web Site.

This segregated approach to search invites a host of problems. First and foremost, it compromises the uniformity of a campaign, and the integrity of the message that’s being delivered. How can you maintain a consistent brand experience when your ad placements are all being planned, created, and managed separately? This especially true when hotels find themselves actually price competing with their own 3rd party intermediary sales channels and these sales channels actually do a far better job at search marketing than the hotel that does not make this a priority item. The end result is that these hotels are actually training their guests to look anywhere but at the hotel’s website when they are ready to book their room reservation???? A second opportunity exists at the intersection of search marketing and Web site optimization. Hotels that miss this vital connection will never produce the kind of fully successful campaign that true integration allows. Qualified site visitors can be hard to attract in general, but producing a quality hotel site visit is even harder.

From search engine placement to copy, site landing pages, reservation booking process, and even how easy it is for potential guests to find hotel information on your site all become critical factors to hotel online booking success. There are just too many critical factors that invalidate a fragmented approach to hotel search marketing.

Analytics is another often missed integration point. But integrating your search marketing program into a comprehensive analytical framework such as the on the Hotel Traffic Builders client hotel dashboard can greatly increase your chances of going beyond the coveted click to secure the most valuable consumer action-room bookings! While many hotels equate traffic with sales, there are, in fact, countless other measures of search campaign quality: post-click e-mail campaign registrations, brochure requests or downloads, photo content interactions, and hotel locator searches, to name just a few. By applying integrated tools and analytical techniques, hotel search marketers can track and assess the quality of visitors’ behavior from the very moment they click–on the search engine, on your site, and beyond.

Interactive marketing integration is a simple concept that isn’t nearly as prevalent as it should be. Cross-channel message consistency, Web site optimization, unified analytics and reporting, and a single vantage point from which to assess the impact of individual campaign elements relative to one another, are all ways to start practicing campaign integration. It’s a progressive approach to online marketing, but one that is far more achievable–and necessary–than you may think.

Hotel Traffic Builders provides and manages all of these solutions for progressive hotels in a completely turn key environment.