Loading ...By Max Starkov
Part 2 of 4 from the Hotels Magazine Blog Article: “Hoteliers’ Action Plan to Capitalize on Rising Travel Demand.”
HeBS President and CEO Max Starkov has been invited to lead the “Successful eMarketing” blog on HOTELS magazine’s website. The following is an excerpt from Part 2 of 4 of Starkov’s article: “Hoteliers’ Action Plan to Capitalize on Rising Travel Demand.”
As the travel and hospitality industry emerges from its recession-induced coma, hoteliers need to develop an action plan to capitalize on resurgent travel demand. Last week, I discussed the importance of unlocking the marketing budget, but doing so smartly and strategically via direct online marketing. This week, we’ll explore multichannel marketing and the need for most operators to reexamine their own website offerings.
Action Plan: Embrace multichannel marketing—the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts
Today’s hyper-interactive travel consumers are seeing your marketing messages across a variety of different channels. Now more than ever, there is a convergence of new and traditional digital formats, of interactive and offline marketing channels such as social media and print, hotel websites and social media initiatives, mobile and email, etc. Hoteliers need to reach future and current customers at multiple touch-points. For instance, if you launch an email campaign to the hotel’s own opt-in list, combine it with a tweet on Twitter, a posting on Facebook, a promotion on your website (this is a must), and a paid search campaign on Google.
At the same time, some marketing initiatives, if judged on their own merits, generate disappointing ROIs. For example, many hoteliers are struggling to justify returns from social marketing initiatives. The same applies to display advertising and online sponsorships which rarely produce significant ROIs as stand-alone marketing formats. But unleashing a marketing promotional campaign simultaneously across all available marketing channels produces compounded effect and far greater returns than each individual marketing format.
Action Plan: Take a hard look at the hotel website
Due to economic considerations, many hotel websites have been practically abandoned during the past 2 years. Many hotel websites offer old photos and stale content and read more like an online brochure than a vibrant and engaging digital presence of the hotel. When there is practically no Web 2.0 functionality on the website, there is nothing to stimulate interactivity with the user. This is contrary to the mere nature of today’s hyper-interactive Internet user who is tweeting, texting, emailing, communicating with friends and commenting on hotel and restaurant review sites.
Hotel Internet marketing starts and ends with the hotel website. The hotel website has become the first, the only, and in many cases, the last point of contact with the travel consumer. It is only natural that re-designing, enhancing and optimizing the hotel website should be the top priority. A website re-design is typically a 90-120 day project. Our experience shows that any website optimizations, enhancements or re-designs pay for themselves within 3-4 months.
Here are some important items to consider:
- Maximize the value of the site. It is the hotel’s most important marketing asset today.
- Make the site reflect 2010-2011 industry’s best practices: user-friendly, search engine-friendly, travel booker-friendly, and Web 2.0 friendly.
- Optimize, enhance, and re-design if necessary.
- If the site is over 12 months old, Web 2.0 and SEO optimizations are now due in order to take full advantage of the much cheaper organic search related visitors to your site.
- If the site is over two years old, a website re-design is a must and should be considered in Q3 or Q4 of 2010, or at least budgeted for early 2011. Typical ROI (Return on investment) from a website re-design is 10-15 times within the first 12 months of post-launch operations.
Read the full article, including case studies and a website re-design ROI analysis on the Hotels Magazine’s “Successful eMarketing” Blog. I look forward to our continued dialogue. Next week, we’ll tackle the exponentially growing importance of social and mobile media.
