5 Things You Should Do Every Week To Make Your Hotel’s Digital Marketing Activity More Effective

A week is a long time in the world of digital marketing, and this is nowhere more true than in the case of the fast-paced hospitality industry! Making time to do these five things each week can help maximise your existing digital marketing activity and make sure your efforts align with key performance indicators such as direct bookings, better search visibility and RevPar growth.

Read on to find out what you should be doing each week to ensure effective digital marketing for hotels.

1. Check Your Reporting Tools

Keeping a close eye on the results of your existing digital marketing strategy is the only way to monitor how successful your marketing is and where improvements need to be made when targets are missed. Unless you keep a close check on existing activity, it will be exceptionally difficult to ascertain what is working and what isn’t. There are many brilliant reporting tools out there for you to try out and see what works best for your hotel, including some designed especially for the hotel marketing industry and tailored to meet the specific needs of hospitality marketers. As a very basic requirements, your reporting should tell you where traffic to your booking engine is coming from, how many reservations each channel generates, how your direct bookings compare to those from your GDS, the conversion rate and cost per conversion of paid ads.

2. Research Your Competition

Regular checks on what your hotel’s competitors are doing will help to fuel your own efforts and ensure you remain differentiated from properties in the same area and of similar star ratings. This doesn’t have to be a lengthy process, particularly once you have already performed your first crucial in-depth competitor analysis, but just as your efforts are evolving, your competitors are likely to do the same. A quick check of key flash points like their SEO performance, content marketing efforts, website developments and booking engine advances can help to keep you well ahead of the pack.

3. Search for New Trends

New trends are cropping up all the time in the hotel industry, making it more vital than ever to stay ahead of the curve. Keep up with the latest news from the hospitality industry by checking your favourite industry blogs and news for inspiration which can be fed back into your digital marketing activity and digital marketing for hotels.

4. Create Engaging Content

Content marketing is one of the most talked about digital marketing trends of 2017, and so it’s crucial you keep your content in the best possible shape. If not already blogging, consider establishing one as a way to demonstrate your industry expertise and provide added value to site visitors which can ultimately lead to more hotel bookings. Invest time and resources in creating good quality content rather than simply tackling quantity – determine what your guests and website visitors want and identify different content types for different types of guests.

5. Utilize Your Social Channels