Online marketing for hotel is as important, if not more, than your operation tasks. Online marketing is most crucial when you are NOT an international chain hotel like Marriott, Accor, Hyatt and more with solid reputation to lean on. Having a good hotel marketing will help you preserve your revenue in the long run as hotels tend to succumb to online travel agent (OTAs) at some point. They are good, but overly reliance is never a good idea. We’d say you should do what you can to increase direct booking revenue for your property.
By having a clear expectations on audience demographics, goals, budget, etc. you can chart out a solid marketing plan to compete with other hotels. With our 10+ years of experience working for international and individual hotels, we have an in-depth understanding on what makes a hotel performs. How to get sustainable growth and decent ROI in the short and long term.
2x Revenue With Half The Cost With Google Ads
As they say, “God is in the details”. Online marketing for hotel stay true to this motto. We used to work for an inter-chain property which was running 5 Google Ads campaigns at the time, but did not quite get the ROI they wanted. What we did was breaking the campaign down to cellular level and rebuilt it back up. Along the way, we found unnecessary keywords that are just in the wrong place, keywords that are draining budget but not performing toward conversion, unfinished ads and many more holes to be patched.
The campaign structure was recreated to show results from different target countries compared to stuffing all different keywords within a single campaign. Three months later, our new optimization showed promising increase with 2x ROI and 50% reduction in overall cost!
This hotel ended the year with an ROI of 12.1x in 2019 roughly doubled from previous year.
To support the campaign, we also launched Google Display Banners to both prospecting and remarketing list to people with intent to travel. This gets less ROI of around 3x but it effectively reached millions with a lower budget. Used together with search campaign, the hotel enjoyed visible increase in their direct booking.
Getting Both Awareness & ROI
Sometimes your online marketing for hotel does not aim toward just bookings. Branding is another aspect you will want to build so one day you can yield a higher ADR and allow customers to engage more with your brand. We would like to take Holiday Inn Express in Krabi as an example. Back then, the hotel is relatively new without direct beach access. We launched Google Display Ads in the form of banners to target countries including HK, SG, KR, etc. and do remarketing ads to capture website visitors. Moreover, we began uploading content and worked on SEO optimization so well the laundry page was ranked in the first page in Krabi. In 6 months of doing so, we enjoyed the ROI of 7:1 from display banners which is doubled from the previous year at around 3:1. We also get millions of views and considerable website traffic as our byproduct.
Online Marketing For Hotel During Covid-19
Another good online marketing for hotel case study would be from Zenith Sukhumvit Hotel Bangkok with their ASQ website. We worked as a consultant in which we see a need to create a quick and user-friendly ASQ page to cope with the rising covid-19 pandemic back when it first started. While revenue from travelers declined, we are one of the first hotels to launch ASQ website and support it with both Facebook and Google Ads.
We built the site within 2 weeks, then reaped more than 100+ ASQ booking within our first month. Better yet, we spent less than THB 20,000 for it. To this day, we still continue pushing ASQ / Hospitel direction until we finally see the end of this pandemic. With the right online marketing for hotel, we are looking at a long-term shift to our revenue mix.
From the success stories above, you can see that each hotel’s sweet spot is different. With Convert Digital as your guide, we will chart out your personalized success path for you with a clearly estimated ROI. Contact us today to learn more.
