For hotels and hospitality business owners, these few years may have been one of the biggest challenges yet as Covid-19 basically put the travel industry to a temporary halt. Some adapted and downsized, some closed down and only a handful managed to thrive through the situation by changing its hotel digital marketing strategy to 

After two long years of off and on, Thai hospitality industry finally has a glimmer of hope since Thai government announced the Sandbox program, followed by the Test & Go program and finally a full opening of the border to accept vaccinated travelers into the country once again.

As the gears began to move once again, the question now is “Are you ready to be back at full operation after two years of downtime.” and also “Are you aware of how much hotel digital marketing has changed since then.” 

Now is the time. Now is the change to reset your past practice and chart a clear hotel digital marketing strategy backed with solid data and enough budget to get you back on track faster than others – including investing solely on OTAs such as Booking.com or Expedia. 

Survey from Thailand Digital Outlook 2021 reports that more than 85.1% of Thais use the internet and spend their time six to ten hours a day. That’s almost half a day. Moving business to online is a key and a necessary thing to do. When finding the right hotel, guests not only look at OTAs but also would search for your hotel’s social media page to read some reviews and may also add you on LINE to see if you have any available offer. 

Thanks to the change in customer behavior, increasing book direct % mix to save your hefty OTAs commission is possible. But only if you do it right. 

We know you are familiar with the terms or are currently using some of them. However, in our long experience it is rare to see any hotel that could make the most out of each channel due to the lack of experience, lack of manpower or simply lack of investment to make it fly. As such, we seek to provide you with what each tool can do and how you may want to set your standards when it comes to using them. 

building a brand on social media will help promote the hotel to a broader group of people and easier. Especially when the business can provide unique contents in its own memorable style that could inspire people to choose the brand over another. 

In social, investment on good photo and video are a must. We have seen most hotels slacking off saying their graphic designer could do it but it is not up to standard. With less than top quality visuals (and perhaps snappy captions) your social media just won’t look as good as you may want it to be. One thing to note is that this is the era of ads. You cannot do social media right without ads as organic reach is getting closer to zero each day. You may need to learn how to define and test your target audiences to see which one performs better. Whatever platform you use, always remember to place tracking mechanisms such as Facebook pixel to ensure you can measure your ROI. 

Do not stop asking your team for a clear ROI on ads because you can have one. And when you see how much you gain with ads, you can manage your budget accordingly. If the team could not provide you with such numbers, another option is to do ‘Message’ ads that drives users to your inbox. With this type of ads, you can use ‘cost per message’ as your benchmark.   

How effective would your marketing be if a guest types keywords like “best hotel in Krabi” and your hotel is at the top of the list. Doing SEO right will give you just that, but it won’t be that easy in this sector because all your competitors would want to be there.

For hotels without any SEO experience, we recommend starting with keyword research. Which keywords are relevant to your hotel and have high search volume on Google? Use tools like Google Keyword Planner to find them and take note. You will need to put these keywords throughout your website where it is relevant. Be it on the homepage, in a blog post, etc. 

Then you may need further SEO optimization from a person with enough experience to tinker with your website backend. Some hotel websites may need web developer’s support in making it load much faster on mobile. 

Whichever stage you are at today, remember that SEO takes time. It needs consistency and lots of effort to keep going for a year or more to see solid results. However, once you optimize your website well enough, you may be surprised just how much quality traffic is coming through your SEO. It is almost absolutely necessary to do SEO to gain visibility and steal back shares from OTAs. 

On this subject, also look at your ‘Local SEO’ and ‘Google My Business / Google Map’. Most hotels would have an issue of not having consistency when it comes to their address, phone number, etc. on so many online platforms. This confuses Google resulting in bad rankings. Always ensure the exact same hotel address and more to start, then try to narrow yourself down to specific location to rank even better for people searching for those specific locations. 

Buy ads today and see results today. There are many forms of paid ads available for hotels such as Google search ads, Google display ads (banner) or ads on OTAs platform such as Expedia travel ads. 

Paid ads give hotels the ability to capture demand when it needs to, with tools to narrow down to specific demographics of their customers. However, depending on your hotel’s target audiences, investment may be high if you need to target large markets such as the US along with 10 other countries. 

With paid ads, you can always ask for a clear ROI which is possible with enough implementation of tracking tools. For small hotels the advertising budget could be as low as THB 15,000/mo while some larger hotels spend up to THB 100,000+/mo with a larger audience and more channels. 

Create that extra credibility and deliver actual traveling experience to your potential customer with KOLs / influencers. As long as the reviews are not too good to be true and cover your unique selling points, you should be fine. 

Selecting KOLs could be confusing as well. First you need to review if their personality and style match with your property, then you will need ones with a relatively large fan base (100k+) for it to work well. With KOLs, the larger the better. But always have a good mix of macro (large) and micro influencers. We would also recommend against nano influencers as the impact would be too small to see. 

Knowing where and how to reach a destination may be even more important than how fast you can travel. Same goes for hotel digital marketing strategy. 

With our 10+ years of experience working for 3 to 5-star luxury hotels & resorts, we know exactly what to fix to improve your hotel online presence and effectively increase your book direct revenue. Moreover, we can help fill the experience gap needed when it comes to setting high standards for each marketing channels or implementing conversion tracking – all crucial to see the exact ROI on what you choose to do. 

Contact us today and hear how we could improve your hotel revenue with digital marketing. 

See more our projects here :  www.convertdigital.co.th/th/bangkok-digital-marketing-agency-project

Get your website up and above all others with Google Ads

Google Ads is a form of ads that uses keywords to trigger. When your customers search something related to your business on Google, the ads will show on #1-4 position on Google’s first page.

The difference of being on top of the first page and somewhere else is enormous. Imagine the first top 3 results getting 80% of all the clicks, and business. If your SEO game is not strong enough to rank there organically, using Google Ads campaign will bring you the same advantage with some investment.

Face it. You’re now in a competition where there’s no day or night. No borders. You can only get above your competitors by serving the right offer to the right person at the right time, which could be 4 a.m. in the morning. Google Ads can help you do just that with its functionalities. You can choose to show or not to show ads to certain areas of the world, certain keywords, times or search conditions.

Google Ads campaign creation can be done in many different ways. We follow Google’s best practice which is constantly updated. We also discuss with Google’s rep each month for our clients. Conversion tracking is also a complimentary service from our side to help you understand how Google Ads brings you increased business. You will have complete control of how you spend, campaign structure, what to measure and many more with us.

After running your campaign for a month, you should have insights on how your competitors are bidding and how much shares they currently have. We also have data aside from Google’s platform to better analyze the niche you may be profitable in and track how your competiors are aiming for.

Once invested, you will see metrics such as impression, clicks, click-through-rate (CTR), etc. We will cross-check these results with other tools such as Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and more to optimize your ROI.

You will know exactly how many users are visiting your website from Google Ads and also know which goals they hit and where they hit them. This level of insights will be provided with our complimentary conversion tracking.

Your firm have an allocated resource and we know hiring an in-house digital marketing team will be a considerable investment. Why invest so much when you can hire a full team as well with just THB 20,000 to do what you need to achieve? Our staffs are veteran on the subject and hold Google Ads Search, Display and Video certifications. You can rest assured we know what we are doing and save this chuck of budget to invest on something else.

Now you may consider investing in Google Ads to see if this works for you. Whether you invest or not, remember, an untapped space will eventually be tapped. And you do not want your competitor to gain influence there. Ask us today and see for yourself how cost-effective this is.

Do you need a digital marketing plan that works during Covid-19? It has been almost 2 years since Thailand and the world has lived through one of the great economic crises. Covid-19 outbreak has changed the way people live, do business, purchase products and services and force businesses to think how to sell without having a storefront. Creating a digital marketing plan containing digital marketing strategy that allow your business to perform in such situation maybe challenging for you.

We invite you to take these 3 steps approach on how to create a digital marketing plan that limit your budget while giving you ROI to grow sustainably in the long term.

1. Define your audiences in detail
2. Choose the right channels
3. Pick the right performance indicator

Start Your Digital Marketing Plan with Audiences

A good digital marketing plan needs a very detailed audience demographics. You should strive to define your customers age, gender, interests, job title, relationship status, etc. for each of your product and service. Audience is the foundation that could spell either success or failure of your entire plan.

Once audiences are defined, you start putting the right price, promotion, content, basically personalization to each group in your overall communication.

Choosing the Right Channels

Different channels give different results. You as a decision maker need to know which type of user are using which channels. For example, Instagram is more popular among ladies and people on Instagram in general tend to have more purchasing power than that of Facebook. Another example would be choosing to invest in Google Ads if your business serves user in urgent needs such as car battery change service. For restaurant and café, you cannot forget LINE OA as Thai people use LINE as their primary tool of ordering even more than any other channels. Thus, knowing which channel should be invested in is one of the keys to success.

Get Your Digital Marketing Plan the Right KPIs

Sometimes KPI does not come in the form of sales figure. In some business, getting more visibility share online or new client registration is their goal. In making a solid digital marketing plan, we would like to introduce these common indicators for you to choose from.

• ROI (Return on investment): ROI = 3 means for every THB 1 spent you get THB 3 in return. ROI is commonly used to see which channel gets you most revenue.
• Reach and Impression: Reach is how many people see your post or ads. Impression is how many times your post or ads has been seen. A person could see your ads twice. That is 1 reach and 2 impressions.
• Impression share: This metric is used primarily on Google Ads and it tells you how many times your client sees your ads out of 100%. Number closer to 100 is better.
• CTR (Click-through-rate): How many times your link or ads is clicked on. CTR of 5% means for every 100 people who saw your ads, 5 people clicked on it.
• Conversion Rate: How many % of people purchased or submitted lead form to your business (conversion). Usually fall below 5%.

Creating a digital marketing plan in Covid-19 situation can be tricky as you cannot spend as much as you wanted to. And sometimes you are limited to only 1-2 channels. In that case, know your audience, know your channels and know how to measure results are the keys to success.

Online marketing landscape has been changing every day. One of the giants who leads this change is of course large companies like Google who owns more than 75% of the world’s total search volume. As such, advertising using Google Ads is one of the best channels in reaching potential customers in every stage of the purchase cycle, from researching to buying.

Google Ads campaign is very effective in driving quality traffic to your website. With this channel, your ads will be shown on rank #1-4 on Google’s first page above organic results. Google Ads campaign allows room for flexibility whether you wish to drive more people to your website or scope down to only a handful of people who are looking for what you offer. You can also target specific time, cities, countries and more to suit your business needs.

Google Ads runs on a PPC or Pay-per-click model where you will be paying for clicks, not impressions. This means your ads can show as many times as needs and you won’t be paying if there is no click. But of course, a good campaign will drive lots of click to your website to purchase your products or services. You can also set objective to maximum clicks, impression share or conversion as well.

We recommend businesses to have at least one Google Ads campaign running to get more business from Google because the average cost per click for most business is only THB 3-7. If you are selling high value items or are selling products in batch, this is the ideal channel to invest in. Moreover, it’s not only in normal search result, you can advertise using Google Shopping Ads, Google Discovery Ads (which goes to gmail and YouTube) and Google Display Network which launches your banners into 97% of websites in this world in the area you choose to advertise.

Not sure how to get started with Google Ads? Consult us for free and see how we could estimate your ROI.

In today’s social media post, brands and corporate compete with “Content”. But what makes quality content on social media post? Your idea may be important, but the first thing your user will probably see is the quality of your image or VDO. This could make or break your social media post performance.

Many may think that posting on social media or launching a campaign does not require much effort. As quality goes, more and more brands are hiring knowledgeable professionals and agencies to manage their social media. This raises the overall standard of how brands compete with quality proofreading, professional photos and breathtaking VDOs. Like it or not, your company needs to adapt or risk becoming obsolete in this field.

If you wish to compete better, start hiring professional photo and videographers. They will recommend you tips to present your products and services in a better way. A well-thought media will inspire people to act whether by buying a product or learning more about the brand.

Our Digital Marketing Agency in Bangkok, Thailand is equipped with content writer, photographer, videographer, and a director to making highly competitive social media post and advertising for your brand. We can take this burden off you and present you a complete social media plan along with graphics and vdos necessary to ace the market. If you are interested in being a leader in your respective field, we could help.

We are living in the world that almost every people are using social media in their daily lives from morning to bedtime. Your digital marketing strategy is most likely involved one or more social channels such as Facebook, Instagram, LINE OA and YouTube. If you want your business to have more exposure on these channels, one of the best metric to focus on is the number of shares. Followed by comments and like.

The Power of the ‘Share’ Button

Social media is built for sharing. You share your post to the world or share others posts on your own timeline. This act of mass sharing could make or break your business. For example, European Food Co., Ltd., the owner of Pepo jelly once hitted top 10 twitter hashtag resulting in a spike in sales within that short period of time. Such is the power of sharing and why you should aim for it.

Writing Social Media Content for people to ‘Share’

Writing content on social media should focus on getting the highest number of shares. We understand that you need to publish promotions and sell your products/services, but these types of posts usually do not get many shares. The solution is to mix your social media plan with something worth sharing indeed, such as tips & trick related to your business, noteworthy updates, infographics and more. If you content is well written and prove to be of good value, people will automatically share it, getting your business much better exposure in turn.

Knowing this, you can go back to the drawing board and plan how you wish to mix your sharable content with your usual sales posts. With proper content and advertising, your social media performance, and sales, could be much better.