Although the digital era is emerging rapidly many small industries and hotels don’t have a web presence at all. But if you are active on the web for your business, you will know how huge and necessary digital marketing is.

Many of you might think, what is it that will make your business a big name and expand.

• Is it the photos, videos, and blog posts of your businesses on the web?
• Is it good food, decent places and prices that will attract customers?

This would be a big NO, none of your efforts will count or work unless you will have a great strategy for your business. However, doing all this will definitely attract some of the visitors but not for the long-term.

Due to increased competitiveness, businesses are more likely to face challenges if you couldn’t present a unique aspect to attract customers. The right and proper usage of strategy will help your business to look creative.

Everyone uses the internet. In short, the internet has become a basic need and completely taken over our lives. So, we can understand:

• How important digital marketing is?
• How digital marketing enables hotels to target online customers whose reviews create a direct impact on your brand’s reputation?

How hotels should do their marketing through digital platforms?

For successfully running the hotel and to outreach the customers especially those looking for the best hotel deals online, adaptation or to be updated to digital marketing is very important.

In recent times, the industry is utilizing digital marketing at a growing pace and the best strategies may result to be profitable but which social media platform or search engine should we choose and will marketing campaigns create effective outcomes?

Basically, hoteliers for creating and maintaining their presence online use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram along with Google and other search engines. So, it’s up to you to choose either one or two.

Here are the most amazing hotel industry trends that will show in what manner it will help your business to grow:

Expand local SEO

Local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) enables individuals searching to find something relevant, local results.

For instance, If you own a hotel in Kathmandu and someone searches for ‘Hotels in Kathmandu’ your hotel will be easier to track down.

To boost your customer base, you have to figure out how to find the good pace of the rankings.

Boosting local SEO will make your hotel progressively visible to the potential visitors, providing you more brand awareness. Local SEO provides the hotel industry with opportunities like,

•  Google My Business
•  TripAdvisor
•  And also large OTAs (Online Travel Agents) such as booking.com can be a help for local SEO opportunities.

It is necessary to understand SEO requires time to get on the top rankings and remaining on the top of the first page on Google needs skill as well as constant investment. To support this, you might need to think about investing in paid search.

Get a mobile-friendly site

For the growth of the hotel, you should think about something interesting like having a mobile-friendly website.

With more and more people today using mobile phones it is easier to search for different hotels and booking it at once while remaining online, signifies the importance of accessible websites using mobile.

The bookings through mobile phones have reached 20% from 13% over a year, whereas PC bookings had declined to 85% from 92% (ABTA’s Holiday Habits report 2017).

If you are willing to make your site available to more customers to increase potential bookings, despite the device they are using, the quality of the website in each device should be the same.

Doing this will assure that nobody avoids booking a stay at your hotel because of unpleasant user experience.

Create more and interesting content

Publishing amazing content relating to your hotel is a great marketing strategy. Online materials such as videos, blogs, and social media posts that indirectly influence customers to take products/services that you are offering.

For instance, you own a hotel in Kathmandu, you could write content on major attractions of this place and even though you don’t include major attractions in your offer you could convince potential guests staying at your hotel.

Moreover, to add more benefit to it you should include CTAs (Call to Action) like ‘BOOK NOW’. CTA’s are beneficial to cause immediate response or encourage immediate sales. The major goal for using CTA is to attract potential leads or to convert existing one into customers.

Be active on social media

With more than 2 billion, 1 billion and 330 million active users on Facebook, Instagram, and twitter respectively proving how huge a difference it can make for your hotel business if a strong social media strategy is applied.

This can help to engage existing and potential guests, create brand awareness, and the opportunity to focus on new audiences.

Getting feedback is the best part of social media marketing. Being active on social media makes it easier to find out the reviews and in turn, you can respond to them immediately in a professional way.

The thing that hoteliers should keep in mind, your competitors are likely to be on social media and to beat them you might need to invest in paid social ads to ensure your offer is pushed to the right audience at the right time.

Use video in your marketing strategy

Customers are always curious about what they are going to experience. Although images have always been a way to display hotel rooms and facilities, the truest and most effective way to show a hotel in its original form is through videos.

80% of internet users like to watch a video instead of reading the same content in written form. Similarly, videos are encouraged to share, in fact, 76% of social media users share a video if they find it interesting.

Displaying your hotel in a video will lead more guests to book a stay at your hotel without any hesitation and the tools through which you can share this asset with the customer is using SMS, Social Media, etc.

Few effective strategies to boost booking

Run Ads on social media and search engines

If your ads are not working properly to increase the number of potential customers it’s better to consider optimizing your ads.

Run dedicated ad campaigns on Google, with average cost per click between $1 and $2 on the search network can provide your brand with better results.

Similarly, Facebook is also accompanied by Instagram. This allows advertisers to run and administer ad campaigns side by side on both Facebook and Instagram to reach more people.

Advertisers can add Instagram ads to Facebook ad campaigns by using Ad Manager and Power Editor just by checking the ‘Instagram’ box under the advertisement set’s placement section.

Running ads on both Instagram and Facebook has resulted in better performance for website clicks, site conversion, videos views and installation of mobile apps compared to the ads ran on just one platform.

There are numerous advantages of connecting with such campaigns. They ensure that your hotel is visible and information on amazing services provided by your hotel business reaches to the right individuals.

Facebook Ads are one of the cheapest ways to attract more customers & get more bookings within your budget.

Likewise, Remarketing Ads is another remarkable way to attract those users who have already visited your hotel website. Targeting those users demonstrates the higher possibility of visiting your website to get a booking with your hotel.

Don’t underestimate email marketing

People nowadays neglect email marketing, but email marketing has a lot of potential that helps work to be done in an effective and efficient manner.

The best way to communicate (business and personal purpose) is through emails. Email marketing allows you to connect with the people by sending and providing guidance on emails and selecting the best amenities based on their budget respectively.

In this manner you can get more new customers and retain existing ones that are beneficial to obtain great ROI for your business.

Associate with Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is another amazing technique to grab the attention of a huge audience.

Hotels can work being associated with the person who can influence hundreds and thousands of people in the purchase decision of others.

It is an easy and effective option for hotels as the influencer has a good reputation for their knowledge and proficiency on a particular topic.

Influencers by posting about your hotel on social media platforms can enable the engagement of their followers on your blog.

Continue daily blogging on your site

Blogging can be beneficial for hotels to attract like-minded readers i.e. customers and the capacity to extend deeply on topics by writing on a medium known as a blog.

Blogging not only provides useful information on a specific subject but also influences customers to dig further on the services that are offered by you which are definitely going to be a win-win situation for you.

Maintain your reputation on the web

The hotel reputation completely depends on customer’s satisfaction and one important thing that you need to keep in mind, negative reviews are equally important as the positive one.

Negative comments provide you with the opportunity to make an improvement in the lacking area. Besides, online reviews are very important as it will determine the decision of your present and future guests whether to stay in your hotel or not.

That is why it is necessary to maintain your online reputation, closely tracking on the ratings and reviews of the customer will help you to understand which part is going wrong and improve work accordingly.

So, a well maintained online hotel reputation will enable you to get more reservations.

Therefore, digital marketing as a whole helps in the generation of revenue for the hotels. With more and better strategies entering the market, visitors are asking for more personalized service. Customers today are demanding friendly websites to work with since they want to be well informed and are not ready to compromise with the offerings from hoteliers. The use of the best digital marketing strategy will help you to understand what the guests are looking for and provide services on that basis.