Acquiring Targeted Customers Through Hotel Web Marketing:
Many hotel and travel websites exist in the market place. These websites help promote and provide options for customers that are traveling to various cities and choosing their temporary place of residence. This is a form of reactive marketing that waits for potential customers to pick your hotel if they are within your price range and traveling to your city. Many other forms of reactive marketing exist.
Despite their effectiveness, they are not proactive because Hotels do not have marketing professionals monitoring their campaign with these website. Another form of hotel marketing known as pay per click advertising is the perfect supplement to marketing via travel and hotel websites. It is targeted, measurable, and controlled. Given the fact that 80% of people book their reservations to hotels online, utilizing every online marketing channel, or at minimum exploring each channel, is a smart business practice.
For those unaware, pay per click advertising is a form of search advertising in which customers go to Google and type in a keyword based on the information they are searching for. For example, a customer may type in the keyword phrase hotels in Miami.” After that keyword phrase is typed in, a list of results shows up. The results in pink at the top of the page as well as the Ads on the right side are known as sponsored links. That is where all of the pay per click advertising occurs. Getting your websites to the top in the middle of the organic search engine ranking pages can be difficult and take time, however getting your website to the top with pay per click to the first page or the top of the first page is not only possible, but it is guaranteed depending on how much you are willing to bid for a particular keyword or a set of keywords.
Consider the idea that you own a hotel in Miami, Florida. You have been marketing your website for non-traditional marketing channels and you’re ready to focus on new marketing opportunities for your hotel. If you were to check Google, you would find that the keyword phrase “hotels in Miami” collects close to 800,000 impressions or searches per month. That translates into 26,667 searches each day. Based on Google’s traffic estimator and a daily budget of $100 per day, a website is expected to get 89 to 99 clicks per day based on the bidding it is conducting. If you pick up 5% of those clicks, you are getting an incredible return on investment. That’s translates into 4 to 5 customers who may spend on average $80 per day for multiple days. The numbers make sense for boutique and larger hotels. Let me remind you, this is only one keyword phrase. There are literally 1000’s of potential hotel keyword phrases out there.
Pay per click advertising is not the end all be all of marketing. It is another distribution channel meant to get your hotel’s message across to potential customers. But given that 75% of searches worldwide are done through Google, pay per click advertising is an area all Hotels must play in in order to compete and gain the proper competitive advantage. Companies such as Hyatt, Hilton, and Starwood Hotels have pay per click marketing budgets that are $500 a day dedicated Miami alone. Simply dedicating $50 to $100 will provide hotels with the opportunity to attract more customers. If you are a boutique hotel, I recommend consider pay per click advertising for your future marketing needs.