As a digital marketing agency for hotels, our first job is to advise our clients so that we can get the most out of the available budget.
Digital marketing can be cost-effective as long as we can segment the audience well and get a good return. Otherwise, it can be a huge cost with a very low return.
As a partner, our interest is that our client gets the best possible results from their budget, even if that means investing their money in other types of offline marketing actions such as public relations, billboards or outdoor advertising.
Our approach is always goal-oriented, always measuring the return on actions, and with the utmost respect for the client's resources.
Before we start
A few considerations to take into account as a basis for our digital marketing.
1. We are not the only ones selling our product.
In our market there are a lot of options to book our hotel. These intermediaries are absolutely necessary to help us sell our product, also on the web. They have their customers and their strategies to sell more, and we must have ours.
Our digital marketing strategy will be designed to capture as much of the demand as possible, that is, that as many customers as possible book on our website. Thus, we must not only compete against other hotels, but mainly against our friend-enemies, the portals.
2. It is very difficult to create new demand for our hotel!
Customers are interested in the destination, the hotel is a decision that is made later, unless you have a very special or niche product. We exclude loyal customers because in this case we are talking about new demand.
For this reason, if you are going to invest efforts in creating new demand, it is better to do it through public relations or offline actions, not digital advertising. As much as we can target, nobody clicks on banners, and bidding on generic keywords in search engines is killing flies with cannons.
That said, you may have that need, and you may have the resources to invest in it. In that case, there is a technique that we do recommend using, pixel marketing for hotels.
3. Hotel name and niches.
Unless your hotel is very niche, such as "ecological hotel in Mallorca", the visits to your website that end in a booking will only be those related to the name of the hotel.
Forget about SEO, the first position and the "long tail", hotel websites will not be positioned in the first position of Google results for a destination, except when the search is for the name of your hotel.
Wanting to position your website for "hotel in Mallorca" would mean competing against the big portals, such as Booking, Expedia, Tripadvisor, Trivago. You are not going to find any provider that can compete against that, and if you do, they may not have enough knowledge of the sector, or they may be selling you a lie.
Let's get to work
Our strategy: attract qualified traffic, stand out from the competition, capture direct bookings.
1. Attract qualified traffic
Attracting qualified traffic to the hotel's website is very easy, you only need to have the hotel published on Booking.com?
What is more complicated is to considerably increase qualified traffic. Here's the thing: if you do things right in terms of product and price, the qualified traffic to the website will be directly proportional to the number of rooms in your hotel. So it is impossible to increase qualified traffic within the demand margins of your hotel.
As a reminder, qualified traffic are those users with an interest in our product, and who might be willing to make a purchase at some point. Investing resources in attracting users who have no prior interest is a mistake, as the return on investment would be low or non-existent.
However, although we will always move within the limits of demand, we can advertise on SEM search engines (AdWords, Bing) and actions on meta-search engines (Google Hotel Ads, Trivago, TripAvicor, etc.). These actions will allow us to direct qualified traffic to our website that would normally be captured by OTAs and portals, thus gaining access to an additional volume of users who, without these actions, would never visit our website.
Both actions will cannibalise our organic traffic, so not all the traffic we get through these channels should be considered an increase. In the case of AdWords, we estimate that the increase in traffic is 15% - 20%, while in the case of meta search engines it could be 3% - 5%.
As mentioned above, AdWords cannibalises organic traffic, and meta traffic cannibalises both organic and AdWords. Although it is foreseeable that in the near future we will see a displacement of traffic towards meta search engines, the current reality is that the increase in traffic that we can achieve is still not very relevant, if we add to this the cost of managing these actions, plus very high CPCs or even commissions of around 10%, the suitability of these actions is doubtful, especially in small and medium-sized hotels.
In short, the increase in the number of users that we will be able to achieve will only be the equivalent of what Booking.com and other OTAs "quintan" us, never more. Furthermore, we must ensure that the cost of acquiring this traffic does not exceed the benefit we can obtain from it.
2. Stand out from the competition
Once we have the user on our website, we have only gone part of the way. Now it is time to convince the user, first of all, to choose our hotel.
Our home page should be like a magazine advertisement where we must finish generating desire in the customer to make the decision to buy. Our website should be a sales pitch, where we should highlight our strengths, where we have to generate desire and offer a value proposition that helps us to "close the deal".
We are committed to originality and simplicity as far as possible, in original and own content, generated by the hotel, as long as we can have a minimum of quality.
Inveritr in spectacular photography, a picture is worth a thousand words, Pro tip: if you can afford it, include models in your sessions, smiles and simplicity will make your product much more attractive and memorable.
As for content: in advertising, a well-spoken word is worth a thousand pictures. Remember, we are making a pitch, and therefore, we must tell a story. The key here is to understand the customer and what they are looking for in our hotel. Pro tip: pay close attention to customer comments when generating our content.
Photos and content should complement each other and work together, but it is also essential to accompany them with good design and impeccable technical execution. Our website conveys our personality, there can be no flaws that might disturb the user, and the information must be presented in a clear and accessible way. As the experts say "the best design is the one that is invisible".
The brand, a key asset that will help us connect with customers. We must give our brand personality, it must be aligned with values and a vision, and this must be perceptible at first glance on our website.
Even if the user does not know our brand beforehand, giving it a personality is key to ensure that our customers recognise and identify us, and this will undoubtedly influence their purchasing decisions.
3. Capture direct bookings
Conversion is the best indicator that we are doing well in our digital marketing strategy. The conversion of our website should be between 1% and 4%, depending on the market and the time of sale. If our website does not average 2 bookings per 100 unique users, there will be changes we should consider.
The search form should be highly visible, even prominent. Very few users will resist the temptation to do a quick search to see how much it would cost them on the web. We must make this as easy as possible.
We must offer advantages, if it can be a direct discount, even better. We recommend offering the same room with the same conditions at a price between 5% and 10% lower. If you can cross out the price that appears on the other portals and put the one on the website in green, all the better. This allows the customer to easily buy the different options.
Offer added value, take advantage of the fact that the customer is on your website to set yourself apart from the portals. This is your opportunity to offer more than just a cold hotel reservation. Make sure you offer extras with the booking on your website, if possible free of charge. Whenever you can, sell experiences, not rooms.
KISS (keep it simple, stupid). Don't distract the user(don't overuse widgets!) It makes no sense when a user is booking to talk about anything other than price and benefits. Comparators should stay in metas, not metas on your website?
It is very important that the booking process is simple and fluid, that it is done within your website. There should be no jumps, iframes or unexpected surprises. Product and price, and little else, is what a customer needs to book, security, ease of use. Nothing more.
Impulsive booking? favour it as much as possible! They may cancel later, but they will have already booked on your website, the customer is already yours, and not someone else's. Do portals use subliminal techniques to improve the booking? So do we! Be careful! Not all of them do it well: there are 3 techniques, positive reinforcement, sense of urgency, gain / opportunity. We are convinced that our engine is the most advanced on the market on this point, by far.
Measure, adjust, move forward.
Our digital marketing must always be justifiable from an ROI point of view. If an action has no direct return, we discard it as soon as possible, fail fast.
Weekly monitoring, monthly reporting.
Digital marketing is becoming increasingly complex. Online sales are influenced by a large number of variables, and it is very difficult to isolate which of them has influenced positive or negative results. For this reason, we like to move forward with lead feet, knowing exactly what is happening with the investment at all times.
The Google Ads dashboard has more and more options, and not all of them are always known or suitable. Pro tip: don't be swayed by Google's advisors: they are focused on maximising the investment, not the benefits for the client. If you follow all their advice, you can end up with a sky-high CPC and bounce rate, and a plummeting ROI in a few days.
Google confession.
As a curiosity, a Google consultant regularly calls us to monitor the investments of some of our clients, when we complained about the increase in CPC after changing the bidding strategy to "conversion optimisation", the Google consultant confessed to us that 17 conversions per day are necessary in this campaign for conversion optimisation to work properly. Don't activate it: use only manual CPC or enhanced cost.
Order and structure
Very important to be able to make an accurate analysis of what is happening. We always work with one campaign per product and market. Each campaign with several ads so that Google can optimise which one works best. The same with ad extensions.
Simplify everything as much as possible so that tracking and measuring is as easy as possible. Prevent chaos from taking over our campaigns, so that we can easily track and measure every single action. The simpler the tracking, the more comprehensive the control we can perform.
Mission accomplished
Our strategy is always to reach the "investment ceiling" for each hotel. In other words, to capture the maximum qualified traffic possible, so that our ad is always at the top, ahead of Boking.com and the rest of our competitors. At any time and from any device.
From the outset it is simple, we only have to increase the CPC and increase the budget of the campaigns, the complicated thing is to do it with a low cost per click and, above all, that all the money invested ends up returning in the form of savings in commissions.
To do this, we have a few "tricks", the first, obvious: have a high converting hotel website. Secondly, register the name of the hotel as a brand, so that we can block Google from allowing our competitors to use the hotel name in their ads, this can reduce the CPC by around 75%.
Pro tip: running at full throttle, the ROI of AdWords campaigns is usually over 1,000%, every euro invested saves 10 euros in commissions.
In short, with the right strategy and execution of your digital marketing actions you can reach as many direct customers as possible, and do so with an excellent return on investment.
