1. Develop your buyer personas.
Online marketing as we know it has evolved. First of all, it is increasingly difficult to attract users to your website, due to the high competition in the hotel industry. Secondly, what you need is, finally, to convert the users who visit you into customers. Therefore, you don’t need just any type of visitor to your website, but the one most likely to make a purchase.
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Most likely you have segmented your audience. But you need to go further. You need to target the people who might be most attracted to your products or services, people who might be interested in repeating and recommending what you offer. You need to develop buyer persona profiles, whose needs you can satisfy.
Keep in mind that data such as gender, geographic location, economic level will not be enough… You must also know their interests, goals, search preferences and more. To do so, at least use online tools such as Google Analytics, Google Webmaster and research on social networks. In addition, apply offline techniques such as interviews and surveys with your current customers to build profiles.
2. Put into practice good Attraction techniques.
In the first phase of the Attraction phase of the Inbound Methodology you must apply the best online marketing techniques to ensure that you generate enough interest to keep visitors browsing and consulting your website.
Add value with your content.
Content is what fills the Internet: texts, images, videos. And yours has to identify the values of your brand, and at the same time, make your potential customers ( buyer personas) identify with it. To do this, differentiate yourself, demonstrate with content what makes you unique as a hotel, and how you can meet the needs of your people.
Add value, not only in the copy of your website, but also in the images and videos you use. Everything must be consistent and easy to identify with your hotel. Don’t complicate your users’ web experience. And remember that added value is fundamental, because a traveler (adjusted to one of your buyer personas) could invest even more money in your products and services.
SEO-friendly content.
Make sure to optimize every single page of your website. Research and apply the right keywords, based on the needs of your buyer personas. These keywords are the magnets that will attract the most purchase-prone visitors when they enter their queries in the search engines.
Add a Blog section.
And how could it be otherwise, to generate the right content, you need a section on your website where to publish it. The information of value and customized to your buyer personas should be of interest to them. A blog is not a place to talk about your products, but to offer the information that your users are looking for in search engines. Information related to all the tourist activities and experiences that could take place in your locality.
3. Pay special attention to the Conversion phase.
This is the stage where the magic of Inbound Marketing happens. Think that you have to continue applying the techniques of attraction, but you have to go a step further.
Satisfy the needs of your buyer personas.
The main objective of the content is to satisfy. Obviously it has to be attractive, but if it is pleasing it will have a better chance of retaining the right users. To do this, you must think about the sales cycle, which in the hotel industry is known as the traveler’s journey. This cycle corresponds to the previous steps that the final consumer of your hotel takes before booking. And to feed their interest you have to know what kind of content they need at any given moment.
Improve your web navigation to convert.
Today’s travelers, when planning their vacations, are not limited to a single screen. In fact, during the traveler’s journey, they cannot commit to a complete search due to lack of time. Google explains that users use micro-moments, short search times. Therefore, they move across different devices to complete searches and tasks to book the perfect vacation.
Keep this in mind when improving the user experience of your website and applying responsive design. The last thing you need is for them to abandon your hotel’s website, or decide not to consume your content again, if load times are not fast or if they have to manually refresh the page when switching devices.
Include eye-catching CTA’s and specific Landing Pages.
Call-to-action and landing pages are intended to prompt your potential customers to take action. If you have worked on the right content, at the right time you should include offers that your buyer personas won’t want to refuse. With the use of these tools, you will be able to get the email of your visitors or even encourage the final purchase.
Keep your Email Marketing strategy up to date.
When you get the emails of your visitors, they will be considered leads (sales opportunities), i.e. the travel consumers you are most interested in taking care of. These are the users who are closest to the moment of purchase decision. For this reason, do not treat the content of your emails as if they were spam. Add interesting content, based on what users who left you their email have already consumed. Include recommendations and offers for your products or services when these leads are one step away from purchasing.
Don’t forget to use Social Networks.
On the one hand, you need to be present on social platforms to follow the behavior of your leads . If you analyze what they search for and what interests them on the networks, you can notice behaviors that will help you optimize your content.
On the other hand, you should encourage your guests to share their experience in your hotel through their social profiles. With the reviews, photos, videos… you will be including the
user generated content
you need to improve your online reputation.
As you can see, Inbound Marketing offers you a range of strategies applied to a Methodology whose main objective is to increase direct bookings on your hotel’s website. Remember that in order to facilitate and shorten work times, you must include automation in the different marketing strategies you implement. That way, nothing will stop you from growing your hotel’s revenue.
