Top 5 New Year's Resolutions for Marketing Your Hotel

By David Elton -- HOTELS Magazine, 1/1/2006

According to industry indices, worldwide electronic hotel revenue from the global distribution systems and key Internet sites continues to climb. Electronic roomnights, average daily rates and length of stays are higher month over month in 2005 than 2004. With no indication that the trend will shift, e-distribution and online bookings are poised to do nothing but climb steadily in 2006.

If you are a hotel marketer stuck doing the same things year after year, now is the time to make a change. It no longer benefits you to spend money on display advertising, co-op ad programs with tour operators or extensive printed pamphlets or brochures that have a limited shelf life. We’ve entered the age of electronic marketing, and there’s no turning back.

The best way to be truly competitive in 2006 is to embrace the Internet as your best marketing tool. To do that, you may need to make the following New Years Resolutions:

1. Audit all Web site hotel images and ensure that they accurately represent the facility and its features.

Take the time to look at the images of your hotel currently on your Web site—are they up to date or are they old? Then view your hotel from the eyes of your customers. The images of your hotel when seen in a Web environment, rather than a brochure environment, probably are not adequate.

A still shot of a nice vase on the guestroom table with the bedroom blurred in the background won’t turn a looker into a booker in today’s online marketplace. However, hotels displaying image galleries that are well presented, instead of one to three thumbnail images, have 100% more pick up than hotels that don’t. In fact, research shows that hotels using image galleries vs. those using thumbnails see an increase in online bookings by up to 70%.

So, as you build your preventive maintenance program for 2006 to be sure your furnishings, fixtures and equipment are kept in good condition, begin building a “preventive marketing” program as well to ensure your Web content and images are fresh and on target.

2. Consider hiring a professional firm to take new images and generate rich media.

Now that you are looking at your Web site in a different light—and from a different perspective—determine whether or not you have consumer-friendly, rich media.

As a traveler, would you book a room at your hotel based on the images you see or would a 360-degree perspective be more inclusive and informative? Have your visual content needs outgrown your personal or property skill set when it comes to Web site design? 

Professional, affordable Internet content design firms are available to help you as much—or as little—as needed, from consulting and designing to hosting and managing the content. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money to have a visually effective Web presence. There are ways of taking your existing still images or print brochures and make them come alive online. An e-brochure costs less to produce and can reach the masses in an instant.

The bottom line is that visuals motivate consumers to make a buy decision. If you’re going to sell yourself, be sure that you are putting your best foot forward and presenting your hotels with the best marketing tools available. If you need help, just ask.

3. Add destination photography to the Web site to enrich it.

Making sure your Web site is sticky as long as possible is the key to online marketing success. Consumers are becoming savvier every day and are astutely aware of the range of marketing and depth of detail that shopping online provide.

For example, just promoting your guestrooms, meeting facilities, recreational activities and food & beverage outlets isn’t enough. You’ve got to raise the bar in terms of exceeding looker expectations.

Selling your hotel alone (the physical properties) is no longer enough—you’ve got to sell the experience, and more importantly, the destination. Showing synergy between the destination and its location shows that you are providing answers to the questions that are in the consumers mind before they even have a chance to ask.

Marketing savvy is vital to brand and property differentiation. Make the difference through destination marketing.

4. Ensure all images include descriptive search-engine optimized captions.

If you’re not familiar with search engine optimization, you’re probably missing the boat when it comes to online marketing. If your captions are not correct, relevant and basically reflective of the SEO criteria, you can miss an opportunity. It’s that simple.

Consumers won’t see the images and the content that you have worked so hard to present because they simply aren’t reaching your information. Research shows that more consumers prefer to do research on the Internet than through any other medium. If a traveler is not booking online, he or she is at least researching the destination and looking for accommodations online.

More importantly, you can’t sell travel without visuals—period. As a hotel marketer, your objective is to get your best visuals and marketing materials on as many distribution channels as possible. People visit many different sites before making an online buying decision. Whether they find you through Google, on a third-party distribution site such as Expedia or Orbitz, or directly on your own site, it’s the visuals that will motivate them to book.

To increase the stickiness of your online promotions, it’s imperative that you tweak your captions and descriptions to ensure that you are more competent at optimizing search engines. This will immediately get you more hits. In order to get traction, you need to be creative.

Again, if you lack the time or the skill set to identify what key descriptive works are the most sticky for your property, it’s probably time to partner with a professional content management group.

5. Know and control which distribution channels images are appearing on and ensure consistency through using a single point-of-entry provider.

If you did an audit today of where your property content appears online, you may find that at least 20 different sites are hosting your information. Some of those sites may be displaying out-of-date rates and information. Others may have the content correct, but the images are of such poor quality that your hotel is actually conveying a poor quality image.

It’s imperative that as you update your rates and content information throughout the distribution channels that your images are also updated—Including legal copyright information. The images you supply to the channels should be a minimum of 300 pixels to maximize the position on the Web sites. Images of a smaller size do not resize well, and sometimes reflect a poor representation of the hotel.

You also need to make certain that no one can get your images without acquiring them from the right source. Minimizing piracy of your imagery is crucial. You must know every place that your hotel is being represented on the Web. It’s easy to do, as long as your images are coming from one single source. And, if you update that source, it will guarantee that the same images are being displayed on every site.

The bottom line is that you probably don’t know who is featuring your hotel where. Effective immediately, take control over where your images are being distributed and that the images are up to date and showcasing your hotel in the best possible light.

Make 2006 the year you implemented intelligent Web marketing. Once you do, you will be able to track where your property is being showcased online, who is looking at your online marketing materials and how many times they’ve been viewed. More importantly, you can ensure that all content is up to date all the time.

About David Elton and Henry Woodman

David Elton is CEO of London-based Leonardo (www.leonardo.com), offering still-image, travel content management, e-marketing and content distribution across the global travel chain. Henry Woodman is president of Miami-based ICE Portal (www.iceportal.com), a company which specializes in the production, management and delivery of moving content, such as visual tours, streaming videos and flash in multiple languages. They can be reached at david@leonardo.com and henry@iceportal.com.