5 Tips: Marketing Ideas for Boutique Hotels

Easy, affordable ways to market your boutique hotel online

As the owner of a boutique hotel, you need to find ways to market your hotel effectively without breaking your budget.  This can be a difficult task – after all, you’re competing with large OTAs and international hotel chains that have marketing funds that may be larger than your yearly operating budget. Fortunately, online hotel marketing strategies are so affordable and effective that even the smallest hotels can successfully use them to attract travelers. To help on your way, we’ve put together our best tips on marketing ideas for boutique hotels.

Tip #1: Use video marketing to highlight the unique experience you offer
It’s easy for hotels to get caught up in pricing wars, particularly when faced with the OTAs’ race to the bottom with their emphasis on offering the lowest prices. That’s not where your boutique hotel is going to shine – your success depends on offering a unique experience that the larger chains simply cannot match. Use video marketing to bring travelers into the unique experience they can enjoy at your boutique hotel – try formatting your videos as travel shows, with a guide to walk guests through all you have to offer.

Tip #2: Turn your Twitter feed into a virtual concierge
One of the strengths of boutique hotels is the strong personal service they provide. Take it a step further by using your hotel’s Twitter feed as a virtual concierge. This offers dual marketing benefits for your boutique hotel:  first, you can provide your guests with better service – when you answer guest concerns virtually, you can provide instant assistance without delays. Also, anyone checking out your Twitter account can see the care you devote to taking care of your guests’ needs. This instant attention to guest concerns is a huge selling feature that will help set your boutique hotel apart from the large hotel chains.

Tip #3: Use email newsletters to encourage repeat stays
Sending out a monthly email newsletter is a highly effective boutique hotel marketing strategy; it gives you a way to remind guests of the wonderful experience they had at your hotel while providing them with an incentive to indulge in repeat stays. Because your boutique hotel can provide a personalized experience, you can easily create unique promotions to encourage return visits. Segmenting your email list and creating several different promotions designed specifically for each set of travelers will make this hotel marketing strategy much more effective. Offer discounts for adventure excursions to the Millennials among your guests, create romantic getaway packages to entice the couples you’ve hosted to return, and so on.

Tip #4: Publicize your loyalty rewards through social media
Loyalty programs are not just for the big chain hotels anymore. Enact a loyalty program for your guests with carefully chosen rewards that work with your particular hotel brand, then showcase your rewards through social media. Since you are a boutique hotel you may want to shift the focus onto rewards that enhance your guests’ experiences rather than money-saving discounts; fortunately, experiential rewards make for great social media posts! Intersperse mentions of your rewards with your regular posts, making sure to include links that take visitors to a custom landing page exclusively for your loyalty program.

Tip #5: Use your guest data to make your marketing more effective
You don’t need to make a major investment in focus groups and testing to make your hotel marketing campaigns more effective – you already have the data you need at your fingertips, you just have to reach out and use it. All of the online interactions you have with your hotel guests, through your website, blog, email, and social networks, produce little nuggets of information. You can data mine these bits of information to find out how guests are responding to each of your hotel marketing strategies. Use this information to refine your marketing approach – invest more of your time and effort in the hotel marketing ideas for boutique hotels that are working, revamp or remove the ones that aren’t getting a positive response.

If you would like some assistance putting these marketing ideas to work for your boutique hotel, Travel Tech Strategies is here to help. We specialize in boutique hotel marketing strategies, with a full range of services including responsive hotel website design, monthly social marketing packages, email marketing services, custom landing page designs, and much more.

Contact Travel Tech Strategies today at 954-779-2801 for help implementing these and other online marketing ideas to ensure your boutique hotel’s success!