Hotel Marketing Plan

Successful hotels do not happen by accident – behind every hotel success story is a dedicated owner with a well-executed marketing plan. Your hotel may be an exquisite jewel of a property, but unless the right audience is aware of it, you are not going to get the bookings you need to succeed. Fortunately, the widespread use of digital technology now allows hotel owners to implement internet marketing campaigns that reach a larger audience than ever before. Using an effective hotel internet marketing plan, you can bring your hotel to the attention of people who will appreciate everything it has to offer and motivate them to book a stay. It takes just a few steps to create an effective hotel marketing plan:

• Define Your Hotel’s Identity and Find Your Niche
  What special quality does your hotel offer? Before you can market your hotel, you first need to define its identity and determine what sets it apart from the competition. Examine the strengths and weaknesses of your hotel (much like the SWOT analysis you performed when writing your business plan) to get a clear picture of your hotel’s unique identity and brand.
• Determine Your Audience and Focus Your Marketing Message
  Who are the guests you want to attract to your hotel and what are they seeking? To draft an effective marketing plan for your hotel, you need to know as much as possible about your target audience. If your hotel has an active presence on social media platforms, you already have a fount of information about your guests: their likes and dislikes, the activities they enjoy, the hotel amenities that appeal to them, and much more. Using Google Analytics, you can easily create ‘buyer personas,’ prototype identities that represent people within your target audience, to determine the words, images, and media that will reach your target audience most successfully.
• Set Specific Marketing Goals
  What do you want your marketing efforts to accomplish? Experience has shown that marketing plans for hotels are much more effective when the owners have clearly defined objectives rather than a vague intention to make their hotel more successful. Setting specific marketing goals, such as “increase the average length of guests’ stays to two or more days” or “increase online bookings by 10%” will sharpen your focus and can even reveal possible strategies.
• Formulate Your Strategy
  The center of any successful hotel marketing plan is an engaging, mobile compatible hotel website. This provides a “home base” where guests who are intrigued by your marketing efforts can connect with your hotel. For maximum effect, your marketing plan should employ a combination of inbound and outbound marketing strategies. Employ inbound marketing strategies, such as SEO strategies to raise your website’s organic search ranking, hotel social media marketing, and an entertaining blog about local events and attractions to help Internet users find your hotel website. Targeted email marketing, SEM (search engine marketing), mobile ads, and other outbound hotel marketing strategies will extend your marketing reach to create new customers.
• Assess Your Success
  Hotel marketing is an ongoing effort, and you will need to adapt your marketing plan as you go along. Web analytics will allow you to assess the impact of your various hotel marketing strategies, giving you actionable intelligence so you can determine their relative ROI. With this information, you will be able to identify your best-received strategies, jettison poorly performing ones, and tweak your overall plan to create a workable, highly successful hotel marketing plan.

Remember, a hotel marketing plan is not an over-night fix. While your hotel’s bookings are not going to increase dramatically overnight, over time a correctly implemented hotel marketing plan will bring your hotel the business it deserves. For more hotel marketing tips and expert hotel marketing services, turn to Travel Tech Strategies. Our marketing professionals can provide you with travel data mining services to help you formulate a successful marketing plan for your hotel, an engaging responsive hotel website design, innovative mobile hotel apps, and more to help your hotel business grow.

Contact Travel Tech Strategies today at 954-779-2801 and let our hotel marketing experts assist you with developing an internet hotel marketing plan that will help your business grow !