¿Cómo puede un hotel atraer tráfico?

Last week’s post was about the most common problems hoteliers have to face today. Today, we are starting a series of posts aimed at trying to find effective solutions to these problems.
We are going to follow users from the first moment they type a hotel’s name on a search engine until the moment they complete the reservation process on the hotel’s website. There are different tools developed to help hoteliers reach their main goal: get as many direct bookings as possible from their own website and reduce dependence on intermediaries. The first thing to do is attract as many visitors as possible.

How can hotels attract more visits?

There are many different ways of driving visitors to a specific website, and the choice of one method or another will have to do with the resources available at the hotel.
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We have divided them into two groups: short-term actions, with some advertising investment, and long-term actions using the resources available by hoteliers:

1. Short-term actions that require advertising investment:

Website positioning: SEO Branding and keyword search.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) includes all the techniques used to increase the visibility of a particular website, which in turn contributes to attracting more visitors. It involves editing HTML code, content and browsing options, adding links, etc. We are not going to go into full detail about these techniques but, if you want to know more, you can click on this link to find a ten-chapter guide where all of them are thoroughly explained. There are two types of SEO:
– SEO Branding. It includes all actions aimed at ranking the hotel’s brand higher on different search engines results pages. This is probably the best way to direct visits for those in the hospitality industry. When users type the name of the hotel, the hotel’s website must be in the very first place.
– SEO keyword research. It is very important to find out the keywords users introduce when they look for the services offered by the hotel. Once defined, these keywords should be indexed in the search engines so that these can identify them and find the site and its products.
Blogs.
Publish valuable, high quality content.
It is a good way of keeping the hotel’s web active and regularly updated. Thanks to their blogs, hotels can share other content different from marketing and communicate with their guests in a more human manner. The set of words that form the published posts are easily ranked higher on Google through different techniques. It is not very common to find hotels that keep their own blog but there is no doubt that, if correctly managed, it can convey confidence, regularity and authority.
Social Media.
Social networking sites are great when it comes to advertise a hotel and make its brand stronger. Participating in these sites conveys a desire to humanize the company and invite clients to interact with the hotel.
Keeping conversations open will contribute to making a brand better known to the public. Besides, social media make it possible to spread content and reach your target audience. For more information on how some hotels manage their Twitter accounts, click on this link.
Newsletters.
It is more and more common to segment all types of content. Newsletters must be designed to reach clients in a personalized manner, promoting, in each case, what is more adequate to their needs. Before that, hotels should have gathered their clients’ details -during check-in and check-out processes-, paying special attention to their e-mail address. This will be very important for future loyalty actions. Mailchimp is great tool used to design and send newsletters. . Click here to read more about how to use this tool.

2. Long-term actions using the hotel’s own resources:

Online marketing using SEM (Search Engine Marketing) techniques.
Create advertising campaigns for your website by increasing its visibility in the most commonly used search engines, such as Yahoo, Google or Bing.
Affiliate marketing.
In this marketing model, the hotel’s adverts appear on affiliates websites. Affiliates get commissions when they direct customers to the hotel’s website. Affilired specializes in performance-based marketing for travel and tourism. Their pricing model is CPA (Cost Per Action) based, so advertisers just pay for a previously specified action (clicks, sales, etc.). They manage multiple affiliate networks, they use tools to increase traffic to your website and also make international branding campaigns.
Retargeting.
Retargeting seeks to recover users who have not completed the process, driving them back to the hotel’s website so that they convert from mere visitors to paying customers. Once users visit your website and cookies have stored all their information, they are sent banners and, sometimes, they are even offered some kind of discount.
Offline actions.
Online marketing is essential nowadays, yet offline actions shouldn’t be neglected. Online actions can be combined with publications in specialized magazines or newspaper advertising campaigns.

These are some of the techniques that may contribute to reaching hoteliers’ goal of reaching as many visitors as possible. The next step is to learn how to keep these visitors and drive them to the last stage so that they convert into real clients. This will be our topic for the next post.

Tras plantear la semana pasada los principales problemas con los que se encuentran los hoteleros, vamos a ir desmenuzando cada uno de ellos con el fin de proponer soluciones eficientes y factibles.

Hoy vamos a tratar de visualizar el panorama en el que se encuentran los hoteles desde el momento en que un posible huésped realiza una búsqueda relativa a un hotel hasta el momento en que éste realiza la reserva. El camino puede ser largo y tortuoso pero el hotel tiene la opción de guiar y acompañar al usuario hasta hacerle llegar al momento de realizar la reserva, máximo objetivo del hotel.

Partamos precisamente de lo que es el objetivo del hotel: el objetivo del hotel es obtener el máximo de reservas directas y disminuir la dependencia de los intermediarios. Para ello deberá captar todo el tráfico que le sea posible.