How to use digital marketing to make hotels and travel agencies stand out? The answer to this question is the key to leverage your business. Check out our tips
Digital marketing is an essential tool for the promotion of any brand or service today. And in tourism it is no different. Every company in the industry needs to know how to position itself on the Internet to be found by the traveler.
No matter if you are a hotel or a travel agency, if you do not mark your presence online, your business chances fall dramatically. This is because every trip starts on the Internet. There, travelers research and ask questions about destinations and services. They also buy airline tickets, book accommodation and hire services.
Digital Marketing Strategies for Hotels and Travel Agencies
However, the challenge for companies in this sector is to know how to use digital marketing to highlight their services. There are techniques and strategies that facilitate the dissemination of tourism services, making them known by travelers.
To help you, we have separated 20 digital marketing strategies for hotels and travel agencies. Check them out below.
- Invest in Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is, in short, attraction marketing. In other words, it uses a series of strategies to attract leads – potential customers – and convert them into actual customers.
Unlike traditional marketing, Inbound Marketing does not go after the target audience. On the other hand, it uses search engine positioning to get hotels and travel agencies found by travelers interested in their services.
For this, it invests in the production of relevant content, with images, videos, and other tools that attract the potential customer to the site or blog of these companies.
Today, it is a fundamental digital marketing strategy to highlight hotels and travel agencies in the market.
- Have a Great Website
But for the good application of Inbound Marketing, you need to be on the Internet to be found by the potential customer.
Hotels and travel agencies must have, as a priority, a good website to stand out in the market. Through it, the potential customer will get to know your service.
The basic requirements of a website are: design, responsiveness and conversion. Design is the face of the site, which must be appropriate to your audience profile.
Responsiveness is the possibility of adaptation to the different existing screens. And when it comes to conversion, the site must have tools for doing business, such as an online store.
- Offer a Functional Online Store
The Internet is the main platform for conducting tourism business today. Travel begins in the online environment, either by researching or hiring the services.
When it comes to finalizing the purchase of a lodging or travel package, one must be aware of the ease offered to the traveler.
Hotels and travel agencies should have functional online stores: with all accessible information, practical tools for online quotes and means of payment.
All this will help your hotel or travel agency close more sales.
- Content Marketing Is Key
Producing relevant content is one of the main ways of attracting potential customers to hotel and travel agency websites.
Every trip starts on the Internet by searching for information about destinations and tourist services. By finding the information they need on your site, the traveler is more likely to become your customer.
Therefore, it is essential for hotels and travel agencies to have content blogs related to lodging and destinations. Moreover, to get your content seen it is important to know how to apply SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques. They help improve your blog’s positioning in Google’s organic searches.
- Learn to Use Branding Strategies
Another digital marketing tool to highlight hotels and travel agencies is branding. In short, branding strategies seek positive brand recognition. To this end, it performs a series of actions to arouse sensations and create connections – conscious and unconscious – with the target audience.
For hotels and travel agencies this positive recognition is essential to win the trust of travelers and achieve new business.
- Bet on Institutional Video
The institutional video is a great way to present a company and should not be overlooked in the marketing strategy of hotels and travel agencies. Highlight it on your website and social networks, show the potential customer everything your company has to offer.
Audiovisual content is a great tool to attract the attention of travelers looking for tourism services.
However, the elaboration of the institutional video must follow branding strategies to create a connection with potential customers. In addition, it should showcase the best of your hotel or travel agency.
- Work With Social Networks
Make contact information available, post photos and videos, enable your company’s location, and provide a link to your website.
However, you must know how to work with the particularity of each of them, as well as explore the tools they offer for the dissemination of content and services.
Another important tip is to never leave the potential customer unanswered. Be ready to answer questions, be aware of trends, and be accessible.
- Use Google Adwords
Google Adwords is an important advertising platform that should not be overlooked in the marketing strategies of hotels and travel agencies.
It allows you to insert ads in the form of sponsored links that appear in Google searches based on the keywords you use. In addition, it makes it possible to display the location of these companies in search results on Google Maps.
The big difference, however, is the possibility of segmenting the target audience. You can choose for whom and when your ad will appear.
Through Google Adwords campaigns, it is also possible to define how much you want to spend on each action and monitor the results through various metrics made available by the platform.
- Pay Attention to Customer Reviews
Positive evaluations are important to increase your company’s credibility. Therefore, they should be used in the marketing strategies of hotels and travel agencies.
Highlight the experience of those who have already experienced the lodging or have contracted a travel package and were satisfied. This is because a customer’s opinion counts a lot so that the potential customer feels safe to hire the service.
And never dismiss a negative review, respond promptly and offer solutions. A great way to demonstrate commitment to the customer is to try to solve their problems.
- Feedback Forms Are Great for Collecting Reviews
To enhance the ratings of your hotel or travel agency, it is worth investing in feedback forms.
This is a way to maintain the relationship with the customer, show concern for his satisfaction, and also get marketing material for your company.
- Always Provide Good Online Service
The potential customer who comes to you via the Internet should receive the same attention as a traveler who physically visits your hotel or travel agency.
What does this mean? You should be ready to provide online service, whether it’s answering emails and comments on social networks or answering questions on your website’s communication channels.
- Run Promotions to Attract Customers
Running promotions is a great way to attract traffic to any business. For hotels and travel agencies, these promotional activities can range from discounts on daily rates to free trips to the destination being explored.
However, to attract the potential customer it is necessary to have a concise marketing strategy to reach the desired audience. The more targeted the promotion is, the greater the chance of getting positive results from it.
In addition, promotions must be used intelligently. For example, create discount campaigns during the low season.
- Pay Attention to The Events Calendar
Another marketing strategy for hotels and travel agencies is to pay attention to the calendar of events to work on appropriate campaigns for each season.
In this way, you can leverage each period of the year in a way that suits your business or destination. It will also be easier to define promotions on festive dates and off-season and promote them correctly.
- Digital Influencers Can Be Great Partners
More and more hotels and travel agencies are discovering the potential of advertising their services through digital influencers. Influencer marketing is a powerful tool in shaping opinions about tourism companies and destinations. This is because digital influencers are trusted by their followers and speak the same language as their target audience.
But it is important to partner with digital influencers who work in the same niche as your company. Also, as in any marketing strategy, planning is necessary to get results.
- Don’t Forget Email Marketing
Email marketing is essential to maintain the relationship with the customer, to advertise promotions aimed at building loyalty, and to reach new business. The first positive point of email marketing is that it is an advertisement aimed at people who have already used your service or shown interest in your company.
Never buy email lists. Only send e-mail marketing to those who have subscribed to your communication channels. This way, this strategy will be more successful.
- Offer Virtual Tours
As we said before, visual appeal is always a great marketing strategy for hotels and travel agencies.
Therefore, offering a virtual tour about the hotel, the tourist destination or some attraction is important to win over the potential customer. Through the virtual tour, the traveler can get to know the environment better and be enchanted by everything that is offered. As a consequence, he/she will be more likely to close a deal.
- Images Are Fundamental
Another fundamental digital marketing strategy for hotels and travel agencies is to use pictures. But they cannot be mere photos. It is essential to know how to enhance each aspect of the destination or hotel to attract the traveler’s attention.
Therefore, investment in photography must be considered in the marketing planning of any tourism company.
In the case of hotels, it is necessary to have photos of all the environments, highlighting the particularity of each one. For travel agencies, the images can show tourist spots, attractions, and lodging.
- Keep Up to Date
It is important to keep up with the market to know how to position yourself. In this sense, the marketing planning of hotels and travel agencies should study the competition, analyze trends, and keep up to date on tools and technology.
In addition, it must follow the behavior of potential customers, know what their purchase desires and financial potential are.
Digital marketing strategies aligned with the market can generate more positive results for your tourism business.
- Artificial Intelligence Can Help Your Business
Technology, in turn, is a great ally of marketing strategies for hotels and travel agencies. This is because it speeds up and facilitates many processes.
A great example of this are chatbots. These automatic conversation mechanisms use natural language and give the impression of talking to another person.
They are excellent for speeding up online customer service based on frequent questions from users. In addition, they serve to direct the potential customer to the services sought.
- Keep an Eye On The Results
Every digital marketing strategy must be monitored. It is extremely important to analyze the data frequently. Thus, you will know the return on each disclosure action.
If necessary, you can redo a strategy that is not working or leverage another one that presents better results.
Bonus: Seek professional help to leverage your tourism business
Digital marketing strategies, if employed in the right way, bring immediate results for tourism companies. Therefore, it is very worthwhile to invest in professional help.
It is possible to find companies specialized in digital marketing focused on the tourism sector. Having a team of specialists in various areas of marketing makes all the difference in the positioning of hotels and travel agencies to travelers.
One example is the work that we do at Travel Media PR, an international media marketing and public relations solutions agency for destinations and tourism companies. With global reach, it leads a series of projects aimed at leveraging tourism businesses and making them stand out in the market.