Milestone has picked out some top proven strategies from its hotel strategy incubator called Portfolio to help you.
This article focuses on strategies hotels can work on to build business in 2022:
Given how many wedding plans were disrupted in 2020 and 2021, the demand for weddings should be more than double in 2022. January and February are normally the biggest months for wedding RFPs and contracts, and Milestone Research expects early 2022 will likely be the biggest on record.
Build out new packages for all sizes and budgets and make them visible on separate pages on your site. Align the wedding packages to the needs of your drive-distance community in terms of budget and size.
This strategy has an omnichannel approach for promoting your wedding business, venues, services, and packages. The strategy drives awareness, engagement, and conversion across customer touchpoints, including a wedding module with RFPs, wedding packages and a voice search module with FAQs on the website as well as landing pages to align with paid campaigns, email marketing campaigns, and, Local SEO.
Through the implementation of schema, keywords, FAQs, and social outreach, we can raise awareness of your wedding business, engage with the right messaging and drive traffic to the RFP page for conversion.
There is also an opportunity to capture postponed receptions for people who had private weddings during Covid.
A robust omnichannel approach puts your message across all digital channels and lets you control the user journey.
Though the vaccines rolled out, first responders and essential workers are still dealing with the pandemic of the unvaccinated. It may make sense to focus on essential services and workers and look for long-term block bookings from federal, state, and local governments on the public side and corporate-funded donations to help support the mental health and recuperation of the medical care workers.
Across the community, Milestone sees properties that have filled rooms by housing medical patients, medical workers, and the unhoused to help them deal with the pandemic. 1440 Multiversity has generated more than $1 million in donations that it uses to fund scholarships to provide essential workers time to recover and recuperate.
Capturing direct bookings is one of the biggest challenges facing hoteliers in the digital age.
To compete with and regain revenue historically lost to OTAs, hoteliers must implement strategies that divert the consumer’s attention to the property website via remarketing efforts, on-page features, and a holistic focus on the value, not to a mention best-rate guarantee that comes with booking directly.
The focus of this strategy is to help hotels and resorts grow weekend and leisure busines across channels and traveler touchpoints.
The strategy includes creating packages on the website for weekend vacations and activities, such as a Staycation, Spa, Golf, Weekend Getaways, Family Getaways, Pet Friendly, and Business-Leisure / Extend Your Stay specials to raise awareness of your weekend offers and drive bookings. Suggest including spouses on the extended bookings.
The on-site strategy is enhanced by blogs, social outreach, and email marketing campaigns that raise awareness of weekend activities, events and packages and drive both business and leisure travelers to reserve a package or book a stay.
Milestone offers a mix of strategies and products to grow your smaller-scale meetings and corporate events business – from creating awareness through organic and social channels to driving engagement and conversion on the website.
Backed by solid SEO and structured data, a strong omnichannel strategy features rich and optimized website content with FAQs for voice search and meetings packages, reinforced with blogs, paid social, paid search, and email marketing.
Local listing and local CVB databases will also be updated for enhanced visibility and messaging. This strategy is intended to raise awareness, drive traffic to the site, and boost engagement and meeting RFP form fills.
You can promote your hotel to executives and business travel planners through a solid SEO and content marketing strategy that includes a website with structured data and maps, local promotion, and display ads.
The content strategy focuses on highlighting business features, including executive rooms with work space, airport shuttle, business center, and boardrooms with an RFP for corporate rates to capture leads.
The site is enhanced with a Corporate Package to drive bookings and FAQs on corporate services for voice queries – all backed by schema to saturate the SERPs.
Local SEO and display ads boost awareness of the message and drive traffic to the site.
This strategy is aimed at increasing the average daily rate and revenue by promoting suites and higher room tiers through specials and controlling inventory.
Through a special package like the Sweet Suite Deal, you can increase bookings for suites with perks like a free welcome drink, dinner credit, or a late checkout, which increases ADR.
The strategy is aplified with enhanced room detail pages with amenities and image galleries, a voice search module with FAQs, display and social ads, and a reviews module. An email campaign targeting booked customers can promote a suite upgrade offer with special rates and perks like a late check-out or free parking to engage and convert users down the funnel.
The strategy also leverages Local listings with enhanced descriptions, amenities, images and FAQs to raise awarness of higher room categories and increase traffic to the website.
These are the top strategies for recovering revenue as we enter 2021. To learn more, contact your CSM or sales@milestoneinternet.com.
To increase your hotel traffic, you need to focus on creating a favorable online experience through your website. You want customers interested in traveling to find your website appealing so they feel inspired to book a visit. Some areas to emphasize are:
Increasing hotel traffic and occupancy depends upon an intimate understanding of your typical guest and what brings them to your hotel. The better you understand these needs, the easier you will find it to encourage them to visit.
A hospitality marketing strategy analyzes the typical guest or customer of your hospitality services and creates a marketing strategy that will directly engage these potential visitors to encourage them to patronize your business. With hospitality marketing, there is an important need to understand why someone might consider visiting a particular area, dining out, or otherwise engaging in hospitality services. Understanding their motivations can help businesses in this sector create effective marketing strategies and encourage more guests to patronize their establishment.
The strategy should allocate focus and budget to valuable personas, target them directly and by behavior, and include website, local, SEO, content, paid media, and reputation and reviews.
Give customers different reasons and experience to increase return bookings and book directly on your site instead of with OTAs. Leverage local events and attractions. Effectively attract and book groups and weddings.
An important component of hospitality marketing also lies in understanding the vital component of word-of-mouth advertising and promotion. Encouraging satisfied customers to leave reviews and tell others about their experience plays an important role in building consistent clientele.
Hospitality marketing is different from other types of product or service marketing because it calls for businesses to market an experience. With other types of product or service marketing, the focus is on selling a particular item that customers want. With hospitality marketing, you want to convince them that you will help them relax, celebrate, travel, or enjoy themselves in a way that no one else can.
The types of guests targeted by a hospitality marketing campaign can vary widely, such as business professionals attending meetings, wedding parties, young families taking vacations, or those looking for an all-inclusive resort atmosphere. You want to make sure that the experiences you promise and the messaging of your campaign aligns with what your business actually offers to guests. Then, you will use a variety of different types of content to help customers picture themselves enjoying your amenities and the atmosphere you promise to create for them.
To get started in hospitality marketing you want to focus on the following strategies:
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