New Beginnings for Hotel Marketing in 2012

Every January marks a new beginning, a time to set new goals and commitments in your personal or professional life. In the fast-paced marketing sector the New Year is the perfect time to re-evaluate marketing strategies.

Milestone Internet Marketing hosted a Webinar last week about hotel marketing resolutions for 2012.  Keeping your online content fresh, generating conversations and having a strong communications plan are a few key points from the presentation that are valuable marketing strategies.

Keep your online Content Fresh

Fresh content and up-to-date information are now favored in all Google search results. Meaning, marketers need to keep their website full of fresh information. There are a lot of ways to keep your website fresh; make sure to integrate related social profiles. Leading travel consumers to social media networks with consistent fresh content updates and information will keep them intrigued.

Reviews and other user generated content like photos, videos and so on naturally keep content fresh. In this case, quantity is more important than quality because we want to allow consumers to comment and start a conversation. Inviting and encouraging reviews and user generate content creates more opportunities for constant conversation and new information about your hotel to circulate the web.

Promoting special offers and contests on your hotel website as well as social media networks and beyond is important because of the amount of shopping and comparing hotel shoppers are doing online.

Generate Conversation

A good way to keep up to date information on your site is to create and maintain a blog. A blog is also a good way to generate flow to your website and create a strong visual representation. Social media platforms will engage travel consumers and can lead them to more information on either Facebook or YouTube. Both of these social media platforms are beneficial because of their strong visual aspects and ability to create conversation. This is an important factor no matter how well your hotel’s interaction is doing. It is important to stay ahead of the game and continue to succeed.

Have a plan

Before creating public profiles on social media channels such as, Twitter and Facebook it is important to do your research.

• Who do you need to connect with?
• What are your consumers looking for?
• What kind of reputation do we want to portray?

After effectively answering these questions create a social calendar that will demonstrate when updates will be distributed to the web and which social media channel will be used. It is also important to keep all information consistent. Blog posts, Tweets and Facebook posts should consist of the same updated information and all lead back to one main goal of the company, initially showing the brand of the hotel and giving online travel shoppers the confidence they need to choose your hotel.

Overall, staying up to date within the market and keeping your information relevant and interactive will create a strong presence within the travel community and lead to more bookings for your hotel.

Tell us, what is on your hotel marketing “must-do” list this year?