New to Hotel Ownership? 5 Marketing Steps to Take First
Are you new to hotel ownership? If so, you may be spending a great deal of your time planning and creating your new hotel. But don’t forget about marketing, as that’s the way you are going to get your hotel in front of potential customers.
This is an exciting time, but it’s also the most vital time for creating brand awareness and harnessing demand for your hotel.
Let’s look at five marketing steps to take first so you start your marketing plan off right.
#1: Create Brand Standards
One of the first steps you need to take is to create your brand standards. This is what informs all of your marketing. Here are some suggestions to get you started:
- Develop your logo.
- Choose your color scheme.
- Decide on your mission and vision.
- Choose some goals.
- Define your target audience – this is who you are going to market to. For example, is your new hotel family-friendly, targeted to an upscale client, or a place for couples?
- Know your unique selling points. This is what separates your hotel from the competition.
- Start working on a marketing plan, strategy, and tactics. We’ll discuss these more in this article.
#2: Build Your Website
This is vital to your marketing. In fact, you want to create your hotel website before you do any other marketing, as your website is the central digital hub for your website.
This website should be modern, clean, and fast. You want to showcase the following on your website:
- Information about your hotel
- Professional photos
- A booking engine
- Contact page with always up-to-date information
- Information and photos about your rooms and amenities
- Videos of your property
- Forms to collect guest information and answer their questions.
- Info about area attractions
- A blog with planned articles. This content will really help your search engine optimization while also anticipating and answering your customers’ questions.
#3: Claim All Your Local Listings
Your local listings are places potential guests might search for your hotel. These are vital marketing steps that you must take. If you don’t take them, you are missing out on potential revenue.
By claiming your local listings, you help your hotel show up on the first page of search engine results pages. Your goal is to take up as many of those listings as organically possible.
It’s also imperative that you claim your Google listing so it includes your information the way you want it. If you don’t, Google may provide info on its own, or someone else could even claim your listing and add incorrect information. Also, don’t forget about Bing – claim your business listing here, too.
Here are links to grab those business pages:
Once you confirm ownership of your business with Google and Bing, you can provide your location, hours, amenities, property images, and other custom information. You can also enable messaging on Google.
#4: Create Social Media Pages for Your Hotel
Your next marketing step is to claim your social media pages. There are quite a few to choose from, so you want to make sure to use the ones that work for your hotel. Each platform has its own unique audience, so make sure you’re using the right one for your business.
Some ideas include:
- Facebook (definite must platform for your hotel)
- Instagram (definite must platform for your hotel)
- X, formerly known as Twitter
- Google – yes, you can and should post here, too!
- TikTok
- YouTube
Make sure that whichever platform you choose to use that you are active every day. The goal of social media is engagement and relationship building and that means more than once a week. (tweet this)
The best part about social media marketing is that it is free unless you want to pay for advertising. Social media is the perfect place to showcase your hotel and build your brand. In addition, you can greatly expand your reach with paid advertising relatively inexpensively.
Here are some social media tips:
- Complete your profiles completely with your logo, cover photos, about information, website links, etc.
- Use video as it has the best engagement.
- Take and use high-quality imagery.
- Make sure your URL is consistent across platforms. For example, use instagram.com/yourrestaurant and facebook.com/yourrestaurant. Ideally, your domain name is also yourrestaurant.com. This makes it easy for people to find you.
Create a social media plan alongside your marketing plan. Best practices suggest you plan and schedule content out at least a week in advance. Then, make sure to comment on every post.
#5: Optimize Your Website’s SEO
Your fifth step is to optimize your website. Here are some tips:
- Create content about the topics that people are searching for. You do this by conducting keyword research. Then, you can create content and blog articles about these search terms.
- Use header tags and optimize them.
- Never use more than one H1 header.
- Use clean, simple, and intuitive navigation.
- Use title tags on every page.
- Complete your meta descriptions for each page and use the page’s focus keyword.
- Use high-quality images with alt tags.
- Use headers to break up bits of content.
- Create appropriate calls to action.
- Track your target keywords and make sure to update pages as needed.
Check on your search engine optimization quarterly so you get the best results.
Final Thoughts on Marketing Steps for Your New Hotel
With these marketing strategies in place, your first year of new hotel ownership will set the tone for your hotel and help propel your business above the competition.
There are a few more strategies you want to consider as well, and those include email marketing, online travel agencies, pay-per-click advertising, reputation management (getting reviews), and creating local partnerships.
Now it’s time to get started with these marketing steps to get your hotel out into the digital world.
We are your hotel digital advertising specialists, and we can help you create your website so that it presents your new hotel in the best way. We will help you take your website to the top. Along with your website, we can create a winning social media marketing strategy that also ties back into your website. As website design and redesign experts, we can also create a new or refreshed website accessible to all. And we can also help with search engine marketing, online booking, online listings, and social media marketing. We are here to help. Contact us today for your consultation!
Images: Campaign Creators on Unsplash
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