Road To Recovery: Turning Your Hotel’s Digital Marketing Back On

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Many hotels went dark on digital marketing during the start of coronavirus lockdowns, cutting budgets and turning off campaigns. As hotels slowly reopen, many marketing and e-commerce managers are grappling with how to restart their digital marketing efforts.

Winning direct bookings will require two important elements: attractive special offers and promotions, and investment in the right marketing channels.

Consider your hotel’s primary selling points as part of your special promotion. Is it positioned in a destination that is easily accessible by car? Include free parking, and perhaps offer a special long weekend getaway rate (i.e. book two nights for the price of three). Consider packaging “socially distanced” recreation, such as free bicycle rentals or an intimate dinner served in their room.

Once you’ve developed your promotions and offers, the next step is to get the word out to the right target audiences and through the right channels.

As hotels slowly ramp up their digital marketing, it’s important to reset expectations for the initial period of reopening. Traditional revenue-based metrics like ROAS will likely be lower than normal to start, so marketing managers may want to look to upper- or mid-funnel metrics like clickthrough rates and conversion rates to analyze the success of ad campaigns. Establish micro-conversion rates to track small goals; for example, the percentage of users who headed to your hotel’s booking engine after landing on the website from an ad campaign is insightful in measuring campaign relevancy. It’s important that hotels communicate and work closely with their digital agency partner ahead of time to clearly delineate the goals and ROI expectations for any marketing dollars spent.

By Gina Ciarrocchi Zech
7-20-2020
Source and complete article: pegs.com