For hotel owners and managers, capturing the attention of your potential guests is complicated enough. But encouraging them to visit your website and make a direct booking is an even tougher task.
With discount accommodation sites and online travel agents (OTAs) all looking to take a piece of your revenue, how can you ensure that guests are paying the maximum room rate to boost your average daily rate (ADR)?
The first step is by driving them to your website. In this post, we’ll share our top tips for using organic marketing tactics to increase your hotel ADRs from both repeat and new guests.
Keep reading to learn how to use organic marketing to create brand loyalty and drive repeat bookings.
Create a loyalty program
Are you focused on getting your past guests to return to your property? If you aren’t, you should be. After all, it can cost 5 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. A loyalty program is an effective and easy way to keep customers engaged.
Loyalty or rewards programs allow you to keep in communication with your previous guests, who probably aren’t thinking about your hotel very often throughout the course of a typical day. Entice them to visit again by sending them special members-only email offers or information about upcoming events in your area.
These exclusive memberships are also a great way to collect detailed information about your guests and their preferences. Understanding their demographic details will allow you to target those specific groups in future campaigns.
Maintain a presence on popular travel review sites
Marketers have always strived to earn word-of-mouth recommendations from their customers. In our digital age, these recommendations don’t even need to come from close family and friends. Instead, online reviews are just as important when people are researching accommodation options.
Travelers rely on sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google to see what their peers are saying about your property. Make sure you’ve uploaded high-quality images of your hotel on each site and respond to negative and positive reviews in a cool, calm, and collected tone.
This high level of engagement shows your prospective guests that you care about their stay and are willing to work to give them a great experience.
Produce evergreen content
Marketers in all industries use keyword-rich content to attract prospects to their websites — and the travel industry is no exception. Your hotel’s site should be full of information relating to your property, amenities, and local area to pull in travelers searching for accommodation near you.
While you should update your site regularly to publish new content and verify existing information, it’s also important to post “evergreen” content that doesn’t go stale. For example, creating a blog post with the top 5 activities in your city will attract organic traffic from search engines long after its initial publication.
Each of these tactics will help boost your brand amongst new and repeat customers. By incentivizing engagement with your brand, you’ll earn their trust and they’ll be more likely to book with you again and again.
