Bijan Chitsaz - Concepts of Internet Marketing For Hotels As a hotel business owner, marketing for hotels should be of prime interest and importance to you. But do you really deserve more business? Are you really promoting your business or just playing at it? Do you have a website that is easy for visitors to navigate and book a reservation? If a visitor comes to your website: Do you make any effort to capture their email address? Can you even capture a visitors email address? Do you have customers all year, or just during the normal holiday periods? Can you send emails to your customer database to inform them of discounts and special promotions? Do you do this? What's a Customer Worth to You? You'll need to determine what your average customer is worth to you both in the short and longer term. For example, if you get a customer and as a result of a transaction and you earn a profit of £100; you say great, lets go and get another one and repeat the process over and over. But, bare in mind that its easier and cheaper to market to your existing customer base than it is for you to get a new customer. What you may be missing is that a customer may represent a longer term profit, which you should factor into your valuation and future marketing efforts. For example, if a customer purchases the same or a similar product from you next year and the year after, that same customer would have a value of £300+, not just the £100 for the original purchase
Constant Marketing is Required: Marketing is not just a one time event. You need to continue to market to each customer (both new and existing) to ensure that they buy from you this time and next time and not your competition. One inexpensive way of doing this is to capture the email addresses from visitors to your website.
You can send then a series of well worded messages, at whatever interval you wish, to bring them back time and time again. Does Your Website Website work? Your website should be set up to make it easy for the visitor to navigate around it and answer a "call to action" either to buy something, book a room or to leave their email address. You may not even need to change your website, but just create a simple landing page, which is based on targeted buying keywords. The name of your hotel is not a keyword, unless of course the potential customer already knows the name. Usually visitors are just surfing the net trying to find regional hotels and bargains and will key in a number of different things to see what comes up. You want to be able to get this traffic to your specific website.
Landing Pages If you're using a landing page, prospective customers coming to your site will be well qualified traffic and more likely to buy than just someone casually surfing the net. The landing page, if properly prepared will create sufficient interest for them to click on the link taking them to your existing website to complete the purchase or booking. You can see why it's important that your main website is designed properly so as to convert the traffic to a sale. About 90% of the hotel websites fall well short of any sort of marketing plan and do not really pay for their keep. With a good internet marketing approach, you can easily reduce some of the existing advertising budget. Its a known fact in internet marketing, specially marketing for hotels, the average buyer will do some casual research, then more detailed research visiting a site several times before actually buying. If you're using your website as just as a replacement for the phone directory, you're missing out on a lot of business. You really need to value your website visitors and try to turn them into paying customers, not just once, but time and time again.