Digital marketing for the hotel industry must include automation as the hotel industry is always tight in terms of staffing.
The below strategy and tools will add a lot of energy and pace to your existing strategy. Most of the hotel businesses now acknowledge the importance of these techniques.
However, these are grossly underutilized in the digital marketing perspective. Even more when we consider the usage of these digital marketing techniques in the hospitality and travel industry.
Google Keyword planners and Google Trends are already quite popular tools to automate a lot of your digital marketing efforts. This must be a part of the digital marketing strategy for hospitality organisations. As hospitality professionals, you might already be using a lot of these tools involuntarily.
The hospitality industry can use more of these highly-rated digital marketing tools in 2022 and beyond.
From Siri to Alexa to Facebook audience insights, there are a lot of digital marketing tools which you can benefit from at no or very low cost.
Let’s quickly run through some of the most useful digital marketing tools relevant to the hospitality industry.
Google Keyword planner
Know about the searched keywords and what’s relevant. Researching the long-tail keywords related to the hospitality industry can help big time. This free tool can help hotel marketers to create content that will receive good organic traffic. More visibility means more business, isn’t it?
Ahref
A very popular digital marketing tool. It has both free and paid services (relevant for content marketing and SEO).
Know the number of backlinks, domain strength, keyword ranking for your business and of your competitors. SEO improvements and a lot more.
Semrush
Much like Ahref, Semrush is another tool which can help the hospitality websites immensely in terms of attracting organic traffic of customers.
Google Adwords
Pay per click advertisement (most popular for digital advertisement). Google Adwords can be a blessing to your effort to gain more customers.
Most of the top hotel chains are already using it. Whether it’s about increased brand visibility or reaching out to more customer looking to travel to your area, this affordable digital marketing solution is a must to have in your digital marketing strategy.
Moving on to a few more exciting digital marketing tools extremely relevant to the hospitality industry.
Similarweb
Similar web can compare key statistics of any website. It is extremely important to understand the content strategy of your competitor.
The hotel industry is extremely competitive. A lot of hotels are targeting the same market segment. This digital marketing tool can help you understand the strategy of your key competitors.
Google Analytics
Most of the digital marketers wouldn’t imagine a content and SEO strategy without the support of Google analytics.
From your top rated pages to top keywords to key demographics, you have it all in your analytics dashboard.
You also have a random collection of page speed and mobile optimisation or error reporting. Along with Google search console, utilising analytics in the most effective way can be a gamechanger in your digital marketing strategy.
You can check demographics and locations to know who are interested in your hospitality business. There might be a huge chunk of potential customers that you might be missing.
Use the bounce rate to understand which pages are getting most and least attention. These can help in improving the design and user experience of pages which gets thumbs down from users.
There are many other interesting and useful features which all hospitality companies can use to ramp up their digital marketing effort using Google analytics.
Buzzsumo
This features in the top 7 growth marketing tools list by Neil Patel, who is a renowned digital marketing expert.
Lots of digital marketing influencers suggest using Buzzsumo in content marketing strategy.
Hotels can use Buzzsumo to find articles and pages similar to their own that are already being shared significantly on Twitter and then ride along by sharing to the same community.
Unsplash
Not many customers can assume a website without engaging images. Customers decide where to travel using images.
A picture is worth a thousand words and that’s so very true. This is even more important for the hospitality industry.
Unsplash is an amazing collection of images both free and paid. This must be a tool in your digital marketing arsenal to ensure your website, emails and more are a visual delight. Always!
Mailchimp
Once a customer, always a customer must be the motto of all hospitality companies.
Customers love to get occasional non-intrusive emails from their favourite hotels and restaurants. And you get more recommendations and get more exposure for your brand.
Thus email marketing is crucial and regular newsletters to subscribers are key to success for hospitality organisations. Tools like Mailchimp automate a lot of this task of creating and sending emails. And it’s not that pricey.
Something all hoteliers must try for sure.
Conclusion
Here you go, some of the most useful digital marketing tools for the hospitality industry.
The Covid pandemic has hurt the hospitality industry big times. Thus, costs have to be reduced and customer service has to be enhanced. These tools would help in automation while giving superior customer support.
