For years, having a good website was the only thing you needed to run a successful hospitality business. But that’s not the case anymore. While your website is still essential, it’s far from enough to keep up with the competition and appeal to today’s digital audience.
A 360-degree robust digital marketing strategy is vital in today’s digital world. Here are some tips to help you with digital marketing for your hospitality business:
Make Sure Customers Can Find You Online
To ensure customers can find you online, you’ll need to ensure your website is optimized for search engines. This involves optimizing your site’s page title tags and meta descriptions to appear when people search for keywords related to your business.
You must also ensure that the URLs of each page on your site are descriptive and keyword-rich. This helps with Google’s ranking algorithm and clickthrough rates from organic traffic. Adding rich snippets is also helpful in providing more information to the readers.
Besides search engine optimization, you must create compelling, informative, and engaging content for your website and promote the same on social media. The content can be a blog, landing page, video, podcasts, infographics, etc. While there are many forms of content, you need to choose the one that increases engagement with your target audience.
Analyzing what keywords to use, who is your target audience, what content they like, creating their content, etc., requires a lot of research and a dedicated online marketing team. Suppose you have a restaurant; you will need to analyze what keywords can build your popularity locally, how many average tourists come to your restaurant, what is the keyword that generates the highest organic traffic to your website, etc.
If you can afford an in-house team for online marketing, it’s well and good. But it’s usually best to outsource the work to an agency. You can hire an agency specializing in online marketing for restaurants and leverage their expertise to ensure success in digital marketing.
These agencies will have the resources and profound knowledge to help promote your hospitality business and its unique selling points (USPs) to the right audience.
Use Your Website as a Hub for Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Your website is a great place to begin your digital marketing efforts. A web presence allows you to showcase your restaurant, hotel, food, and other amenities. Use the homepage as an introduction to potential customers. Include pictures of the venue, directions, and hours of operation. Also, provide information on special events, coupons or promotions, and links to social media pages.
Create subpages for each department within your hospitality business so visitors can easily find what they need, whether dining alone or with large groups of people.
Don’t Overlook Social Media
Social media is one of the most effective ways to connect with customers, and it can be used for much more than just promoting your business. Social media also allows you to listen and respond to customer feedback, get reviews of your products or services, and create brand loyalty by providing valuable content that customers want.
Social media is an excellent tool for collecting customer information, like names, addresses, and email addresses, which can be used in marketing campaigns. The best way to use social media is through engaging conversations with followers. This will encourage them to share their experiences with other people online that they know through word-of-mouth marketing.
To leverage the full potential of social media, ensure creating content specific to the platform you choose. For example, if you are creating content for Instagram, create catchy posts or short videos that can drive engagement. Similarly, if you are using Twitter, write concise and precise tweets. If you use content irrelevant to the platform, it won’t drive any engagement.
Respond to Reviews and Complaints Quickly and Professionally
Customer reviews are vital for your business. When you get a positive review, you need to make the most out of it by using it on your website. But if you get a negative review, it’s time to act fast on it.
You must respond to feedback on your business because a negative review can hurt your reputation more than a positive one helps it. Just as the customer service department of a hotel will try to make up for any problems that occurred during an unpleasant stay, your customers need to see that you are willing to make things right when there is an issue with their experience at your business.
You don’t have to bend over backward or apologize profusely, but an apology and explanation of what went wrong go a long way toward building trust with customers who might otherwise take their business elsewhere in the future.
Work With Influencers When It Makes Sense for Your Brand
Influencers are people who have a large following on social media. They might be Instagram stars, YouTube celebrities, or bloggers. Influencers can help you reach new customers and expand your brand’s reach when used strategically. Here are some ways they can do so:
- Provide testimonials or endorsements of your business
- Promote you to their followers by featuring photos or videos of your hotel on their accounts. This could lead to more bookings for you!
- Create content for a campaign in which they promote your hotel. If the influencer has an audience interested in travel experiences like yours, it could benefit both parties if the deal is mutually beneficial.
Invest in Mobile Advertising That’s Relevant to Your Customer Base
Mobile advertising is a great way to reach customers while they’re on the go. However, it’s important to note that your ads should be tailored specifically for mobile users. Ensure that your ads are relevant and valuable by understanding how people use their phones in particular situations.
For example, if you’re trying to promote your restaurant’s lunch special, target potential customers who are likely at work during lunchtime. That way, when they open up their newsfeed in between shifts or break time and see an ad from you, it’ll be more than just a distraction from emails or texts. It’ll catch their attention because it offers something they need right now!
Another good practice is investing in remarketing campaigns on Google Ads. Remarketing allows businesses like yours who had already appeared organically within someone’s search results list before but didn’t convert into sales yet. Now those same people will see ads from you again with more information about why exactly what service/product would benefit the most out of all the options available online today.
Improve Your Online Bookings
If you haven’t already, it is time to consider an online booking system for your restaurant or hospitality business. Nowadays, many customers prefer to book their tables in advance via the internet rather than calling or walking into a restaurant and asking for a table. Here are some ways you can improve your online booking process:
- Use a booking system that integrates with as many calendars and platforms as possible. This will allow people looking at your website but not yet ready to reserve a table on their phone or tablet device to see when they can come in on any given day. It may even prompt them with information about special events happening that week, which might appeal more than simply coming for dinner out of curiosity during regular hours!
- Optimize your website for mobile users by using “responsive design” principles to look good regardless of whether someone accesses it from their desktop computer screen vs. an iPhone screen size.
Conclusion
You may think having a strong online presence is only important for businesses selling products or services, but you’d be mistaken. Strong online marketing for restaurants and other hospitality businesses is now more important than ever.
The best part of this advice is that it won’t cost you much money to implement. In fact, some of it will save you money! We promise these tips and tricks are simple yet highly effective ways to improve your digital marketing strategy for your hospitality business.