Whether you’re new to the world of digital marketing for hotels, Inns, bed and breakfasts, and/or vacation rentals, or whether you’ve been in the industry for a long time, it’s important to stay on top of current trends and best practices. So often, we find aspiring innkeepers new to the bed and breakfast industry who don’t understand what digital marketing is, let alone why things like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are important and how best to implement a successful marketing strategy.
While traditional means of marketing, including running print ads and working with local chambers of commerce and bureaus of tourism, can still be an integral component of any overall marketing strategy, in the age of the internet, it’s more important than ever to understand digital marketing for hotels and bed and breakfasts. More importantly, it’s important to leave the do-it-yourself mentality behind and work with a team of experts that will guide you to the best results possible in an increasingly competitive online world.
If there’s one thing to know about digital marketing for hotels and bed and breakfasts, it’s that it changes. Constantly. Luckily, the experienced team behind Inn Marketplace are seasoned experts who have been working in the hospitality industry for more than 50 years combined. Our expertise ranges from Innkeeping practices, investment properties, buying and selling hotels, bed and breakfasts, and vacation properties, and digital marketing for hotels, bed and breakfasts, vacation rentals, and more.
What is Digital Marketing for Hotels and Bed and Breakfasts?
On its face, digital marketing for hotels and bed and breakfasts is a generic term. Most of us know how important the internet is in today’s eCommerce-driven world. But how, exactly, do you get started with digital marketing for hotels and bed and breakfasts? Below, we offer an introductory guide to the most essential elements of any good strategy for digital marketing for hotels and bed and breakfasts.
If you’re ready to get started on implementing a digital marketing strategy that is customized to the needs of your business, we encourage you to reach out to our dedicated vendors, including the marketing experts at Logan Marketing. Our dedicated vendors are leading experts in digital marketing for hotels and bed and breakfasts. We also encourage you to attend aspiring innkeeper seminars and other industry-related conferences over the course of 2023 to talk to those actively working in and loving the industry.
Digital Marketing for Hotels and Bed and Breakfasts: The Website
At its most basic, distilled form, digital marketing for hotels and bed and breakfasts is all about driving users to your website, increasing engagement, and driving conversations to actual bookings (i.e. revenue). Of course, to do this, the first thing you’ll need to consider when developing a business plan for your bed and breakfast is a website.
Aside from purchasing your Inn and paying your staff, developing a proper, functioning website that adequately represents your business will be one of your biggest – and most important – expenses. This is not a place to cut corners, and the foundation of any great strategy for digital marketing for hotels and bed and breakfasts is a modern, well-designed website.
The first component of any successful strategy when it comes to digital marketing for hotels and bed and breakfasts is a modern, well-built website. Though there are several different platforms on which you can build a website – some of which are even marketing as easy do-it-yourself solutions, the most used platform in the world is WordPress. WordPress also happens to be the platform Google themselves recommends, which is advice that just should not be ignored. There’s a reason for it!
Among other things that make WordPress a great website platform is just how easy it is to add metadata to your website. We’ll dedicate another blog post to that, but in short, this is what allows Google to “crawl” your website, understand what it’s about, and give it a corresponding ranking for various google searches. The short of it: This is how your website gets found by all the users on the internet performing a Google search.
What is SEO and Why Does it Matter?
We just mentioned a critical factor that your website plays in helping your business to be found by Google, but how does it do that? The short answer is by something called SEO, which stands for search engine optimization. This is one of the most important things to understand when it comes to digital marketing for hotels and bed and breakfasts.
SEO is a complex and ever-changing aspect of digital marketing for hotels and bed and breakfasts. However, put into simplified terms, SEO is the process by which marketing experts make your website more visible for various google searches. In order to increase the profitability of your business, you want it to be seen by as many prospective guests as possible. In order for your website to be more visible, it needs to be optimized to show up as a top organic search result (i.e. not a paid ad) for various terms people type into the Google search box.
The world of SEO can be exceedingly complex, and we’ll spare you most of the details in this post. But, to give you a basic understanding of the key points to a good SEO strategy, you’ll need to keep in mind these five things:
- Compelling Content: Though some people in every industry, the bed and breakfast industry included, will tell you that content is less important these days, they are wrong. Content is still king when it comes to solid SEO for a website. Having good, compelling, and relevant content is even more important, particularly as the Google algorithm and artificial intelligence technology grow more sophisticated. It’s important that your content has important keywords in it, but this has to be done carefully.
- Keyword optimization: Your website should be optimized for several keywords that are most related to your industry (for example, Bed and Breakfast, or, more specifically, [city/state name] Bed and Breakfast. You don’t just want to put them in randomly, though, so that your copy reads choppy and artificial. Your marketing company can help you identify important keywords. Ultimately, these keywords will help you attract people who are looking for businesses like yours and bring them to your website.
- Well-Designed and Optimized Website: This goes beyond just good keyword optimization. The website also needs to have a good user experience associated with it, which means that the photos and copy should load quickly and without problems, should be easy to use, navigate, and find information on, and should have the same or similar experience across a range of devices (particularly on mobile devices).
- Content Authority: Having just any content with a few keywords sprinkled in is’t enough. The content has to be high-quality, authoritative, and share-worthy, especially in an increasingly social world!
- Links: Your website should not only have a number of links out to other sources, but should also have a web of links coming to it from other sources, particularly highly valuable and authoritative sources.
- Meta Details: Having things like a good, catchy, and relevant title, good meta descriptions for your content, and appropriate URL’s is an important part of any SEO strategy, particularly when developing new and ongoing content.
Data-driven Marketing Strategies
As you get ready to implement various strategies in digital marketing for hotels and bed and breakfasts, it’s important to understand how well your marketing company and its various initiatives are performing. Data is an increasingly important part of any good strategy in digital marketing for hotels and bed and Breakfasts. If your digital marketing company isn’t utilizing this data to recommend, alter, or update its products, you should consider looking elsewhere.
At the foundation of any good data-driven marketing strategy is Google Analytics. The proper use and filtering of data out of Google Analytics can help you pinpoint exactly where your marketing dollars are best spent. For example, if you see in Google Analytics that your monthly blog posts are driving $100,000 in revenue for you each year, you’ll obviously want to continue the same practices that got you those results. Conversely, if you find that your audience isn’t engaged in your email marketing campaign, you’ll either want to come up with a new plan or engage in some testing to adjust how you’ve been marketing your property.
Above, we listed the development of content as a critical component of a well-defined SEO strategy. Don’t let anyone tell you content doesn’t matter, digital marketing expert or otherwise. The use of keywords and how that content is created has certainly changed over the years, but content is still absolutely king when it comes to keeping your website ranking well for various organic Google searches. But what’s at the core of good content creation? Data!
There are a number of tools out there that use real data and help digital marketing agencies build a content strategy around it – which ultimately results in a website that is far more authoritative than its competitors, thus resulting in improved placement over competitors. If you’re curious about learning more about how these tools can help you, book a complimentary consultation with the expert digital marketing team at Logan Marketing.
In addition to having a solid content-creation strategy that is supported by data, your digital marketing agency should be engaging in email marketing. Email marketing is often your best tool to establish and increase loyalty. Though you can buy email databases and market to audiences who haven’t yet stayed at your property, the best use of an email marketing campaign is to market yourself directly to guests who have already stayed with you.
These past guests have already (hopefully) had a great experience with you, and they are far more likely to return again for another stay. More importantly, you can sweeten your offer by offering promotions, discounts, and other packages as appropriate to your business model, but do so only to reward loyalty. Utilizing data in the form of open rates, click-through rates, and heat mapping on email newsletters, in addition to new technologies like call tracking, can go a long way in helping you determine the overall success of your email marketing campaigns and adjust them when needed.
Finally, another data-driven aspect of a comprehensive strategy in digital marketing for hotels and bed and breakfasts is the use of Google Hotel Ads and paid Google Ad Campaigns. Google Hotel Ads are a free listing on Google for your property and offer businesses a great way to grow and promote themselves on Google Search and Google Maps results. You can also run a variety of paid Ad Campaigns directly on Google for your hotel, Bed and Breakfast, and a variety of other industry-related searches.
Reviews: Why they Matter and How to Get More
Reviews matter for a number of reasons, but most importantly, it’s a quick and easy way for users to determine whether or not they want to engage with your business further. Reviews on platforms like Google and TripAdvisor can also mean your website ranks better in organic searches, which can help prospective guests find you.
It seems straightforward enough that reviews, such as those on Google and other relevant platforms, matter, but it’s also essential to understand how to get Google reviews and how to respond to negative reviews when they happen. There are a few different ways to get reviews. The most organic and obvious of these is to ask anyone who has interacted with your business to leave you one.
The next way to get a review is via email – though these do run the risk of getting lost and forgotten about in someone’s email inbox – something that’s more and more common in our email-heavy world. However, aside from asking (begging!) for reviews and emailing guests about reviews, there’s one more method that is proving incredibly successful, and that’s utilizing a text messaging service.
Users are increasingly engaged with text messages, especially when compared with emails. The best tool in the industry to help you gather Google Reviews is Review My Stay, a product exclusively offered by Logan Marketing, a leading industry expert in all things Digital Marketing and the preferred marketing vendor here at Inn Marketplace.
To get a free demonstration of this product and learn more about how we can help you market your bed and breakfast successfully, book a free consultation with Logan Marketing today.
