Digital Marketing strategy for Hoteliers during Covid-19 Pandemic

The hospitality businesses across the globe are struggling to find a firm foot with the ongoing pandemic situation. Hoteliers are always on the lookout for ways to maximize their profit and keep their businesses visible. Therefore, digital marketing activities are now gaining popularity to counteract the colossal impact of a pandemic on the hotel business.

If you are looking around for a head start to outsmart your competitors amid the period of social distancing, this article is for you. We have outlined an action plan that you must include in your digital marketing strategy to get ahead of your competitors.

Continue with PPC advertising.

Marketing investment may seem like a fugitive expense owing to pandemic-induced travel restrictions in many parts of the world. You may want to wait and see the developments to gauge the organic leads. While this may give you a short time saving, it is not a plausible situation for the long run.

As every country is now trying to get back to normal, people are always on the lookout to make travel plans whenever possible. It means more people on the internet are searching for hotels.
Since OTAs continue to bid on your hotel brand name, pulling back your PPC ads is not a wise move to make. It would result in OTAs gaining profits and you losing the lower-cost bookings that may improve in the future.

You can also update PPC advertisements easily anytime and have the liberty to change your CTA for your customers, update offers, and highlight your in-hose covid safety protocols and precautions. You can customize and change it anytime to attract more customers at any time of the year.
Another reason why PPC works wonders is that Google’s AI and smart bidding technology supports your PPC ad campaigns. With this powerful combination, you can optimize the campaign in real-time.

It is based on user interactions, booking history, conversion predictions, and other SEO parameters that rely on a steady data flow like clicks and conversions. Once you discontinue the PPC, you switch off this data flow creating a glitch in your campaign. It will only take you a step back in the marketing game, making it difficult to come off the blocks of recovery.

In short, we advise you to continue with your PPC campaigns by investing more in brand protection and remarketing and less on prospecting and display campaigns. You can also keep the campaigns that have a long lead time like inquiries for weddings or conferences active but at a lower level. You can leverage the time to focus on creating Youtube and Display ads to keep reaching out to the relevant customers online.

Invest in On-Site SEO strategy

On-site SEO is the gold mine for digital marketers. When used wisely, you can easily attract leads and increase your direct booking rates. On-site SEO refers to updating the home page with relevant meta-tags and titles such that your brand ranks show up on the first page of a search engine to the users searching for your services.

Optimizing your hotel web page with such small changes brings in quicker results when compared to PPC ad campaigns. It lets customers know your latest status and show your page with the specified keywords during their search.
We work closely with our clients and help them create such small yet prominent changes to their on-site SEO. Our focus is to drive more sales via direct bookings so hotels can enjoy a better ROI and improve their RevPAR. Apart from titles and tags, our focus is to optimize the website content and make it SEO-friendly.

Updating the webpage with relevant content also increases the chances of ranking well and appearing in the ‘featured snippets. An optimized website content fulfills the following criteria:

• Answers questions with “who, what, how, etc.”
• Uses bullet points, tables, paragraphs
• Uses Structured Data (schema.org)
• Uses correct heading formats
• Includes FAQs like – ‘People also ask’ .
• No plagiarism

Appearing in ‘featured snippets’ means your brand name would appear in response to voice search queries. For example, if there’s a query like “how to choose the best hotel for leisure” and your website page content has an answer to it, it may appear as an answer to such a query. It increases the click rate, thereby increasing the chances of direct bookings.

Leverage the Power of Local SEO

Local SEO is one of the most important digital marketing elements as it focuses on the Google My Business listing. It is a core element of the content in the knowledge graph that comes up on the right-hand side of the search result page. Our digital marketing experts are well versed with Google my business listing and other similar platforms like Apple Maps and Bing Places.
Once you get your business listed on such platforms, you get to view its performance, add or edit property photos, and even set up direct communication with customers on the go. You can also add additional details like facilities, location, USP, etc.
Non Hotels businesses can also use the platform to list with a relevant post that highlights their location and their current statuses like open/close and any other details that will help customers decide.
Google My Business is an active platform with useful links that help you understand the current trend and create relevant campaigns.

1. Strengthen Your Metasearch Campaigns

Although demand has fallen, there is still plenty to do to improve future performance:
Metasearch is still one of the sure-shot ways to improve your brand performance online and drive direct sales. As travelers are gearing up for their vacation with safety precautions, you need to work intensively to enhance your hotel brand presence online.
Metasearch is one of the best digital marketing strategies to gain a competitive advantage once everyone starts traveling again.
We offer the best detailed digital marketing action plan that aims to optimize your hotel brand on metasearch and focus on the following areas:

a. Brand Identity
It includes revisiting your hotel profile, content, and other information and examining the accuracy and consistency in all major metasearch platforms such as Google, Trivago, Tripadvisor, Kayak, Skyscanner, Wego, Bing.

We analyze and correct the following to create a reliable brand identity on metasearch:

• Information such as hotel name, address, postal code, contact details;
• Geolocation
• Display photos and photo gallery
• Hotel description
• Hotel services

b. Brand Image
It includes analyzing your brand image positioning on major metasearch platforms like Google, Trivago, Tripadvisor, Kayak, Skyscanner, Wego, Bing, in terms of:

• Ranking
• Reputation
• Reviews
• Traffic Share (official website vs. OTAs)
• Booking Share (official website vs. OTAs)

c. In-Depth brand positioning analysis

It is a crucial element of metasearch as it gives you insights into your hotel image and compares it with your competitors on the Metasearch platforms. It gives you a clear idea of the areas that require improvement and create a more actionable strategy to stand out among your competitors in terms of rank and brand reputation.

Our metasearch experts provide in-depth analysis to assess the level of your hotel in terms of positioning and optimization on metasearch. Our experts use their meta search expertise to improve the visibility of your hotel online and maintain/improve the visibility of your hotel.

In a Nutshell

Since the onset of the pandemic, the situation has improved, and people are now slowly back to planning trips. It is a sign that the covid-19 situation is not eternal. Eventually, travel and tourism will regain their demand. Therefore, it is crucial to keep the business rolling with the best digital marketing strategy. The action plan listed in this article is perfect for the hospitality business in this recovery period.