Moreover, the lack of a hotel site is perceived by the target audience as an indicator of a low level of the enterprise, regardless of the actual quality of the services provided.
The Internet can become a tool for the effective promotion of services for the hotel business only if the site is a sales channel and it presents in a favorable light the products and services offered by the hotel. A correct approach to website development and organization of a rational marketing campaign lead to an increase in the share of direct sales on the Internet.
Ways to attract customers via the Internet
Like any other advertising tool, it can be effective, ineffective, or completely useless. The goal of every hotelier is to maximize resource efficiency. To do this, Internet marketing provides a number of tools, the most popular among which are the following:
- SEO (from English search engine optimization) or search engine optimization; contextual advertising;
- contextual advertising;
- SMM (from the English Social media marketing) – promotion in social networks;
- email marketing;
- thematic sites – thematic blogs, forums, etc.
- The most common, effective and at the same time expensive are search engine optimization and contextual advertising. Analytics allows you to track the effectiveness of each specific promotion method and correctly distribute financial investments in promotion. Let’s take a closer look at the role each of the listed methods of driving traffic plays.
Search engine promotion
According to statistics, about 450 million people enter approximately 11 billion queries into search engine windows every month. Up to 90% of visitors come to web resources from search engine sites. At the same time, about 70% of users exclusively use links from organic search results for this, ignoring contextual advertising. At least 40% of buyers of modern online stores come from search engines. Approximately 46% of users learn about the emergence of new Internet projects through search results.
According to a study by NPD Group, search engines Yandex and Google bring about 55% of buyers to the website. At the same time, the conversion rate of website visitors to customers is 15 times higher than the conversion of any other traffic sources, and the conversion across the entire site is 7-8 times. Thus, among modern methods of Internet marketing, search engine promotion gives the highest return on investment (ROI) – in 42% of cases (despite the fact that, for example, banner ads provide the highest return on investment in only 4% of cases).
When engaged in search engine promotion, it is important to correctly compare your own financial capabilities, in accordance with which to set the achieved result. It is necessary to take into account the data of the Compaq study, which showed that 68% of users look only the first page in the search engine results and only 7% of visitors go beyond the third page. From this it follows that it is better to achieve a site’s position on the second or third page for a targeted request than on the first for a key request, which is useless for the site and can become a source of extremely uninterested visitors.
The main goals of search engine optimization, in addition to reaching the top, are clicks on feedback forms, reservations, calls, applications. In order to achieve a result, an Internet project must meet the requirements that Yandex and Google systems impose on content, design, usability and site structure. A high-quality Internet project of a hotel, according to search engines, should have:
- original (unique), structured, laconic, truthful, content (this applies to any content – texts, photos, videos);
- thoughtful design that matches the theme of the site;
- convenient navigation for efficient data search and quick transition to the required section;
- a well-thought-out structure, in which the following pages must be present: Contact information, About the hotel, Special offers / Promotions.
Thus, optimization covers a wide range of works related not only to promotion in search engines as such, but also to improving usability (ease of use of the site), attracting targeted traffic and increasing the interest of the target audience in the promoted hotel and the services it provides. In the process of competent search engine optimization, gross errors in the work of the site, deficiencies in content, structure, design are revealed. In addition, SEO provides ample opportunities for finding new unoccupied niches in a specific area and using them in order to improve an Internet project and increase its traffic and conversion rate.
Contextual advertising
Thus, a potential buyer sees advertising “on his own request”, which allows to achieve the maximum coincidence of interests. According to statistics, from 3 to 40% clicks on a contextual ad, while no more than 0.3% of users click on a banner ad. At the same time, contextual advertising provides a high conversion rate of users to customers.
These 2 methods complement each other. So, it takes about 3 months to get SEO results, and contextual advertising begins to give results immediately after placement. Contextual advertising opens up wide opportunities for website promotion, but it plays a special role, if necessary, to convey to the target audience information about current special offers and promotions of the hotel.
One of the main advantages of contextual advertising is that when using it, the advertiser pays not for the planned, but for the result. The cost of one click (that is, for each attracted user) varies depending on the site’s topic and regional placement.
Photo by LinkedIn Sales Navigator on Unsplash
