7 Hotel Promotion Ideas To Inspire You

When it comes to promoting a hotel, creativity is an essential factor in creating successful promotional strategies.

This is important, especially because the hospitality industry is already saturated with businesses and establishments, making it so that the competition among hotels is even more difficult.

To remain relevant in the hotel industry and possibly rise to the reputation of the best hotel in your locality, it is important to promote your establishment in ways your competition isn't.

Are you having difficulty creating a strategy to attract clients to your hotel establishment? Here are seven hotel promotion ideas to implement into your marketing and business strategy.

Importance of Promoting Your Hotel

Promoting your hotel establishment is an easy way to reach prospective guests and improve your business. With an effective promotional strategy, you attract new guests, retain old guests, and keep your business at the forefront of the industry.

With more than 700,000 hotel establishments globally, the competition in the hospitality industry is growing more difficult daily. Hotel owners invest time and resources in promoting their establishments, hoping to remain even more relevant than neighboring hotels.

As competition toughens, generic marketing efforts such as word-of-mouth are becoming less effective. Promotional and marketing strategies are becoming extremely important, and hotel owners are creatively tailoring strategies to appeal directly to their target audience.

A hotel promotion and marketing strategy refers to the tools a hotel establishment adopts to promote its business. These strategies aim to get noticed in the crowded industry and attract as many guests as possible. Without an adequate and effective promotional strategy, there will be no way to inform potential guests about your hotel's services.

An effective hotel marketing strategy serves several purposes and plays several roles in keeping a hotel establishment successful. The major benefits of adopting a hotel promotional strategy include the following:

1. Attract Hotel Bookings

As previously mentioned, competition is one of the most significant challenges in the hospitality industry. With hundreds of thousands of hotels globally, it becomes increasingly difficult to attract guests interested in booking rooms and staying in the establishment.

It is especially difficult for new establishments that have only just been set up as they now have to contend with established and popular hotels that already have a significant customer base.

Having an adequate promotion strategy makes it easier to raise awareness about your hotel establishment. With a property promotional strategy, you can enlighten your potential guests about your services, how you differ from your competitors, and why you are the better choice.

Doing this makes it easier for your hotel to seem appealing and attractive to customers, making it easier to attract bookings. This gives your business a boost and widens your client base.

2. Increase Revenue

The customer-attracting benefits of hotel promotion offer more advantages than just brand awareness. By attracting more clients, you get more guests in your hotel. In turn, you make more revenue than you usually would. Essentially, a good promotional strategy is a key ingredient to maximizing revenue.

3. Stand Out From The Competition

How do you make a mark for yourself in the hospitality industry? The easy answer is to set yourself apart from competing establishments. A unique promotional tactic is a great way to stand apart from other hotels within your location.

It not only generates leads and drives sales but serves as your very own unique marker that communicates key messages to your intended audience. The less generic a hotel's promotional strategy, the more potential it has to strike a chord with potential guests, making it so that they regard your establishment as the better choice.

This makes it easier to create a loyal customer base, thereby helping you stand out from the competition.

7 Hotel Promotion Ideas To Inspire You

Are you stuck on the perfect promotion strategy for your establishment Creating a promotion strategy is one of the most difficult processes a hotel will need to dabble in. To make the process less sticky and challenging than it already is, here are seven ideas to inspire your next promotional strategy.

1. Run Loyalty Programs

Everyone loves freebies. Rewards and reward systems make people feel special and appreciated, fuelling a form of loyalty from the customers to the brands that offer these incentives. As a result, it is a no-brainer that loyalty programs are one of the most effective forms of promotion any hotel can use.

A loyalty program is a program sponsored by a business that includes offering rewards, discounts, and other special incentives as a way to attract and retain customers. These programs make customers feel very special, thereby helping them naturally gravitate toward your hotel because they feel appreciated.

Although loyalty programs and special offers have been incorporated into the business world for a while, they are not prevalent in the hospitality industry. This is quite ironic, especially since it is a very effective promotion tool to welcome new guests and keep old guests coming back.

Build a reward and loyalty program and offer something of value. This reward can be anything from complimentary breakfast to surprise room upgrades discounts off the fees. You may even offer an extra night at a discounted price or entirely free if guests book more than two nights.

There is no rule as to what you can offer as rewards. However, the more creative you are with your reward system, the more special your guests feel.

Regardless of the reward you offer, ensure you make your loyalty program pay off by identifying and targeting customers who are more likely to shift to your competitor’s doorsteps. This will make it easier to retain customers, thereby ensuring your business always booms.

2. Utilize Social Media

Social Media Marketing is another significantly effective promotion tool for any hotel. By leveraging the power of social media, you can connect with customers and potential customers, thereby creating brand awareness.

In 2021, over 4.26 billion people were using social media worldwide. This number has increased to over 4.9 billion since that survey was held. With these many people using social media platforms and networks globally, positioning your hotel brand on these platforms severely increases your chances of connecting with potential clients and driving sales.

A strong social media presence is one of the many things a hotel needs to grow in today's hotel industry. Platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and Facebook are integral in any successful hotel’s promotional strategy.

These platforms offer several features for hotels to spread awareness about their services, facilities, and other features that may appeal to their target audience. There are numerous ways you can use social media channels for promotion. Some include:

• Post pictures or videos with catchy captions and leverage the necessary features for effective content marketing
• Use unique hashtags to set your brand apart from others and reach out to your target audience
• Communicate with your audience via the comment sections and direct messaging
• Hold polls and surveys
• Host giveaways
• Create a portal for direct bookings so potential customers can book rooms without showing up physically
• Promote user content, such as pictures of your audience visiting or staying at your facilities
• Holding competitions to generate user content
• Working with influencers and bloggers
• Partnering with local businesses in the area online and offline
• Partnering with small businesses online and offline
• Using the advertising features to promote your business at a small charge

The opportunities are endless with social media.

3. Utilize Website Digital Marketing

Businesses are going digital, and hotels are not far behind in these trends. By leveraging the power of the internet and all its tools, you can easily promote your hotel and make it relevant in the industry.

Hoteliers worldwide are recognizing the power of digital marketing and are adopting several measures to enjoy the benefits this marketing strategy offers. One of these measures is incorporating a hotel website.

A hotel website is critical in creating brand awareness and leading potential customers down the purchase funnel. In today’s society, many people choose to consult hotel websites before they decide if they will book a room or not.

In most cases, your website will pop up on a potential customer’s Google search. As a result, it is best to optimize your website and ensure it stands out positively.

Having a solid website is a great promotional strategy. Some ways you can ensure this is the case include:

• Integrate eye-catching graphics
• Match your website design to your hotel’s theme (fun colors for a holiday getaway vs. Luxury designs for a high-end resort)
• Upload high-resolution images and videos. Remember, pictures say a thousand words.
• Ensure the website is responsive
• Ensure the website is user-intuitive
• Include your contact details, including an address, phone number, and email address
• Clearly state all necessary details, including your offering and prices
• Include booking engines to make direct booking easier and faster

4. Use Google My Business

As previously mentioned, searching on Google is a step many people take when looking for hotels to book a stay in. However, not every business will show up on Google’s result page. More importantly, some hotels will rank higher than others on the result page.

To boost your chances of potential clients discovering your hotel business via a simple Google search, it is important to utilize Google My Business and build a Google My Business profile. This will not only discover your hotel business quickly but also offer social proof that will get potential customers to trust you, as Google only lists authentic businesses.

Create a Google My Business Profile and optimize it by filling in all the necessary details relevant to your business. For the best results:

• Claim and verify your business account
• Provide accurate information ( consistent and accurate across all your social media platforms)
• Select the right business category and hotel attributes
• Show off your guest rooms and facilities using videos and pictures
• Update your content regularly
• Encourage user-generated content by integrating customer reviews and pictures taken by guests at the facility

5. Optimize SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a process that is used to optimize a website's technical configuration, content relevance, and link popularity so its pages can become more relevant and easily findable on metasearch engines or the internet as a whole.

By making your content more visible, SEO offers more publicity and promotion. This makes it easier to get more traffic and convert prospects into customers. Optimizing SEO will rank your website higher on search engines such as Google.

It will make it so that your website is one of the first few results a person sees after they inquire about a hotel (usually within their location). Optimizing SEO on your website and Google My Business profile helps your hotel rank higher in visibility.

To optimize SEO on your hotel website:

• Update your content regularly
• Publish relevant, value-rich, and authoritative content
• Use appropriate keywords and keyword placements without spamming
• Use title metadata and meta
• Have a link-worthy site
• Use alt tags

To optimize SEO on your Google My Business Profile:

• Use keywords where possible
• Pick the most relevant categories
• Keep all information accurate

6. Utilize Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective promotional strategies to implement in a marketing campaign any hotel can use for promotion. It's a great way to up-sell, cross-sell, and keep in touch with clients.

Email marketing involves using electronic messages(usually personalized) to market products or services directly to customers. It is a great way to build customer relationships and inform them about upcoming events and promotions.

Every email a hotel sends to clients and potential guests is an opportunity to seal bookings. More importantly, by adopting email marketing as a marketing effort to implement promotional strategies, hoteliers can reach a wider audience and create a close-knit audience of potential clients.

Some emails that can be utilized in email marketing include:

• Confirmation Emails: Sent to clients after they book their rooms. This email should include all details about their stay, including check-in dates, check-out dates, room type, and any special features or requests they made. Confirmation emails can also upsell services, such as spa treatments or can services.
  
• Preference Emails: Do you suspect a guest (preferably one already staying at the facility) will like certain services? You can offer suggestions through personalized emails. These may include vacant suites with discounted prices. By sending these emails, you offer your guest a promise of a better stay while also increasing your chances of making more revenue when the client takes you up on your offer.
  
• Welcome Emails: Also known as pre-arrival emails, welcome emails get guests excited and looking forward to their getaway at your establishment. It includes relevant details such as check-in and check-out dates, room type, and any other requests they made. These emails make guests feel welcome while also giving you the opportunity to upsell certain on-site services, such as spa treatments.

Email marketing is also used to send messages concerning loyalty programs, events, abandoned bookings, or even requests for feedback. Regardless of what the messages entail, email marketing is a great strategy to improve the guest experience before, during, and after their stay.

When writing emails to your guests, remember to keep them short, engaging, and personalized for the guest.

7. Improve OTA Ranking

OTA means Online Travel Agency. These usually refer to websites travelers visit to shop for travel-related products and services. Of course, one of the many travel-related services people look for on OTAs is the availability of hotels.

As you would guess, not every hotel shows up on OTAs. When these hotels do show up, some rank higher than others, with those that rank higher getting more attention than those that don’t. One way to give your hotel the desired promotion is to increase its OTA ranking.

OTA rankings are scores awarded using attributes such as photo and text descriptions, reviews, commission, conversion, and content quality. The better your OTA score and ranking, the more promotion your hotel gets. To increase your OTA score:

• Keep your listing and content up-to-date
• Post high-quality and HD pictures and videos of your property
• Collect and respond to reviews
• Maintain rate parity by not charging too high or low compared to your competitors
• Reduce the booking cancellation ratio
• Participate in OTA promotions such as discounts and other forms of reward program
• Pay for advert spots on OTA sites

There are numerous OTAs, but for the best ranking, it is important to select the right one. Always choose an OTA with your target audience, property type, commission model, demographic reach, and other factors relevant to your business.

Creating The Perfect Hotel Promotion Strategy

Promoting a hotel business can be a very tricky and challenging process. However, when done correctly, it offers numerous benefits, such as better revenue and a bigger customer base in the long- and short-run.

Our guidelines of seven hotel promotion ideas are effective for grabbing attention and facilitating sales. Put together, social media marketing, email marketing, and SEO implementation are effective and play critical roles in the success of any hotel promotion strategy.

Get started, discover the best strategy for your hotel using our idea guidelines, and unlock a new level of brand awareness that you have never reached!