5 Hotel Marketing Mistakes & Ways To Avoid

Right marketing campaigns can open the threshold of growth opportunities for the hotel business. If it’s done wrongly, it can also drive an adverse effect on sales and revenue. Therefore, before you plan your next marketing plan for your hotel. It is advisable to recognize the common marketing mistakes which you should avoid at all costs if you want to maximize your sales and boost the revenue of your hotel.

Therefore, we have put together for you the seven most common hotel marketing mistakes that you must avoid if you want to achieve your maximum profits and sales. While reading contemplates if you’re making the same mistakes that keep you in the loop of less return on investment. Jot them down and develop your strategy around them to maximize your hotel profit.

5 Hotel Marketing Mistakes That Hurt Your Sales

1. Not Using Data In Your Marketing Strategy

As you know, the use of data has become one of the main factors in determining the success of a marketing campaign. Most businesses today are using data analysis to develop and implement an effective marketing strategy that will maximize their sales and increase revenues.

To get those positive results for your hotel marketing, you should also use relevant data to improve your conversion rates, ROI, lead generation, bounce rates, etc. Here is the Type of Data You can Incorporate into your Marketing Strategy:

A) Hotel Rate Intelligence Data:

To make your marketing campaign a success. There should be a strong USP that attracts your target audience.

What works better than promoting discounts & lower pricing than your competitors?

When it comes to booking a hotel most travellers are price sensitive and look for an inexpensive staying option with decent amenities and facilities.

Therefore, highlighting and promoting competitive rates and discounts on your website, ads and OTA platforms will definitely attract more customers to your hotel and drive more sales.

To do so, you can use rate intelligence tools to track the market hotel rates and monitor your competitor’s prices on a regular basis to ensure that you have the lowest rates and can make your offers stand out from the crowd.

This is certainly one of the key ways to generate more hotel bookings for your hotel and help boost your revenue.

To know thoroughly about hotel rate intelligence and how it can help your hotel generate higher revenues and improve your marketing efforts it’s recommended to read this blog.

B) Google Analytics Data

To gain more insight into the performance of your campaign. You should gather as much data as possible to maximize the excellence of your marketing campaigns. Through good analytics, you can get insights into visitor behavior on your website and discover any problem areas that might impact the performance of your campaigns.

C) Big Data

Many companies are leveraging big data in their marketing strategy to gain insight into customer behavior and get an edge over their competition. If you came across the term for the first time, let me tell you what it is and how it is useful for your marketing campaigns to make them successful.

What Is Big Data?

Big data is a collection of large sets of structured or unstructured data that is analysed by computers to reveal trends, patterns, and other useful information.

How Big Data Is Useful For Hotel Marketing Campaigns?

The big data is collected from various channels such as websites, social media, mobiles, emails, etc; then categorized and analysed using different tools and techniques. Altogether, it provides deep insights related to user behaviour patterns, buying patterns, and preferences which can be used to improve the user experience. It also enables marketers to personalize the user experience for different visitors based on their browsing history, demographics, and other factors.

2. Not Concentrating On Social Media Marketing

According to a global social media statistics research summary, 60% of the world’s population uses social media and an average person spends an average of 2.5 hours on social media per day. Social media is the most inexpensive platform to promote your hotel than any other channel. In spite of that, most hoteliers ignore this platform in their overall digital marketing strategy, which makes them lose a huge chunk of their potential audience. Therefore, ignoring social media promotion is one of the greatest hotel marketing mistakes most hotel owners make.

If you are not using social media for your marketing campaigns yet, then you need to take a serious look at your marketing strategy and start focusing on social media to build a strong base of followers, and generate high-quality leads.

Here is What can You do to Get Bookings From Social Media Channels:

1. Optimize your profiles on various social media channels to attract your audience.
2. Create a unique social media strategy based on the type of your target audience and their preferences.
3. Be creative in your strategy and focus on creating videos and reels to promote your property.
4. Keep your audience engaged by regularly posting interesting contests and offering freebies to your audience.
5. Take feedback from your audience and use those things to improve your social media marketing efforts.
6. Measure the performance of your campaign and identify the things you are doing right and the things you are doing wrong to fine-tune your campaigns and improve results.
7. Collaborate with travel influencers who has large no of genuine followers to review your hotel. It will build trust & credibility for your hotel.

3. Not Improving Your Website User Experience

If you’re able to drive a ton of traffic through online ads to your website but the conversion rate makes you disappointed. The real issue might lie in your website layout. Do you know, it takes only 50 milliseconds to decide whether or not a visitor will stay on your site? The first impression is the last impression for sure.

Here is What you can do to Improve the User Experience of Your Website:

1. Website Navigation: Make it easy for your visitors to navigate the website and keep all the important pages on the header. And, pages like contact us, about us, and more exactly where they can easily find it.
2. A Web Copy That Converts: Use a powerful web copy that communicates everything you want to say in precise words. Use easy, powerful & engaging words rather than jargons that the audience might not understand.
3. Use A Clear Call To Action: In order to impress your audience you don’t have to use a sophisticated call to action. A simple “book now”, “get a discount” and “check prices” works better in most cases.
4. Improve Your Website Layout & Speed: In 2019, Unbounce conducted a study by asking search engine users if website speed impacts their purchasing decision. 70% of the users gave a Big Yes! So, it is extremely important to optimize the page loading time if you don’t want users to get frustrated and never come back. Plus, also keep your website layout engaging and responsive. If you’re not sure how to do it, this best website design company in UK can help you out.

4. Not Responding To Queries & Complaints

Being active on social media and publishing content on your website is great. But, if you’re not spending time resolving visitor’s queries or guest complaints. The marketing efforts are not only worthless but they can also severely damage your brand image.

So, to engage your audience and convert them into paying customers you need to respond to every message you receive whether it is on Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media platform. Plus, for tackling bad comments and reviews it would be wise to hire an ORM (online reputation management) team.

5. Overwhelming Ads, Posts, and Emails

Too much of anything is bad. Sometimes the less is more rule you need to implement in your Best Luxury hotels . Bombarding ads, posts, and email promotions can result in making your target audience frustrated and lose interest in your brand.

Furthermore, out of frustration, many users might unsubscribe from emails and unfollow you on social media. Plus, it might also result in reduced website traffic and customer conversions. So, instead of feeding your brimming audience constant content on different channels.

Take a break to review your marketing strategy again and leverage data to find out when your customers are most engaged on different marketing platforms. And, make changes to your strategy to get the best results.

Final Words:

A well-thought-out hotel marketing plan will help to attract and retain more customers, drive more bookings and increase revenues. But, mistakes that go unnoticed but hotel marketing mistakes can go unnoticed can seriously hurt your hotel’s brand value and decrease ROI. Therefore, to attain maximum ROI on your marketing strategy.

It’s important to find out if you’re stuck in the trap of common marketing mistakes most hoteliers make in their marketing campaigns. Improve upon them and work on your way upward to increase ROI and profitability for your hotel business!