The Internet offers marketing applications and methods that are not available to you in print or any other marketing channel. My company specializes in marketing hotel proprietary websites, including multiple property websites for hotel management companies. We have done this very successfully since 1998!
All reports from PWC and Jupiter Communications indicate that the Internet will continue to grow its share of hotel bookings worldwide. Given this fact, it is also your hotel's best sales channel offering your best RevPar or it can be your worst nightmare. Having your own website and marketing it properly can be your best marketing solution, but only when you are willing to take control of your marketing and invest in creating a successful shopping experience for your website visitors and offer them an easy booking channel. The real advantage of Internet marketing compared to other marketing methods is that so much of your work and investment is measurable.
Developing your own website as a sales channel does eliminate the need to maintain your merchant site promotions as an outlet for rooms you know you will never sell, but don't give away too much. And, of course you need to keep your inventory and rates current on the GDS based volume alone the GDS enable thousands of travel agents, Internet portals and don't forget the corporate management systems that draw inventory from the GDS.
My comments going forward focus on marketing your hotel directly to consumers via your own property website (proprietary website). The first step in this process is to determine whether this is a task you want to take on in-house or should you work with a 3rd party supplier. Unless you have a highly skilled marketing manager who can write HTML and has lots of time to surf the Internet you should find help. Plus, by outsourcing you can control your cost based on results.
So the first step is to select the right Internet marketing service provider! This may be a daunting task in itself because Internet marketing vendors range from offering their services for free to charging thousands of dollars per month. Some vendors specialize in website design while others offer marketing services such as search engine optimization. These services may even be offered by your advertising agency who will incorporate services such as pay-per-click ad campaigns into your online and print advertising efforts. But as you find with all marketing, Internet marketing success is dependent on skilled personnel, lots of man-hours and reliable research and analysis. With this in mind, I suggest you proceed with caution when you are offered free Internet marketing, Buyer beware!
Free service generally means you won't pay now you will pay later. Generally you will pay in the form of a hefty commission or transaction fee. This may work for you if you don't expect to sell much via the Internet, but if you are successful it can really cost you.
On the other hand, there are other marketing service suppliers who leverage the complexity of their services to charge exhorbatant service fees. Oh yes, you get lots of data and tons of details about everyone who visited your site and for an additional fee you get some advise on how to target and capitalize on this data. And, the work and cost are up front.
Internet marketing is still in its earliest stage of development and the companies at each end of this spectrum are taking advantage of this fact. To make the right choices you need to segment the three elements of Internet marketing; 1) Website design 2) Internet marketing 3) Online bookings. Let's look at each element on its own then how they are interdependent.
Website design demands man-hours and a creative mind. Many website design services work from a choice of templates. This means they will offer a choice of 5 or 10 site formats and you have to fit your brand, navigation and message into their template. It is sort of like coloring by the numbers. Depending on your property size, brand, ADR, location, seasonality and other factors you may only need a six or seven page site. If you are more of a full-service hotel, suites property or a resort in a key market your site require as many as thirty or forty pages. So once you have a design you like and you have listing some of the things you want to promote the designer should develop the site map. This map shows how a consumer will navigate through your website. After all of this is in place, someone has to write all of the copy and select good pictures to deliver an effective story about your hotel and its benefits. Oh, and when they copy is written and formatted for the site it should be written in a certain search engine friendly format called optimized content.
Now you've got a website! Unfortunately, this does not mean the door is open and they will come to or even find you when they are looking. This just means you are open for business. Now, you need to invest in marketing your website and there are a number of ways to do this. Of course, you need to put your website address on all of your printed marketing materials, business cards, road signs and other information distribution channels. But, the best way to drive traffic to your website is through search engines. Search engines are automated directories that are used as part of the search process by more than 90% of all Internet shopping.
Optimizing website content is very unique skill and one that is growing more and more important in the battle for top listings in the search engines. Simply put, optimization is using keywords and phrases in your site content, headers and where possible so the search engine web spiders will find you when a shopper uses these words in their search. There are a number of other elements to optimizing your website, but the bottom line is that it requires experience and lots of man-hours to be effective. Then there is the challenge of keeping your site in synch with the search engine algorithm changes.
Next you should need to shift some of your print advertising budget to Internet advertising, starting with an on-going pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. PPC means you are bidding for specific phrases that you think shoppers will choose and that phrase will lead them to your hotel. An investment in PPC is payment to assure you of positioning on page one or two if you are one of the higher bidders. The advantage is that you have a listing and only pay when someone clicks to your website. What happens when they get to your site is dependent on the experience that you offer the shopper.
The last marketing element and it may be considered the most important is your online booking engine. This is the element that differentiates many of the website service vendors because so many offer services, but are unable to track their results to the actual sale. The real value here is when one company is providing website hosting, optimization, online advertising and the booking engine they can track whether the shopper came from a search engine, what keyword the buyer used and relate that data to the actual booking. Needless to say this information can be applied to improve your Internet marketing program and to build online sales. Having this type of data also opens opportunities for targeting email promotions and other marketing by origin market or buyer preferences.
One of the challenges you may have to deal with is the requirement by your brand that your website bookings must go through their CRS. This link is easy to provide, but it does eliminate any possibility of tracking the source of the booking that came from your website optimization or PPC.
In conclusion, Internet sales are rapidly becoming an important segment of your hotel's sales revenue and you need to allocate a percentage of your annual marketing budget to Internet, plus your plan should consider all elements and how they need to work together to enable measurable results. Be very cautious of under priced or over priced services, always ask for details on how the service is provided and ask for real case studies. Based on the PWC forecast of a 6.3% increase in RevPar in 2004, it appears business and leisure travel is recovering. Hence, it may be time to focus on direct sales instead of the 3rd parties. Also, statistics indicate that the RevPar from direct sales from your proprietary website should average 10 to 20% higher than other channels and at a much better return on investment. Your goal should be to generate 20 to 30% of your bookings through your proprietary website. You should also expect to see your Internet sales grow at a ratio of from five to ten times your marketing investment.
SECURE-RES provides a complete Internet marketing solution dedicated to the hotel industry. They are located at 4237 Salisbury North, Suite 205 Jacksonville, Florida 32216. The company has been in business since 1998 and serving over 1,000 hotels worldwide. For more details about SECURE-RES visit www.SECURE-RES.COM or phone (904) 389-1130 extension 142.
Richard Walsh is Vice President of Sales & Marketing for SECURE-RES. His industry experience includes executive management tenure with Reed Elsivier Publishing, Wizcom, Amadeus, Innovata and a number of Internet travel marketing ventures. Richard is a graduate of Western Michigan University and has been an innovator in travel marketing for more than 20 years. Contact rwalsh@secure-res.com.
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