Is your hotel website working for you?

Is your hotel website working for you?

This is a question which I find myself asking hoteliers on many occassions and the answers vary from yes it is , but we can't quantify it, to no idea at all.

What amazes me is that most hoteliers make a marketing investment of many thouosands of pounds in a website and then seemingly think it will just produce future sales without any further resources & investment or that once the website is launched they leave the promotion of it to a slick web marketing company who speak a different (technical) language, produce reports and assure them that they are top of the listings for certain keyword phrases. Most of which include the hotel name, and ignore the fact that people searching for hotels in a location usually do not know the hotel name and therfore would not use it as a search phrase!

Nowadays its not good enough to just have a website designed, launch it and expect sales to flow. Hoteliers need to have an internet strategy, preferably one for local search and one for regional/national search, and recognise that as the singularly most important communication tool websites need to be kept up to date a managed.

Some points for hoteliers to consider include:

1) Appoint someone in your organisation to be the website champion and accept responsibility for keeping it up to date.
2) Aim to update offers/information/content/ images/ banners on the home page regularly - perhaps every two to three weeks.
3) Consider the customers perspective when viewing your website. Can the the corporate guest see a clear navigational journey to find his information and likewise the leisure guest who has different requirements.
4) Use offers to attract customers. Try selling upgrades, restaurant meals, leisure, themed weekends etc.
5) Plan to expand the content on your website over the years. Seach engines love original and new content and this will help your rankings.
6)  Always have a newsletter subscription service and collect the customer details, with segmentation by interest, into a database.
7) Use the database to send out regular newsletters and relevant offers to customers.
8) Use pay per click to support marketing initiatives.
9) Submit your website to free directories to obtain free one way links to your website.
10) Finally, measure the sales that are generated by your website and invest further resources.

These are just a few points which I hope will prove useful, but there are many, many more. I would be happy to receive comments or if anyone is thinking of investing in a new website or revamping their existing one and need some help then drop me a line.

Finaly, please follow my blog by clicking on the follow this blog link at the top right and pass it along to colleagues or friends.

Many thanks

Robert Smith
Director
Complete Hotels Services
http://www.completehotelsservices.co.uk/