Mr. Boni

Sales & Marketing

Online Merchandising: Best Practices for Marketing and Merchandising Your Hotel

By Paolo Boni, President & Chief Executive Officer, VFM Leonardo, Inc.

Hotel brands, chains, representation companies, third-party sites and guests all contribute to a hotel’s online presence in their own valuable ways. They have their places and purposes. But hoteliers also have their roles in ensuring their hotel is marketed and merchandised effectively online.

One thing that the brands, chains. representation companies and third-party sites do very well is ensure that your property information, rates, availability and photos are available online – an integral part of ensuring that your hotel can be found and booked online on a functional level.

Guests ensure that there are plenty of written reviews of your hotel and user-generated photos and videos of their experiences available to their peers seeking real, unfiltered feedback straight from the mouths of guests.

But there’s a missing piece to the puzzle. Hoteliers typically have the best knowledge of what makes their hotel unique. This is important knowledge to have, first and foremost, but also to capitalize on. This is why hoteliers have such an opportunity when it comes to marketing and merchandising online.

Hoteliers play a very important role: bringing the hotel’s online presence to the next level. Not in isolation, but to complement the marketing and merchandising efforts already in place. Differentiating their hotel from the competition and connecting with consumers from the individual property level completes the hotel’s online presence and drives more bookings.

What can you actually do to extract more value out of your hotel’s online presence? What are the best practices for marketing and merchandising your hotel?

Commit to social media, it’s not just a fad

Social media has become a part of everyday life. Over 44% of all Internet users are active on social media sites. Social media has helped the internet evolve into a public, interactive, communication tool used by consumers to voice their opinions and share their experiences – and they do it whether you’re involved in the conversation or not. But it’s better to be involved. Put in the time to engage in the conversation about your hotel online. Your view from the hotel is just as important.

Push updates to social media sites regularly

When it comes to social media, there is no downtime. Content and conversations change rapidly, new content becomes old quickly. Leaders in the social media space – those with thousands of Twitter followers, Facebook friends and blog subscribers don’t get there by posting an update once a week. They achieve success by constantly pushing promotions and updates to their audiences to keep the conversations going. Regular updates increase your overall web presence and attract more attention to your hotel because every one of your followers links you to all of their followers and gets your message out to them as well.

Ensure your photos and videos are pushed to social photo and video sites

Sites like Flickr and YouTube are great platforms for giving your hotel a personality and sharing information and experiences with consumers. Having a presence on these sites is also good for your online visibility, especially with Google now displaying photo and video content in its search results pages.

Develop a website for your hotel

The difference between your own hotel website, your presence on your brand’s website and travel websites is that it’s dedicated only to your hotel and its unique value proposition. This doesn’t mean that brand guidelines don’t matter, but within those guidelines there’s still flexibility to make your website really work for you.

• Update as frequently as you want
• Link to your social media conversations and vice versa
• Emphasize your hotel’s unique features and amenities
• Promote special offers
• Cater the content to your target guest segments
• Link directly to your booking engine

Ensure consumers find your hotel

In the end, it’s all about driving bookings. In order to drive bookings online, it needs to be easy for travel shoppers to find your hotel among the millions of other hotels listed online. Luckily, hotels are listed on thousands of travel websites which helps from a search standpoint. However, there are additional activities that make your hotel even more visible:

• An active presence on social media sites
  Google and Bing both recently announced that they will be including tweets in their search results. In order to fully compete within search, you will need to have Twitter strategy in place.(i)
  
• Visual content on photo and video sites
  YouTube is now the number two search engine(ii). This is a testament to the type of content that users are searching for.
  
• A well-optimized website

Inspire travel shoppers to book your hotel

For travel shoppers, who have never stayed at your hotel, their likelihood of booking depends on how well your hotel captures their attention. There are two well-known facts that come in to play: one, travel shoppers (especially leisure travelers) typically conduct extensive research on multiple websites before booking; two, attention spans are short. Once travel shoppers find you, regardless of where they find you, you only have an instant to make a lasting impression so that your hotel makes their shortlist and they book it in the end. The best way to inspire travel shoppers is with content. If they don’t see anything that catches their interest and makes them feel inspired, they’re not booking your hotel.

Develop and distribute visual content that tells your hotel’s story

According to Forrester, 38% of US online leisure travelers surveyed avoid staying at hotels because they don’t see photos, video or written content that would make them feel comfortable(iii). Photos, virtual tours and videos are all necessary and valuable marketing tools. They all serve different purposes; videos provide overviews of the property or aspects of it, location information, and help establish an emotional connection with the travel shopper; virtual tours help demonstrate size and scope of features and amenities; and photos show your hotel at a glance and can highlight finishing touches in detail. Providing all three types of content to travel shoppers in your online merchandising efforts is the best way to ensure that travel shoppers find the information they’re seeking during the hotel selection process and best convey your hotel story – from the high-level right down to the details.

Target your content to appeal to your guest segments

Marketing to a mass audience is no longer the way to go. Effective online merchandising is all about providing relevant, engaging content to the right audience on the appropriate channels. Before developing any new content, know who your current guests are, what they value and how your hotel makes their trips successful. For example, if you’re a luxury golf resort frequented primarily by retirees, written content and photos describing the golf courses, spa services and other relevant amenities on leisure travel and destination websites may be effective options for reaching this audience. A video, when developed specifically to target these guests can also be effective.

Keep your content short and concise

Written content about your hotel should be descriptive and informative. Paired with your visual content, written descriptions are your opportunity to convince travel shoppers, that your hotel has features and benefits that best suit their needs. Use text to reinforce imagery and highlight features that can’t necessarily be captured with visual content. Text descriptions should include a short three to five line paragraph followed by five to eight supporting bullet points. Bullet points are much easier to read than paragraphs and force you to get your major points across in a succinct manner. Using this format will allow you to provide a good amount of detail about your hotel without overwhelming travel shoppers with long descriptions. For video, keep it focused on one central topic or theme and to a length where the travel shopper is still engaged. One minute is a good rule of thumb. Consider doing multiple short videos if you have different stories to tell to different travel shopping segments.

Hire professionals to produce your content

Professional content shows that you care about your property and your guests. You can count on your guests to produce and post handy-cam videos, point-and-shoot camera photos and written opinions of your hotel for you. Your job is to complement this user-generated content with your own professional content to give online travel shoppers a well-rounded perspective of what your hotel offers. Hire professional photographers, videographers and copywriters who know the hotel industry and how to best present your hotel with high-quality content.

Make your content available in multiple languages

This is most relevant if your hotel attracts international travelers, you want to start targeting international travelers or you’re located in an area where multiple languages are spoken equally. Where applicable, providing content in multiple languages opens the door to more guests and can help make them feel welcome at your hotel and more likely to book.

Convey the experience your hotel has to offer

When producing content, ensure that what makes you unique and the reasons why travelers’ want to stay at your hotel are the central focus. Traditionally, hotel photos have often been void of the human, experiential element. But now, at a time when competing for booking is more than just about price and location, it’s about experience. There’s no better way to connect with travel shoppers than by showing people like them experiencing your hotel. That said not every photo and video needs to have people in it. Having people in your photos and videos depends on what they’re showing. When travel shoppers can picture themselves at your hotel and feel comfortable, that’s when your story is most effective.

These best practices lead to one conclusion: to succeed, hoteliers need to focus their eBusiness strategies on activities that ensure travel shoppers not only find their hotel but also book it. A strong online presence for a hotel is one that comes from activities by more than the brand, chain, representation company, travel sites and guests – but also from the hotel itself.

References
(i) Cahill, Adam. The New Age of Search Strategy. ClickZ. Nov 5, 2009. http://www.clickz.com/3635563
(ii) Cahill, Adam. The New Age of Search Strategy. ClickZ. Nov 5, 2009. http://www.clickz.com/3635563
(iii) North American Technographics® Travel Online Survey, Q1 2009 (US), Forrester Research, Inc., February 2009.

Paolo Boni has lead VFM Leonardo’s vision and strategic direction since 2001. Under his leadership, the company has expanded globally and now has over 80,000 hotels, over 30,000 travel related website partners worldwide and the largest online visual content distribution network for the travel industry. As a recognized travel industry expert, Mr. Boni frequently speaks at major travel conferences on subjects relating to online travel marketing, online hotel merchandising and rich media. He holds an LL.B. from Osgoode Hall Law School and a B.A. Economics from McGill University. Mr. Boni can be contacted at 1-877-593-6634 or press@vfmleonardo.com Extended Bio...

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