The Billboard Effect: How to Supercharge your Direct Bookings
It isn’t dead yet.
As a part of your job opening and running a hotel, strengthening your online presence plays a vital role. Starting from a well-decorated website to a fully-fledged social media optimization will help wandering guests engage more than just a stay. If you are here, then you are obviously one of them, so strap in, cause we will tell you the ‘Dos and the Dont’s’ to optimize your market digitally.
Despite the popular belief that TBE(The Billboard Effect) is just a reflection of its previous self, recent studies tell this has been exaggerated to a greater extent. Often ‘The Billboard Effect’ is diminished by an impediment. Travelers make a shortlist of interesting hotels they find on the OTA and then check individually hotel websites for more learning. If they don’t find the same room types, names, pictures, and policies they get frustrated and head back to the OTA. And hence the focus should be on getting a snappy website in place that goes in hand with a top-notch and engaging social media.
Using it to your Hotel’s Advantage
To exponentially attract guests and increase bookings, you and we will make sure that your content is easy to find, is engaging, and stands up to the competition. Here are a few ways you can convert travelers into guests who book direct:
Engaged Content
In an ideal world, the number of visitors should equal to the number of bookings. We might be far from that, but we will strive to achieve the same real soon with proper tactics. Once the visitor lands on your website, you need to show them highly engaging videos, blogs or just travel stories so as to magnetize them. To create an atmosphere of comfort there are a few things that can lead to it.
- Hotel tours. VR, 3D or Drone footage will add on to the engagement. VR and AR content is much more impactful when it comes to showcasing your fancy hotel. With reducing retention spans of each visitor, you need to pin them with the correct and right amount of content customized to fit their needs.
- Retain views. Creatives that allow guests to socialize with your hotel. There are diverse ways to engage and reach out to your followers, visitors and more through creatives. Be it videos, images or just memes, these creatives have been and will create an impact on Gen-X, Gen-Y, and Gen-Z around the globe.
- Educate guests. Spread awareness beforehand about the top-notch attractions in and around your hotel. Guests never just want to spend time inside the hotel and they obviously want to get some recipe to travel smart.
Smart Promotions
There are a number of ways to have guests book rooms in your hotels just for the freebies. Apart from the discounts and the freebies that you offer from your website’s direct booking, there are numerous other promotions to help you with it. Time-sensitive promotions are the new way of promoting hotel rooms that allow you to encourage them to not only book through your site, but to do it soon.
Creating scarcity is a way of inculcating the value of your product in the visitor. Here are a few examples to start with:
- “Only 4 in stock today for delivery”
- “First 500 downloads get a gift”
- “Our most popular product, get it now while it’s in stock”
- “Offer expires in 2h 34m”
Optimizing your Website
Your website and social media is your online sales team. Optimizing your website and your landing page is the most important fact of getting to know how your guests and visitors perform online and to analyze it to the fullest. Once the visitor is on the website, make sure to Retain -> Engage -> Convert the visitor to a customer.
Tell a story, share an experience to which someone can connect to and then visualize himself/ herself to the stellar experiences that you want to give. Be it HD images and videos, a 360-degree tour of your hotel or just properly placed Call-to-action buttons.
The Little Extra
One more thing, it’s one thing to get billboard visitors to arrive at your site, but it’s an added thing for them to book a stay through it. On your website’s landing page, contemplate implementing a user-friendly booking widget or engine. This kills the user’s pursuit for a “book now” tab or button, making it easier and more likely that they’ll book their trip through your site.
The best way to sell is by eliciting some type of emotion. A desire to stay at your hotel, for a touching emotional reason will resonate with them the most.
Bookingjini believes in empowering its fellow hoteliers with tools that would help them make the most out of their Hotels and realize the dreams that they set out within the beginning. Move over to our website by clicking here to start empowering yourself today.
