The Problem with small hotels and marketing

Marketing or more specifically digital marketing for hotels is tough, it’s so hard that nobody wants to do it!

Imagine trying to catch a falling knife, not something you would like to do right?

What is digital marketing

Basically anything digital that sells your business, your website is considered as digital marketing. Google adverts, Facebook adverts, social media posts are all digital marketing. You can do free things or paid things but it’s all the same.

Why is digital marketing so hard?

Most companies find it extremely hard to market themselves online, the competition is also trying to do the same thing and this drives up prices and creates a lot of noise for the customer.

Hotels are even harder because there are other people who want to sell your room on your behalf, e.g. booking.com and Expedia.

It does not make sense to compete against these big budgets on paid advertising and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

No point trying then?

Woah there! I didn’t quite say that….

There are lots of things that you can do that is 100% worth doing, for example:

• Modern, mobile friendly website
• Great Photos
• Booking Engine thats easy to use and mobile friendly
• Direct booking offers or added extras

Also some more advanced things….

• Google adwords on your own name (cheap)
• Google Adwords on other keywords (Expensive)
• Social Media (Good for some properties)
• Email and Facebook Re-marketing (Difficult)

But who has the mental bandwidth to sort this stuff out? Manage it? go through the pain of the costly mistakes.

Why the OTA’s dominate

They dominate for 2 reasons:

1. They are the only place to search and compare hotels
2. They dominate digital marketing

We are not solving the first issue easily as there is no hotel friendly place that guests can search and compare (yet).

Hotels need to do a little pushback and get their basics ready

There’s no need for the online travel agents to get ALL your online bookings. With a good website, booking engine and some special offers we can start educating our guests to book directly and be less reliant on the big online travel agents.

Evan Davies, CEO The Booking Factory

The Booking Factory provides a full suite of software and services for a small monthly fee based on performance

visit www.thebookingfactory.com for more details